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Movies
Taking care of business: Miller Time "interns" travel across the country in support of the summer comedy, The Internship.
Times are tough for the movie business, so studios have been getting creative with how they promote their films. Moving beyond newspaper ads, TV spots and fast-food toys, the big film groups have been devising kooky tactics to grab our scattered attention: Facebook apps, crowdsourced screening locations, promotional web videos made by YouTube stars are all ways of reaching millennials, and we get that. But some of the latest marketing ploys to have reached our ears sound downright wacky (but they must be working if we're writing about them, right?).
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From left: The TLA's founding members, Claire Brown Kohler, Eric Moore and Ray Murray
After 32 years in the movies business, Adapt or Die might as well be the TLA Entertainment Group's motto. What started as a repertory movie house on South Street in the '80s expanded into a thriving video rental chain that later went bust when Netflix and other video-on-demand businesses came along. But instead of keeling over, the TLA got a second life through its DVD distribution business and is still making some of the most obscure (and bizarre) cinema available to the masses. Despite the group's prominence, Eric Bresler, a former TLA employee who started his own film festival this year, felt it necessary to give the TLA its due. “The history of TLA isn’t recorded anywhere in detail, “just [in] broad strokes,” he said when we profiled Cinedelphia earlier this month.
And so on Monday night at the Philadelphia Mausoleum of Contemporary Art (an exhibition/film space run in part by Bresler), TLA's three founders – Ray Murray, Claire Brown Kohler and Eric Moore – gathered to give a quick and dirty history of the group, tossing around jokes and launching into wistful reminisces while speaking to the evolution of an industry now in turmoil.
A short documentary on the Philly punk/DIY scene, house shows in particular, made by Temple film students Evan Lescallete and Luke Proctor. (Earlier I attributed the film to Kristine Trever-Weatherston. She's their film professor. Sorry about that.)
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is an all-too-familiar story that has had its fair share of Hollywood adaptations. With Scrooge & Marley, debut directors Richard Knight Jr. and Peter Neville attempt to modernize the well-worn holiday tale by putting a gay spin on it, and at times they succeed.
“Ben” Scrooge (David Pevsner) is a grumpy, money-obsessed owner of a piano bar — one that he used to work at with friend “Jake” Marley (Tim Kazurinksy) and Fezziwig (Bruce Vilanch), portrayed here as a wild, coke-sniffing club owner. Speaking of things you inhale into your brain, Scrooge is taken into the past by huffing poppers (sigh). There he is shown painful moments from his young adulthood, like when he and his partner are caught by his father, who immediately disowns him. This subplot adds a fresh perspective on Scrooge’s disdain toward family, whereas scenes from the present and future don’t shed any new light on the old story, trying instead to use humor as a crutch.
Other than a few chuckle-worthy moments, the film’s jokes are weighed down by obvious puns — donning “gay” apparel is a recurring one — and the song numbers seem to be forced fillers. But despite the amateur filmmaking and occasional eye-rolling punch lines, the basic sentiment from Dickens’ classic remains intact. Thanks to the scenes from Scrooge’s past and the strong source material, the climax — though expected — is still a festive and tender one.
These days, the holidays seem to be more shoved-down-your-throat than a peaceful, jolly time. What with the same list of sappy songs playing ad nauseam (if we hear Mariah Carey screeching about what she wants for Christmas one more time … ), the blow-up Santas lining suburban driveways and the stream of 24-hour Christmas-movie marathons, these festive times inevitably start to lose their charm. To keep the spirit going without making you want to hang yourself with a strand of Christmas lights, we’ve put together this list of the best non-holiday holiday films.
Have you seen the trailer for M. Night Shyamalan's After Earth? The sci-fi flick, slated to come out June 7, stars Will Smith and his mini-me Jaden as a space general and his son who take the spaceship out for a father-son outing and crash-land on a post-apocalyptic Earth.
Looks pretty cool if you can get past the Smith-family overload. I just keep waiting for little Willow to pop out of a bush and whip her hair back and forth or something.
As the rabid turnout for Exhumed Films’ annual 24-Hour Horrorthon exemplifies, nostalgia plays a huge role in horror fanatics’ adoration of even the dreckiest films from their younger days. In her new book, House of Psychotic Women, film programmer and journalist Kier-La Janisse explores the idea of female neurosis in horror films through an autobiographical look at her own fright-flick-obsessed youth. The title comes from a 1973 Spanish film starring unlikely horror idol Paul Naschy as a drifter who dreams of strangling women (the film is also known as Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll – if only Euro-sleaze filmmakers were as adept at pacing and coherent storytelling as they were at devising baroque titles). Exhumed’s Joseph A. Gervasi will present an evening with both Houses, featuring a screening of an uncut video print with an introduction and discussion by Janisse.
Wed., Nov. 28, 8 p.m., $8, PhilaMOCA, 531 N. 12th St., www.philamoca.org.
In 1985, the Tiberino family of Poweltown Village filmed The Mural, a noisy, lively look at Philly’s Beat generation of contemporary artists, poets and musicians who hung out at Joseph and Ellen Tiberino’s Bachanal bar. Along with The Mural being a giddy tour guide to the then-battered area, the grainy black-and-white film examines Joseph’s legendary painting The Liberation of Women, and delves into the mythology surrounding the Tiberino clan. Twenty-five years later, that family started filming Tiberino, an autobiographical mockumentary that finds their patriarch searching for an allegorical pot of gold at the end of an imaginary rainbow. Tonight, the Troc will screen the former in hopes to raise funds to finish the latter.
TONIGHT, Thu., Nov. 15, 8 p.m., $10, The Trocadero, 1003 Arch St., 215-922-6888, troc.com.
Philadelphia (sometimes potrayed by Glasgow) is ground zero for a total zom dot com situation. Looks pretty great. And sounds like Inception.
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