Repertory

by Matt Prigge

(Shown on film and video): Named for the first movie production studio, designed by Thomas Edison, this annual festival swings by the Ambler (and the County later this month) with a set of short films ranging from experimental to narrative, from documentary to animation.
Thurs., March 20, 7pm.

(1999) (Shown on DVD): After The Simpsons but before The Incredibles and Ratatouille, Brad Bird was beloved by a significantly smaller group of people for this expert Cold War-era block of cel animation. Vin Diesel voices the clunky E.T.-esque beast.
B+ Sat., March 22, 11am.

(Shown on film): The trophy went to Suze Templeton’s miserablist take on Peter & the Wolf, but it should’ve gone to Madame Tutli-Putli, a wordless poetic/existentialist portrait of one increasingly odd train ride.
Wed., March 19, 7pm.

(2006) (Shown on DVD): Thomas Rockwell’s kiddie fave, first published all the way back in 1973, made a super-belated graduation to film form—the most interesting part of which appears to be a score by Devo’s Mark and Bob Mothersbaugh.
(Not reviewed.) Sat., March 22, 11am.

(2006) (Shown on film): Shown as part of the Israeli Film Festival, Dror Shaul’s grim drama tells of a boy torn between his kibbutz and his mother, whom the kibbutz has denounced. Opens with bovine-performed fellatio, if you must know.
(Not reviewed.) Sun., March 23, 7pm.

(1965) (Shown on film): Jean-Luc Godard’s finest moment was debatably this delirious pop pastiche, in which a gutter-noir plot—Jean-Paul Belmondo runs from gangsters with fatale Anna Karina—serves as the basis for Brechtian gags, political jabs, melancholy brooding, musical numbers, pastoral loveliness and loud bursts of ‘Scope color (including a party scene presented in various tints). Not to mention the best ending shy of George Romero’s Martin.
A Wed., March 26, 7pm.

(1941) (Shown on film): The same year they made Sergeant York, Howard Hawks and Gary Cooper atoned with this spot-on screwball, with Cooper as the dorky head of a group of dorky lexicographers working on a dictionary of slang and Barbara Stanwyck as the mafia moll who wins his heart.
A Tues., March 25, 7:30pm.

(1959) (Shown on film): Three years before Dr. No, Sean Connery popped up in this live-action Disney trifle, featuring Albert Sharpe’s aged Irishman stealing a pot of gold from the titular trick photography subjects.
(Not reviewed.) Sat., March 22, 2pm.

(1998) (Shown on DVD): With which Woody Allen had a chance to commence a fruitful second career writing for children’s movies and/or voicing them, but decided the world really needed The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and Scoop instead. Shame.
B- Sat., March 22, 11am.

(1965) (Shown on video): See Bryn Mawr Film Institute.
A Mon., March 24, 7pm.

(2005/2007) (Shown on Beta): The Jewish Film Festival devotes its entire weekend to new filmmakers, starting with Ari Sandel’s charming West Bank Story. Winner of the 2005 Oscar for Best Live Action Short, the film resets West Side Story on the West Bank, with the Palestinian-Israeli strife boiled down to competing falafel stands. Following up will be Making Trouble, which sits down at a kosher deli table with four comediennes—Judy Gold, Cory Kahaney, Jessica Kirson and Jackie Hoffman—as they weigh in on their ancestors, from Fanny Brice to Gilda Radner to Wendy Wasserstein.
B/(Not reviewed). Sat., March 22, 8:30pm. $12.

(2007/2006) (Shown on Beta): Made by Zoe Greenberg, a student at Chestnut Hill’s Springside School, as her Bat Mitzvah project, Enough looks at five different young people as they confront subjects like wealth, poverty and class. Adam Hootnick’s Unsettled then takes us all the way to the Gaza Strip, where another group of young people try to survive on the front lines. Matisyahu supplies the music.
(Not reviewed.) Sun., March 23, 2pm. $10.

(2006/2007) (Shown on Beta/DVD): Filmed partly by Albert Maysles, Ilona Upstairs portrays an artist as she dances, sings, paints and swims, all while ignoring her past. Sally Mitlas’ doc A Hero in Heaven tells of Philadelphia native Michael Levin, who joined the Israeli Defense Force only to be killed in a clash with Hezbollah.
(Not reviewed.) Mon., March 24, 7pm. $10.

To be nice, Thai wunderkind Apichatpong Weerasethakul lets people call him “Joe.” But that’s all he makes easy. A director in love with odd structures, nonactors, the narcotic allure of nature and film titles as inscrutably mysterious as the movies to which they’re attached, “Joe” makes primal, enigmatic films that don’t easily reveal themselves. Instead they sit in your head or return to you days and weeks later. A slightly abridged version of a program that played New York in January, I-House’s “Joe” retro produces nearly half his prolific oeuvre of shorts and features (among the missing are his masterpiece Blissfully Yours and the transvestite action parody The Adventures of Iron Pussy).

(2006) (Shown on film): Inspired by his parents, who met in a hospital, the first half is set in a building adjacent to a jungle. The film then resets, this time in the middle of a city. Weerasethakul intends the viewer to find rhymes between the two sections, but they’re never so clear. Slowly the theme of miscommunication crops up, but it’s quickly evident that finding meaning isn’t as important as letting it wash over you.
A- Wed., March 19, 7pm.

(2004) (Shown on film): A return of the art-house mindfuck, Weerasethakul’s delirious, hothouse whatzit starts with a sweet gay romance in the city. At the hour mark, however, the film restarts—with new credits—with the same actors recast as a soldier and a shape-shifting tiger.
A- Thurs., March 20, 7pm.

(Shown on film and Beta SP): Ten of Weerasethakul’s shorts unspool over two nights, with Friday’s show commencing with 2006’s The Anthem—his proposed contribution to a tradition in Thai moviewatching that every film or ceremony should be preceded with a blessing. Anthem boils the director’s shtick down to five minutes, with a peaceful pastoral setting paired with a raucous gymnasium. The rest of the night hurtles back into his early work, like the 1995 quasi-doc Like the Relentless Fury of Pounding Waves and 1999’s Windows, wherein the director plays with the technical limitations of his video camera lens. Saturday turns up his more recent wares, among them the playful My Mother’s Garden and Luminous People, with a “story” built out of footage of people on a boat. The biggie is the 40-minute Worldly Desires, whose mix of multiple elements—including a music video, a film set and more time in the jungle—are bewitching.
Fri., March 21 and Sat., March 22, 7pm.

(2004/1982/1963) (Shown on video): We love us some Agnès Varda, the major female voice of the French New Wave, so excuse us while we wait till next week to speak up about this trio of her short documentaries spanning the entirety of her career.
B+ Wed., March 26, 7pm.

(2002) (Shown on DVD): Follow up the Art Museum’s Frida Kahlo exhibit with this distressingly standard biopic—not distressing only because it’s about Kahlo but because you’d expect some phantasmagoria from director Julie Taymor (Titus, Across the Universe). Sheesh.
C
Fri., March 21-Sat., March 22, 8pm; and Sun., March 23, 7pm.

(Shown on film): March is Women’s History Month, and Secret Cinema celebrates by digging into their vaults for films for, about or by women. A portrait of very different times, “Girl Films” unearths such sights as a 1930s musical short Mother Melodies, featuring maudlin ode after maudlin ode to materfamilias; 1943’s She Serves Abroad, about the women who helped out in WWII; Arranging the Buffet Supper, a 1946 primer for the common house wife; and Love Carefully, a 1970s instructional film about various birth control options. Also expect women’s wrestling films from the ’50s and even a 1977 film about the art of belly dancing.
Fri., March 21, 8pm.

(1998) (Shown on DVD): Maybe if we all cross our fingers Johnny Depp’s promise to return to Hunter S. Thompson with the in-development-hell Rum Diary may actually happen.
B Mon., March 24, 7:30pm.

(2007) (Shown on video): Soon to be aired as part of PBS’ Independent Lens series, Aaron Woolf’s doc looks to the surprisingly troublesome corn industry—namely the overproduction of the stuff and its major role in the fast food industry. An agriculture-related panel discussion follows.
(Not reviewed.) Wed., March 19, 6:30pm.

(2006) (Shown on DVD): Gay love between an Israeli and a Palestinian may not be the most subtle of storylines, but Eytan Fox (Walk on Water) makes it interesting, if only by tackling it onto a portrait of progressive youths in Tel Aviv.
B- Sat., March 22, 7:30pm.