Pete's weekend movie roundup: Friday the 13th substitutes, pulp noir at the PFA

Like Pulp Fiction? The Pacific Film Archive is starting a new series that's the cream of the crop.

Happy Friday the 13th, movie buffs! There’s a new remake of the slasher classic Friday the 13th in multiplexes today, but I have interest in seeing it. If you want a real scare or gothic depair, rent Roman Polanski’s The Tenant, Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, or Neil Marshall’s The Descent.

The Oscar-nominated movies are still playing everywhere, and my top three to see would be Slumdog Millionaire, The Wrestler, and Frost/Nixon. I caught up on The Reader and Doubt this week, and thought both were very well done—but not worthy of me re-arranging my top 10 list. If you’re into the adapted screenplay category, by all means check them out.

By far the best new movie of 2009 is Henry Selick’s eye-pooping animated feature Coraline. It’s the kind of kids’ movie that parents will probably like more than little ones. Surreal, beautifully animated, and genuinely creepy/unsettling in the final act. Make sure to see it in 3-D.

I’m always checking the Pacific Film Archive’s schedule for their latest series. They have a really cool one starting tonight: One-Two Punch, Pulp Writers on Film. The series showcases adaptations of some of the best pulp novelists like Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford. Tonight’s movies include the boxing noir Crack-Up and the thriller The Kill-Off. On Thursday, the 19th, they’ll be showing Miami Blues, based on the great Willeford novel, and Black Angel, based on a Cornell Woolrich story.

More info on the series below:

One-Two Punch: Pulp Writers on Film
February 13, 2009 - February 28, 2009

Phantom Lady, February 21

Pulp fiction was never about technical virtuosity or the well-placed jab. It was more the swift uppercut that sent you reeling. The effect was physical, but if the prose landed properly the impact would follow through to the brain, where it would dazzle as it dazed. One-Two Punch ducks and weaves around four great pulp writers—Fredric Brown, Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford, and Cornell Woolrich—reveling in their adaptations to film. First published in 1926, Woolrich is the punch-drunk veteran of the group. His notable adaptations include Rear Window, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, and the prototypical noir Phantom Lady. Brown wrote dozens of short stories before settling on sci-fi and crime fiction in the forties. A true curio of its time, his Screaming Mimi stars that just-discovered knockout Anita Ekberg. Thompson came out swinging with a flurry of novels about beautiful, bruised losers. Only two of his books were adapted during his lifetime, so we don’t know how he would square off with Série noire or The Kill-Off, contemporary takes on his bare-knuckles approach to life at the bottom. Finally, Willeford would be the most contemporary heavyweight, having published right until his death in 1988. His patently quirky Hoke Moseley series saw four installments, but only one rough-and-tumble movie, Miami Blues, starring Alec Baldwin as a wide-eyed sociopath. Join us for a series of double bills featuring pulp writers who come out swinging.



Friday, February 13, 2009 
6:30 p.m. Crack-Up


In this hallucinatory noir based on a Fredric Brown story, Pat O’Brien is an expert in forged paintings with a tenuous grasp on the boundary between real and fake—in art and in life.



Friday, February 13, 2009
 8:30 p.m. The Kill-Off


Maggie Greenwald captures Jim Thompson’s dismal vision of an off-season resort. “A nasty, claustrophobic little gem.”—Paper

Thursday,

February 19, 2009: 
6:30 p.m. Miami Blues


Introduced by Don Herron. Fred Ward plays Charles Willeford’s detective Hoke Moseley, in pursuit of sociopath Alec Baldwin and collegiate call girl Jennifer Jason Leigh. “A pungent, blithely violent thriller.”—New Yorker

Thursday, February 19, 2009


8:45 p.m. Black Angel


Introduced by Elliot Lavine. Dan Duryea and June Vincent in a booze-drenched B-movie version of the Cornell Woolrich novel.
 

Posted at 12:14 PM in Pete's Popcorn Picks | Permalink