What's Happening

July 25 to 26, 2008

Bicknell International Film Festival

Bicknell, UT

One of the lesser known laws of cinema states that a good bad film will always be more satisfying viewing than a bad good film. You only have to look to the popularity of the film series we've covered in this space in recent times — Tucson's Mondo Mondays, Sacramento's Trash Film Orgy, and San Francisco's Midnite for Maniacs — to see this rule in practice. Another group of believers in this received wisdom are the organizers of Utah's Bicknell International Film Festival that runs this week. The festival's name seems innocent enough, but it is the subtitle of this latest edition that really gives the game away: "Wild, Wild Worst — Bad 'B' Westerns." Over the course of BIFF's one-and-a-half day duration, it will screen Howard Hughes' The Outlaw (the film which introduced Jane Russell, and the bra Hughes designed to showcase her particular talents), the "anti-establishment schlock" western The Master Gunfighter, and a Saturday night triple feature of the legendary midget horse opera The Terror of Tiny Town, The Great Train Robbery (the first ever western, made in 1903) and a (no doubt chuckleworthy) educational video on the West. In addition to the filmic activities, there are a number of accompanying events, including a swap meet and the "Ride Into The Sunset," the world's fastest parade (55mph) which will speed from Torrey to Bicknell in advance of the opening night movie.

July 26 to August 3, 2008

The Next Wave: British Cinema in the '70s and '80s

Los Angeles, CA

With every generation comes a new wave. The British New Wave arrived in the late 50s / early 60s as directors like Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Joseph Losey and John Schlesinger brought the gritty toughness of the "Angry Young Men" playwrights to the screen. The UCLA Film & Television Archive' series The Next Wave: British Cinema in the '70s and '80s looks at how the filmmakers that followed brought such issues as race, homophobia, immigration, and punk into their frame. Some of the works, like Bill Douglas's tough My Childhood and Terrence Davies's rich tapestry Distant Voices, Still Lives, are deeply personal testaments to lives led. Others like Stephan Frears' gay Pakistani romance My Beautiful Laundrette and Mike Leigh's class comedy High Hopes capture the complex tensions of the Thatcher years. This was also was a generation defined by music as both Horace Ové's 1975 Pressure and Chris Petit's 1979 Radio On audibly demonstrate.

Until August 3, 2008

Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks

St. Louis, MO

Gordon Parks was 26 before he shot his first photograph. As a poor African-American kid, he was tossed and turned through a number of jobs before he deciding to take up photography. He quickly created a stellar career moving from fashion and portraiture to stunning social commentary in his work for the Farm Security Administration, to working on the staff of Vogue and Life magazines. But Parks' remarkable talent knew no bounds: he wrote music, novels, and directed one of the first blaxploitation films, Shaft. But his photographs remain his most powerful legacy. As an African-American man he was able to bring light to the struggles and accomplishments of people, who, when not kept out of the frame, were treated like anthropological figures. With wit and compassion, Parks imbued his photos with a nearly transcendent humanity. Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks at The Saint Louis Art Museum presents 50 photographs, selected by Parks himself before his death, to represent his life's work. Here Park captures the great ("Muhammad Ali," 1970) to the nearly forgotten ("American Gothic," 1942), each with the same respect.

Until August 16, 2008

The Dead Of Summer

Denver, CO

Though Jacques Tourneur directed I Walked With A Zombie in 1943, it was not until 1968 that the idea of zombie movies truly had its breakthrough with George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Tourneur's film was about the traditional perception of the zombie, a corpse reanimated by Caribbean voodoo magic, but it was Romero's concept of zombies — dead people rising from their graves and stumbling around looking for flesh to eat and more hapless humans to "zombify" — that captured audiences' imaginations. Marking the 40th anniversary of the modern zombie movie, the Denver Film Society presents a tribute to the subgenre in their currently running series The Dead Of Summer. And there's a lot for viewers to get their teeth stuck into: the premiere of zombie prom movie Dance of the Dead, another high school set flick, the zombie romantic comedy (or "zom rom com"!) My Boyfriend's Back directed by actor-director Bob Balaban, and Night of the Creeps, a comedy about a grave-robbing college prank that goes gruesomely wrong. Closing out the season is a particular treat, namely an early screening of the legendary photographer and filmmaker Bruce La Bruce's new film, Otto; Or, Up With Dead People, a gay existential zombie comedy that has charmed festival audiences since it premiered at Sundance earlier this year.

Until August 31, 2008

Dances With Films

Los Angeles, CA

Film festivals today must increasingly rely on star power to attract people to attend their screenings, and even Sundance — the daddy of indie film festivals — turns Park City into a hub of celebrities every January. The upshot of this focus on the name above the title has resulted in certain films being unfairly overlooked, however one film festival exists solely to right this wrong and redress the balance at least a little bit. Dances With Films, founded a decade ago by Leslee Scallon and Michael Trent, makes it a rule that every film must not be directed by or starring established talents with the intention that the festival will act as a place of discovery where budding talent will be fostered. The festival has an impressive policy of watching each submission in its entirety (there were 1500 last year), and also tries to build lasting relationships with its filmmakers, as evidenced by its final days being made up of new work by DWF alumni. The names of the talent and the movies at this year's festival may not be familiar to people now, but Scallon and Trent strongly believe that won't be the case for long.