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					Also this issue: Try to Remember The Toronto Film Festival's directors cope with the past year. -Sam Adams The Magic Mountain Notes from Telluride. -Archie Perlmutter and Ruth New Continuing repertory film Showtimes

September 19-25, 2002

screen picks

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Text of Light (Fri., Sept. 20, 8 p.m., $8, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542, www.ihousephilly.org) Future Sounds I -- Sonic Cinema (Sat., Sept. 21, 7:30 p.m.; Sun., Sept. 22, 3 p.m., $20, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700, www.princemusictheater.org) Providing live music for silent film can be a dangerous business. Too little innovation and you sound like a player piano; too much and you run the risk of trivializing the work you're meant to be accompanying. Of course, you can always look at it the other way 'round -- consider it a musical performance with visual accompaniment -- or a collaboration between the two. The last might be the safest bet for this weekend, which coincidentally features two avant-garde ensembles backing up films which take advantage of the medium's capacity for visual magic and changing perspectives. The new music outfit Relâche Ensemble, who will back up a collection of shorts by George Méliès and others at the Prince, and the ad hoc Lower East Side supergroup of Lee Ranaldo, Alan Licht, Christian Marclay, DJ Olive and William Hooker, who will do the same for Stan Brakhage's Text of Light, are better known for performing on their own than in front of movie screens, and though Relâche will mainly be playing pieces written specifically for the films they're scoring (most by composer Phillip Johnston), the latter collective will make the collaboration particularly apparent by improvising their score live.

In both cases, that means you don't know what you're going to get, although you can bet that Méliès -- represented by his celebrated A Trip to the Moon, The Damnation of Faust and four others -- would have cottoned to the idea more than Brakhage, who generally prefers his films with no soundtrack at all. But that's surely part of the fun, and Relâche is taking out some of the financial sting of seeing both shows by offering a 25 percent discount to Text of Light viewers. Relâche's evening will also include Irving Browning's City of Contrasts, with score by Leroy Jenkins, and René Clair's Entr'acte, with music from Erik Satie, drawn from the multimedia work that gave the ensemble their name.

Unrestrained Genius: Cartoons by Tex Avery (Fri., Sept. 20, 8 p.m., $6, Moore College of Art & Design, 20th and Race sts., 215-568-4515, www.voicenet.com/~jschwart) It's hard to find an account of Tex Avery's career that doesn't include some variant of the word "anarchy." Beginning at Warner Bros., where he presided over a team that included Chuck Jones and was instrumental in the creation of Bugs Bunny, Avery didn't play well with others, and decamped for MGM, where he created Droopy Dog and Huckleberry Hound, among others. More importantly, he stretched the boundaries of acceptable gags, giving new meaning to the word "cartoony." Secret Cinema's program includes several Droopy shorts as well as House of Tomorrow, Red Hot Riding Hood and many others. Incidentally, SC activity will be slow for another few weeks as they move house, but head guy Jay Schwartz promises things will be back to normal next month.

Rex the Runt -- The Complete Collection ($39.95 DVD)/God Hates Cartoons ($25 DVD) The barriers have fallen since Avery's day, and animators have eagerly poured over them, but the freedom hasn't always worked to their advantage. God Hates Cartoons -- sort of a Liquid Television for the new millennium -- collects 20 short animated segments adapted from noted alternative cartoonists, but the results are a seriously mixed bag. The deliberately (and successfully) idiotic cartoons of Ivan Brunetti (Schizo) are even more so when brought to life, although if a title like "Diaper Dyke and Captain Boyfuck" draws even a titter, you might find yourself in hog heaven. GHC's entries draw on a wide range of styles, from wobbly cutouts to Flash slickness, with a few pleasant results -- "Whimgrinder," adapted from Jim Woodring's eerie Frank is no less powerful in motion, while Sam Henderson's "Lonely Robot Duckling" effectively draws on his brand of amiably silly crudeness. Raw-head and Garbage Pail Kids creator Mark Newgarden carries the day, though, with "Cartoons and You," a tongue-through-cheek pisstake on "understanding comics" with a zippy, sarcastic flair.

Rex the Runt, turned out by British claymation studio Aardman (Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run), pushes the boundaries of sense instead of taste, warping its 10-minute installments every which way they go. Centering around the adventures of four plasticine dogs -- sensible, neurotic Rex, beefy, belligerent Bad Bob, skeptical Wendy and voracious Vince -- the show (24 episodes collected on two discs) takes advantage of its brief, repetitive format to mix up subject matter with abandon. In one episode, Vince (kind of an id on legs) contracts "Random Pavarotti Syndrome," which results in his periodically bursting out in operatic song. In another, the gang are nearly abducted by posh-sounding aliens with Easter Island heads (all voiced by Eddie Izzard). The manic energy flags a bit over time, which is to say none of the episodes are quite as mind-bogglingly great as the shorts which preceded them (on view in several Aardman collections, though sadly not available here). But it doesn't get much more off-the-wall than this.

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Zatoichi 1: The Tale of Zatoichi/Zatoichi 2: The Tale of Zatoichi Continues ($19.95 each DVD) The hero of more samurai stories than you can shake a katana at, Zatoichi (which, near as I can tell, means "blind Ichi"), makes Toshiro Mifune look like a lollygagger. The sightless swordsman was the hero of more than two dozen movies (four in the first year alone), not to mention TV spinoffs and merchandising tie-ins. The secret to Zato's success, as evidenced by the first two in Home Vision's planned 17-disc series? Mystique. Shintar™ Katsu plays Zatoichi as equal parts Falstaff and Yojimno, an administer of justice who observes more than he talks, and never uses violence when charm or cunning will do. Short on swordplay (though apparently later episodes up the ante), Z1 and Z2 are action-philosophy hybrids (if no one else, you wonder if the makers of Kung Fu got an eyeball). Critics of Kurosawa have always harped on his Western (and western)-ization; now we know what the Japanese equivalent of the American popcorn-muncher was watching. Volumes 3 and 4 are due at the end of October.