Grindhouse is back, at least in Los Angeles and Chicago. Cinefamily is screening 70s-era exploitation double features every Friday in February, a series co-presented by Temple of Schlock: "These films weren't all just mustaches and hot pants - they were also, intentionally or accidentally, artistic outlets for aspiring film students, movie-loving outsiders, and all manner of dreamers. Sharing our point of view is the new DVD label Cultra Video, whose mission is to restore and release these long-forgotten exploitation gems with an emphasis on their artistic value, trashy good times or not."
On Thursdays, doc films is exploring The Golden Age of American Sexploitation. This week: "The first X-rated feature directed by Orson Welles collaborator and protégé, Gary Graver, 3 A.M. is a study of guilt and loneliness in the wake of death." A 16mm rarity from 1975. On a related note, Susie Bright remembered Graver's work as Robert McCallum back in 2006.
OTHER EVENTS
Cinefist screens Tom Quinn's The New Year Parade on Friday in Los Angeles.
The Double-Edged Sword: The Chambara Filmss of Shintaro Katsu & Raizo Ichikawa runs through May at the Japan Society in New York. The next screening takes place Friday, February 19: "An astonishing, dreamlike samurai film written by Kaneto Shindo, Destiny's Son is a demonic masterpiece: designed with quasi-expressionist artistry, awash with surreal landscapes, and subsumed in an otherworldly beauty that fuses Zen and sword."
Spike Jonze's half-hour robot love story I'm Here premiered at Sundance and will be viewable online from anywhere in the world on March 1. But Absolut Vodka is presenting screenings in London, Manchester and Edinburgh on February 25, 26 and 27, respectively. Click here for details.
DVDS
"Global phenom though it's been, the Korean New Wave has been as badly hit by the 2008 economic crisis as any national industry, a situation that opened the door in the last two years for a variety of dirt-cheap indies, most notoriously Yang Ik-joon's Breathless, which took South Korea by storm," writes Michael Atkinson for IFC. "The far less flamboyant example is Noh Young-Seok's Daytime Drinking, a peripatetic generation-Z comedy that's as eventless, but as seductive and wistful, as a real afternoon boozing spree." Also reviewed is the he four-disc, eight-film Columbia set Bad Girls of Film Noir. For more on that one, see Dave Kehr in the New York Times.
The New York Post's Lou Lumenick reports that Universal will release a three-disc collection of films featuring Barbara Stanwyck on April 27. Six films previously unavailable on DVD, including two directed by Douglas Sirk.
For DVD Beaver, Jonathan Rosenbaum considers "Great 30s Movies on DVD (... and a few more than should be)."
DVD roundups: Sean Axmaker and Brad Brevet.
ONLINE VIEWING TIP
8 is a feature-length collection of eight short films, each addressing one of the Millennium Development Goals set by 191 governments in September 2000. The makers: Gael García Bernal, Jane Campion, Jan Kounen, Mira Nair, Gaspar Noé, Abderrahmane Sissako, Gus Van Sant and Wim Wenders. The collection premiered at the Rome Film Festival in 2008 and is now viewable at No Time Left's YouTube channel.
Top image: Detail from the poster for The Body Beneath (1970), screening this Friday at Cinefamily.
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