Fests and events, 11/18.

"Frownland is a film whose synopsis screams, 'Avoid at all costs,'" writes Matt Zoller Seitz at the House Next Door. "Yet the movie's energy is so peculiar, its vision of socially maladjusted loners so scathingly funny and its creative choices so uncompromising that the result is not just memorable, but haunting." Filmmaker Ronald Bronstein will be on hand for tomorrow evening's MoMA screening.

Still Lives: The Films of Pedro Costa is a series running at the Gene Siskel Film Center through December 4. Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader:

Costa's films have the reputation of being difficult, but I would argue that three of them are relatively accessible. I had no trouble diving headfirst into his first color feature, Casa de Lava (1994, stupidly translated as Down to Earth), a voluptuous remake of Tourneur's 1943 film I Walked With a Zombie; the zombie here is Isaach de Bankolé, playing a construction worker in a protracted coma. And Costa's black-and-white first feature, The Blood (1989), was gripping even though I couldn't follow all of the plot, its fairy-tale poetics evoking Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) and its milky whites, inky blacks, and delicate balances of light and shadow suggesting Lang's The Big Heat (1953) and Bresson's Pickpocket (1959). Where Lies Your Hidden Smile? shows Straub and Huillet editing their 1999 feature Sicilia!, making only five cuts per day and quarreling endlessly over each one; it reveals the difference a single frame can make and how much the two need each other. Aptly described as a romantic comedy, it's the only Costa feature that isn't sad and the best film ever made about filmmaking.

On Tuesday, the Academy celebrates the 30th anniversary of Saturday Night Fever. "[John] Travolta, who returned to his musical roots this year in the hit Hairspray, will participate in the panel discussion with other members of the cast, including Donna Pescow, and Newsweek critic David Ansen will moderate," notes Susan King, who's got a nice conversation with Travolta in the Los Angeles Times.

Posted by dwhudson at November 18, 2007 11:59 AM