By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Screening Gotham: July 7-9, 2006
A few of this weekend’s worthwhile cinematic happenings around New York:
–You can come at me 1,000 different ways with your World Cup hype and your dorky protestations about why soccer is sooooooo much better than baseball or any other sport where players actually score, but face it: When the tournament winds down this weekend and gets shoved back into America’s cultural attic for the next four years like a recurring white-elephant gift at Christmas, you’ll be glad to get back to normal life. Before you have to go cold turkey, however, you might as well check out Paul Crowder and John Dower’s Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos, an admittedly breezy, entertaining glimpse at the soccer team that won the city’s heart (and a league championship) in 1977. I stand by my Tribeca endorsement (which you can read here), even if the game itself plunges me into catatonia.
–Not that her career ended after 1981–far from it, in fact–but nobody would dispute that Karen Allen scored the role of a lifetime as Marion Ravenwood in Raiders of the Lost Ark. As Indiana Jones’s hard-charging ex, Allen stole more than a few scenes, including a drinking contest amounting to one of the best screen entrances of the ’80s. Now the Paris Theater has skedded a pair of Raiders screenings at 10 tonight and Saturday, and Allen will drop in for Q&A’s following both. Honestly, I would be more interested in knowing why she let James Toback squeeze her into such a small role in When Will I Be Loved, but that Paris crowd can get violent when you veer off-topic.
–I do not have a lot to say about this that you cannot just deduce from five words: The Ed Wood Film Festival. A color print of Plan 9 From Outer Space is the main event, with Plan 9 survivor Conrad Brooks in attendance. And it gets better–or something–from there: A rare shorts program includes Wood commercials and footage of the cross-dressing trash-film icon modeling his famous angora sweater and fishnet stockings. Whatever–I would take this terror over the World Cup any day.