ON THE BIG SCREEN
What better way to start the new year than with a shot of Jack? Lemmon, that is. MODERN MATINEES: JACK LEMMON kicks off at the Museum of Modern Art on New Years Day with a Lemmon double feature (remember those?): Once Too Often (1950) and Phffft! (1954). It’s followed by two Lemmon/Matthau/Wilder goodies: The Front Page (1974) on Thursday and The Fortune Cookie (1966).
Wilder and Lemmon did seven films together, including classics like Some Like it Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960). Six will be included in the series, which runs through 2.28.
IFC Center’s Autumn 2019 series WAVERLY MIDNIGHTS: SPY GAMES concludes this weekend with Top Secret! (1984) the ZAZ follow-up to Airplane!. David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker bring their lunacy back to the silver screen with this satire of surfer films, Elvis Presley films and 60s spy films. Val Kilmer, in his debut film role, is American rock-and-roll star Nick Rivers. He’s on tour in East Germany, Which still seems to be under Nazi control. But worry not-the fighters of the French underground are on hand. Which is good, because Nick needs all the help he can get when he gets sucked into a plot to rescue a scientist held hostage.
Top Secret! is less reliant on the incessant wordplay (“and don’t call me Shirley”) of Airplane!. In a variety of clever and unexpected ways, Top Secret! plays on visual perceptions and the visual assumptions we bring to watching a film. No spoilers here. The surprise is half the fun.
And a note from IFC:
**Please note the late-night screenings on Fri 12/27 and Sat 12/28 begin at 12:15am, not 11:59pm!**
For WHERE TO FIND THE FLICKS, click on the links below:
MANHATTAN
BROOKLYN/QUEENS/The BRONX
THE REGION
BLU-RAY/DVD
The most interesting Blu-Ray release this week is the 1949 film Trapped, a T-Men-vs.-The-Counterfeiters drama, out of the “semi-documentary” sub-genre of film noir. The film is a “procedural,” starting with the requisite overview of the Treasury Department and all it does, and proceeds to the specifics of printing currency, and finally gets around to the point of counterfeiting.
This high definition re-mastering restores the black-and-white luster of Guy Roe’s cinematography. It’s a must, with so much of the film bathed in shadows.
Trapped is directed by Richard Fleischer, who began his long and varied career directing other films noir like Bodyguard (1948) The Clay Pigeon (1949) Armored Car Robbery (1950) and the classic The Narrow Margin (1952). It stars a young Lloyd Nolan.
