Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
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May 31–June 7, 2001
movies
Screen Picks
To Sleep With Anger
(Wed., June 6, 7:10 p.m., Philadelphia Museum of Art, 20th & the Parkway, 215-684-7506, www.philamuseum.org/events/wednesday)
The fact that Charles Burnett has been reduced to making compromised movies for the Disney Channel (Nightjohn) and Oprah (The Wedding) is nothing short of appalling; even The Glass Shield (1994), his last proper theatrical release, had a new (and horribly incongruous) ending forced on it by Miramax after test audiences objected. The fact that distributors still haven’t figured out how to market art house films to African-American audiences (or African-American films to art houses) has taken its toll on Burnett’s career (as well as Burnett-influenced filmmakers like Julie Dash). To Sleep With Anger, Burnett’s 1990 masterwork, shows him at full strength, a brooding, magic realist tale with a powerful sense of the absurd. Not so far off in sensibility from Toni Morrison’s Beloved — Burnett and Alfre Woodard were always my acting-directing dream team for the movie — Anger stars Danny Glover (who’s rarely been given such a chance to stretch his talents) as Harry Mention, an invasive houseguest whose ever-less-welcome stay begins to take on devilish undertones. Bringing the mystery of the Old South (and further back) to a family of middle-class L.A. residents, Harry both stirs up trouble and reveals long-concealed rifts within the family itself; sometimes innocuously, sometimes overtly, he brings everything to the surface. The film’s unique blend of domestic drama and supernatural mystery has never been approached, let alone equaled, on film. Along with Killer of Sheep (1997), To Sleep With Anger marks Burnett as a true original, one whose unadulterated voice is sorely missed.
Philadelphia Stories
(Tue., June 5, 9 p.m., WYBE-TV 35)
With four more weeks to run, WYBE’s mammoth Philly film overview presents a double bill of films with similar themes but dramatically different approaches. Severed Souls, a Festival of Independents entry, is the story of Corrine Sykes, the first African-American woman executed in Pennsylvania, and the effect the execution had on Philadelphia’s black community. Family Values likewise traffics in the aftermath of murder, but it’s a fairly lighthearted film, focusing on a Philadelphia lesbian couple who run a business cleaning up crime scenes. (It’s reminiscent of a similar piece run on TV Nation several years back.) Learn why human brains are particularly difficult to clean up, or how even the crime-scene cleanup business thrives on repeat customers. Future weeks include Eugene Martin’s Invisible Cities (June 12), Ron Kanter’s Acting Out (June 19) and a triple bill of Big Picture Alliance’s The Seekers, Big Tea Party’s ACT UP Philadelphia and Kimi Takesue’s Rosewater (June 26).
Requiem for a Dream
($24.98 DVD)
The best film of 2000, Darren Aronofsky’s technically dazzling examination of the psychology of addiction certainly deserves repeat viewing, and having Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique explain (in separate commentaries) just how and why they got things to look the way they did can’t hurt either. Though its images can’t assault you nearly as effectively when contained on a TV, they’re more easily understood; while you won’t feel the way you did watching it on the big screen, you’ll have a better understanding of why you felt that way. (Caveat emptor: Be sure to buy the unrated "director’s cut," the one shown in theaters, rather than the hacked-up featureless Blockbuster travesty.)
The House of Mirth
($29.95 DVD)
Another of 2000’s best films — and a sure contender for its most overlooked — hits stores this week as well. Terence Davies’ rhapsodic adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel — whose title is even more bitterly ironic than The Age of Innocence — is a study in soft light and temporal ellipses. I don’t think I’ve ever seen dissolves used more expressively; you’re filled with loss and longing every time one scene bleeds into another. The dusky, fragile quality of the film’s cinematography is lost on television, but Davies’ magnificent sense of pace and Gillian Anderson’s heartbreaking descent from self-assured impetuousness to broken disgrace shreds any resistance to melodrama. Compared to Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth is a far more British take on turn-of-the-century New York society, more focused on class immobility, less concerned with Americans’ slight vulgar recapitulation of European sophistication. But it’s hardly inferior for that. Davies’ commentary is mostly confined to production detail, but his passionate defense of the film’s alternate opening (included as a deleted) scene should not be missed. Though longer by only three minutes, the sequence — which Davies was forced to trim in order to get the movie down to an arbitrary two hours and 20 minutes — strikes an entirely different pace, fleshing out relationships right off the bat so every subsequent scene is enriched.
