Spanish cinema who's who today at Instituto Cervantes (L-R): Antonio Pérez, Chus Gutiérrez, Ventura Pons, FSLC director Richard Peña, Fernando Lara; Montxo Armendariz and Manuel Martín Cuenca

Some of this weekend's worthwhile cinematic happenings around New York:

--The good news about Spanish Cinema Now is that it gets underway at Lincoln Center this weekend, matching more than a dozen contemporary Spanish films with a selection of classic Don Quixote adaptations. I thought the myth was that Quixote--which celebrates its 400th anniversary this year--was the ultimate cursed, unfilmable novel. Nevertheless, three of these versions seem to hang in there, while the floundering-Terry-Gilliam saga Lost in La Mancha reminds us that we tackle Cervantes at our own peril. (Speaking of peril, avoid Jess Franco's unwatchable edit of Orson Welles's doomed Don Quixote at all costs; the consequences are more acutely painful than the curiosity.)

So what is the bad news? I covered the press conference today, and everybody spoke Spanish! The nerve! At least the films are subtitled, and what films: Highlights include Montxo Armendariz's Oscar contender Obaba, Ventura Pons's beautifully acted Idiot Love and Miguel Courtois's thriller El Lobo. The odds of most of these films getting American distribution are not what you would call good, so do not miss the chance to check them out while you can.

--Film Forum begins its Essential Hitchcock series today--36 films over five weeks, including a rarely screened 3-D print of Dial M For Murder and the bizarre short film that passed for the Psycho trailer in 1960. But even better, if you ask me (at the end of the day, you can rent Vertigo) is Posteritati Gallery's classic Hitchcock poster exhibit, "Blondes, Blood and Blackmail." I mean, I am a Hitchcock freak, and I cannot summon the image of a single ONE of his posters besides Psycho. Posteritati fills in the blanks with one-sheets from 25 countries spanning the director's 50-year career. You have until March to pay a visit, but you might as well accompany a friend or loved one this weekend and scam a poster out of them for a holiday gift.

--Anthology Film Archives is celebrating its 35th year over the next few days, welcoming guest curators like Patti Smith, Peter Bogdanovich and Christine Vachon while boasting a curiously strange sponsorship from Altoids. Yes, Altoids. My head hurts trying to reconcile AFA with any patron but Jonas Mekas, but I am not here to judge--only to make suggestions. And I absolutely suggest getting your ass down there tonight for drinks with Bogdanovich and tomorrow for Smith's screening of Au Hasard Balthazar. Vachon, meanwhile, goes back to countercultural basics with a double-bill of Pull My Daisy and Flaming Creatures. Happy birthday to all.

And the cinema of war would never be the same: Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick on the set of Paths of Glory

Some of this weekend's worthwhile cinematic happenings around New York:

--Nobody ever went out on a limb recommending a Stanley Kubrick film, especially something as exquisitely paced and crafted as 1957's Paths of Glory (opening today at Film Forum). Shot when Kubrick was 29 years old and already acquiring a distaste for the Hollywood system he would eventually abandon, Paths features Kirk Douglas as (of all things) a French colonel charged with the task of storming an impregnable German position in World War I. When the mission fails, his officious, sociopathic generals arrange a kangaroo court to try three of the men for cowardice. Between the sweep of Georg Krause's camera and the economical rigor of Calder Willingham's and Jim Thompson's dialogue, Paths subsequent moral battling bristles with a kinetic outrage that foretold a civilization--our civilization, today, this one--doomed to implode with war.

Not to mention a filmmaker who would never return to the type of crisp aesthetic that made him such a talent to watch in the first place (his early photos for Look Magazine, recently reissued in the volume Drama and Shadows, remain a haunting influence in their own right). Paths showcases a fundamental pessimism that no auteur of Kubrick's talent and intellect could possibly overcome or suppress; you just know, when you gaze at this freshly restored print the way he saw it a half-century ago, that what started as an anti-war film ended as a personal statement he had to understand he would probably never finish. Revisiting these themes twice more in Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket, he never again achieved a terror as palpable as in Paths's climax, nor a helplessness as devastating as its denoeument.

In other words, Kubrick knew then what Vietnam and Iraq have since retaught us. And with that knowledge, if a contemporary viewing of Paths of Glory does not provoke you to tears, then frankly, you are not paying attention.

--As Kubrick inspired a thousand imitators, so did late songwriter Townes Van Zandt. In her contemplative new documentary Be Here to Love Me (opening tonight at the Angelika), filmmaker Margaret Brown scours the archives to interlace Van Zandt's itinerant, self-destructive genius with the memories of his family, friends and colleagues. But Brown's portrayal meanders south of hagiography and north of pity, invoking Van Zandt's absentee fatherhood as unblinkingly as it defines his folk-country legend. No less authorities than Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris lend a hand, while Lee Daniel's cinematography frames Brown's subjects with the same intense poignancy they summon to remember Van Zandt.

--If you are feeling flush, you can always borrow against your next six months' unemployment checks and crash the Museum of the Moving Image's tribute to Ron Howard Sunday at the Waldorf-Astoria. Renee Zellweger, Paul Giamatti, producing partner Brian Grazer and a few other Hollywood starry-types will also be on hand to slap Howard on the back and make fun of his baldness. Tickets start at the low, looooooow price of $1,500; tables are a mere $15,000. For that kind of money, I hope you at least get to shout out "Yay, Opie!" or get your picture taken with the Fonz or something. I mean, Jesus.

A sequence from Margaret Tait's Where I am Is Here

Call it complete and total intellectual laziness, but this weekend's guide to worthwhile cinematic happenings around New York comprises the most obscure shit I could find, in its natural (i.e. cribbed) element--if only to do some business below the mainstream hype dogfight pitting Harry Potter against Johnny Cash:

--From the lovely folks at Anthology Film Archives:

NEW YORK PREMIERES
VIRGINIE MARCHAND
FAITH 2002/03 (Tonight through Sunday, 7 p.m.)
"These years my brain is funny; I have a bad taste full of blood." – V.M.

MENSTRUATION OF THE CRAYFISH (2002, 26 minutes)
THE LITTLE MERMAID (2001, 3:30 minutes)
TARGET DREAM (2002, 25 minutes)
MARYLIN AND HER MARYLINETTES (2001, 1 minute)
FOODFUCK IN NY/NICE AND ROME (2002, 33 minutes)
Total program time: ca. 95 minutes.

"These five earlier films by film-maker and writer Virginie Marchand predate her two feature films now in post-production. Despite appearances, Marchand's five films are not 'underground,' they are more an intimiste [sic] and chirurgical mise-en-scene of the real." – Jean-Baptiste Papailhau

--From the resoundingly sweet art fags at MoMA:

Stalking the Image: The Films of Margaret Tait
Margaret Tait’s pride of place in her native Scotland—and even more ardently in the Highlands and on the island of Orkney—manifested itself in exquisitely intimate films that combine poetry, portraiture, music, art, experimental documentary, home movie, and animation. A true auteur—she wrote, directed, photographed, edited, animated, and almost always financed her films—Tait (1918–1999) is the subject of an extensive touring retrospective that features newly preserved prints, including Portrait of Ga (1952) and Colour Poems (1974). Also presented is one of Tait’s earliest films, Three Portrait Sketches (1951), made in Rome when she was studying at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia during the height of the neorealist movement. Tait often quoted García Lorca’s phrase "stalking the image" to define her philosophy, believing that if you look at an object closely enough—a garden, a face, a street—it will speak its nature.

SELECTED FILMS:
Where I Am Is Here. 1964. Great Britain. Tait discovers the unusual in everyday Edinburgh. A film poem that possesses its own inner logic and rhythmic cohesion. 35 min. (Tonight at 6:45; Saturday at 2:00)
Happy Bees. 1955. Great Britain. "An evocation of what it was like to be a small child in Orkney" (Tait). 16 min.
Garden Pieces. 1998. Great Britain. Music by John Gray. Tait’s last work before her death, this three-part film looks at the garden as a philosophical and phenomenological space. 12 min. (Tonight at 8:00; Saturday at 3:45)

--And finally, from the refined tastes at Lincoln Center:

NEXT DOOR / NABOER (Sunday at 8:45 p.m.)
Director: Pål Sletaune, Country: Norway, Release: 2005, Runtime: 78
Hailed by Variety as one of the 10 most promising directors working today, Pål Sletaune starts off in his new film Next Door in the vein of offbeat comedy that characterized his earlier films Junk Mail and You Really Got Me, then gradually moves into darker, David Lynchian territory that exposes a new side to Sletaune’s already impressive talent. After breaking up with his girlfriend, John (Kristoffer Joner) gets better acquainted with the two young women who live next door. They invite him into their odd, maze-like apartment, and drop some strong hints that they know far more about John than he could have imagined. Soon, John realizes that his neighbors have been expecting his arrival into their very private world for quite a while.

Some of this weekend's worthwhile cinematic happenings around New York:

--Basically, it comes down to Saturday, when Lincoln Center's Luminous Century tribute to Norwegian cinema gets underway in earnest with Liv Ullmann introducing a rare screening of her 1959 breakthrough film, The Wayward Girl. I have not seen it, cannot recommend or critique it, but if Ullmann is in the house, I feel comfortable encouraging you to attend. In fact, I would hold it against you if you did not at least try. It is preceded by Sara Johnsen's acclaimed debut Kissed by Winter, which also features an introduction from its leading lady. Except...

--Uptown at Columbia University's Dodge Hall, the first-ever Journal of Short Film enjoys its NYC premiere. You read about it here a few days ago, and I would say that this is an even better choice than Lincoln Center if you a) prefer short films to features, b) prefer English to Norwegian c) are illiterate and cannot read subtitles. But then you could not read this blog, so really, I cannot help you there, either. Good luck.

--And downtown, you have not only one but two chances (2 p.m. and 7:30) to catch Brian Poyser's Dear Pillow, a disturbing glimpse of companionship and sexual frustration playing IFC Center as part of indieWIRE's Undiscovered Gems series. As an added bonus, stick around after the screening for a Q&A with young actor/director Rusty Kelly--moderated by yours truly. I have been telling people to drop by and heckle me all they like, but do arrive early as this film is well worth your viewing time.

¿Quien es mas macho? ¡Montalban es mas macho!

Some of this weekend's worthwhile cinematic happenings around New York:

--Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is what happens when an ostensibly guilty pleasure grows teeth and bites back at an entire culture's low expectations. After Robert Wise's Star Trek: The Motion Picture squandered the cult momentum the TV franchise acquired during its four-year NBC run, nobody could have possibly thought that the cosmopolitan crew of the Starship Enterprise (multi-ethnic and, we recently learned, gay-friendly) would bounce back so dramatically with one of the darker mainstream science fiction films of the '80s. I mean, irony of ironies: How wicked is Ricardo Montalban? How pissed is William Shatner? How hot is Kirstie Alley? And for a whole generation that has probably never witnessed the film in a theater, the Sunshine is bringing all the squirmy treachery (e.g. Chekov, meet bug) to NYC as this weekend's midnight feature. I am the furthest thing from a Trekkie, but I cannot recommend this one too highly.

--The Reeler told you a few months ago about Kevin Frech's fascinating documentary Bowery Dish, which screened for one all-too-brief evening at the Pioneer Theater. But now that the Pioneer has shuffled all of October's leftover zombies out the door, it is bringing Dish back tonight at 7 for a much-deserved encore. Frech revitalizes the shopworn subject of gentrification by studying the ways upscale restaurants and bars have sprouted along the historically shabby Bowery over the last decade. His investigation yields a smart, funny and poignant survey of a community at odds with both its future and its past--a fine-tuned microcosm of the city that gave it such turbulent life.

--Oscar-winning director Sydney Pollack is getting into the documentary business with Sketches of Frank Gehry, which he will preview and discuss tonight at 8 at the Apple Store in SoHo. As always, visitors are promised plenty of wonkery (Pollack is expected to detail Sketches' blend of digital video and Super 16mm, which always leads to some orgy of jargon and Final Cut Pro demos), but your reward is the chance to ask basically whatever you want about some pretty great films: Tootsie and Three Days of the Condor are at the top of my list (and probably everybody else's, admittedly). Feel free to ask him where The Interpreter went wrong, if you like, even though he will probably pull out his hammy Eyes Wide Shut persona, point at the computer and say something like, "We did it on a PC." Or maybe he will blame New York and threaten to move. Anyone's guess, really.

D. Crockett Bunker meets the press in Lee Basannavar's Briefing, screening at this year's Eureka International Film Festival (Photo: EIFF)

--Remember last week, when there was all of CineKink's hotttt, smutty sexiness streaking the theater walls down at Anthology? Well, the hazmat crew has been and gone, and the Eureka! International Film Festival has moved in for the weekend with an equally heady blend of politics. The organizers peg the fest as a nonpartisan event "encouraging filmmakers to share their unique stories in an effort to foster global understanding," and if you do not believe them, check out the line-up that features everything from in-depth looks at at Ronald Regan's victory over Communism (In the Face of Evil) to Saturday's NYC premiere of the medical-marijuana documentary Waiting to Inhale. As you know, this is not an easy city to pull off right-wing anything, so why not drop in? A little ideological balance might do your righteous ass some good.

--It seems like it was just yesterday that I was down at the Pioneer Theater talking to Dr. Reinhardt van Nostrand about the long month of horror films he had programmed. And now look at us: It is the end of the month, and the old man is pulling out all the stops with tonight's All-Night Vampire Movie Marathon. The Pioneer promises "at least 578 minutes" of vampire flicks, from sundown to sunrise, including the NYC indie-horror standards Habit and New York Vampire. And if that is not enough, stop in tomorrow for a program of avant-garde horror films and stay late for an exclusive selection of Burning Angel horror porn (including the world premiere of, yes, The XXXorcist). Bring your ID and do not sit in front of the guy in the overcoat.

--Politics and fucking zombies not your thing? How about Billy Wilder? Probably my personal favorite Wilder film, Ace in the Hole, gets an exceedingly rare screening tomorrow at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria as part of the museum's continuing Some Like it Wilder series. Kirk Douglas plays a ruthless reporter who blows up a mine tragedy into a media circus, presaging Network by about 25 years and setting back American perceptions of journalists even further than that. Too bad it is so totally entertaining--even if it wields enough wretched grimness to blow out the sun. Enjoy!

Hope Davis and Nicolas Cage in The Weather Man, featured at this year's Hamptons Film Festival (Photo: Paramount Pictures)

This week's worthwhile festivalgoing experiences around New York:

--Unlike most New Yorkers, I actually need a pretty good reason to cross the East River for anything but mozzarella at Caputo's or beer at Spuyten Duyvil. And to get me all the way out to the Hamptons? You would have to have a pretty big-time film festival with panels and parties and premieres and all that good stuff I love to crash. As fortune (or fate, depending on your point of view) would have it, this is indeed the weekend the Hamptons Film Festival takes over Long Island. The festival boasts East Coast premieres of hotly anticipated fall films like Bee Season, Why We Fight and The Weather Man, not to mention a selection of nifty shorts by NYC filmmakers such as Jeff and James Israel and Cary Fukunaga. I will report back Monday morning with some weekend goings-on, assuming I can find my way there and back. Or you can meet me out there, and we will get through it together.

--Or if you are a homebody with a taste for blood, head down to Tribeca Cinemas for this year's New York City Horror Film Festival. The event hits its stride tonight and tomorrow with new films by Don Coscarelli and Tom Savini, along with a full-blown, audience-participating midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Also, cult fillmaker Roger Corman will accept the fest's Lifetime Acheivement Award Saturday night at 10 p.m. before a screening of his Masque of the Red Death. This festival thrives on rarely-seen shorts by filmmakers from all over the world, so you do not have to worry too much about not seeing anything original. Moreover, you do not have worry about traveling to the Hamptons. Enough said.

--If you remain geographically conflicted, BAMcinematek is offering up the Pordenone Silent Film Festival. Do not count on any glamorous star sightings, however--the most exotic extravangance you are lkely to discover is live piano accompaniment and commentary by film preservationist Serge Bromberg. Still, with an emphasis on films by British director Anthony Asquith, this is another one of those line-ups you are not likely to have an opportunity to catch again anytime soon. Did I mention travel is a no-brainer?

--One more quick mention for CineKink NYC, which winds down this weekend with a range of alt-sex phenomena, filmmaker appearances and generally crazy, arousing shit. Read more about the festival from The Reeler's coverage earlier this week.

(Photo: Kino International)

This weekend's (possibly) worthwhile cinematic happenings around New York:

--Im Sangsoo's The President's Last Bang (right) received one of the more ambivalent reactions from critics who saw it at this year's New York Film Festival, drawing a consensus that seemed to appreciate the film even as it was lost in its messy narrative and overt South Korean political satire. The film's bloody, darkly humorous treatment of a 1979 assassination stirred an uproar in its homeland, where the late president's family sued Sangsoo and where the public at large seemed unprepared to look at itself through the looking glass of Dr. Strangelove. At any rate, Bang goes to the New York jury today, which I am sure will settle this once and for all with its impeccable, incomparable taste and discernment.

--My favorite review of the week belongs to none other than Michael Atkinson, whom I have assailed here numerous times and whom thus deserves a bit of credit when credit is due. His excoriation of Wim Wenders' Land of Plenty contains more than its share of heartbreak and revolt at Wenders' slippery slope into hackdom ("Wenders shoots on location, in digital video, and yet the huge shagginess of reality evades him on every front"), but more interestingly, Atkinson seems to give up on a man whose obvious talent cannot possibly have just passed like a kidney stone. Is this fair? Find out this weekend, when Wenders will be on hand at IFC Center to field your questions about Land of Plenty and anything else that may be worrying you about his decline. Be polite, though--I mean, this guy did direct Paris, Texas, you know.

--And finally, taking a cue from the charming folks at Cinematical, draw straws with your friends to see who will be the "lucky" one who gets to watch Rupert Wainwright's remake of the John Carpenter not-really-classic The Fog. It appears that Columbia did not open the film up to press screenings, thus pardoning themselves from an excess of bad reviews with the inevitable headlines cracking on The Fog's "zero-visibility" or some similarly retarded snark. But hey--anything with David Foster's juice behind it (he has "Love Theme From St. Elmo's Fire" to beat) might be a wreck worth your time, if not your $10.75. Nevertheless, it looks like you are on your own.