Headline: Movies: Great expectations, after summer’s best

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Records tumbled, glowing reviews were dispensed like so much sunscreen, and we
still had room for mindless junk like Eight
Legged Freaks and XXX. Thanks to
pictures like Road To Perdition, Signs and Minority Report, the summer of 2002 was certainly the best in
recent memory.

            But what about the fall? Does the
bumper crop of stellar offerings between Days Memorial and Labor mean we won’t
see anything good until the holidays, when the big Oscar race gears up?

            Don’t bet on it. While the
mainstream theatres will be chock-full with the back-to-school swill, the
alternative outlets should keep us happy with plenty of films that actual
people with actual brains might actually want to see. Think about it — last
year, the best of what cinema had to offer hit local screens between September
and mid-November (Ghost World, Mulholland Drive, Amélie), and the year 2000 wasn’t much different (Dancer in the Dark, Billy Elliot, Best in Show).

            What follows is a guide to navigate
you through the many independent, foreign and special interest events that are
scheduled to unspool in Rochester before you even have to think about
concocting your Thanksgiving excuses.

            Das
Experiment is a German import about a psychological research project in
which 20 volunteers are randomly divided into guards and prisoners before being
dropped into an artificial penitentiary for two weeks to see how the role
assignment affects its subjects. Run Lola
Run‘s Moritz Bleibtreu stars as a journalist who becomes a prisoner in
hopes of turning the experience into an award-winning story.

            Another career go-getter is in Secretary:
young Lee Holloway (Maggie Gyllenhaal) does whatever she can to please her
egomaniacal boss (James Spader). Trouble is, Lee has just been released from a
mental institution and is a chronic self-mutilator. You can practically feel
the sparks from here, can’t you? Secretary won a special award for originality at this year’s Sundance Festival.

            If
you don’t see any humor in cutting, maybe traditional stand-up comedy is more
your speed. Check out Notorious C.H.O. (October 18),
comedian Margaret Cho’s follow-up to the arthouse hit I’m the One That I Want. Filmed live during a Seattle performance
in late 2001, Cho waxes poetic about her Korean roots, her inability to break
into Hollywood and her apparent love of various body parts that I dare not
mention in such a high-brow publication. There is also a lot of very un-PC
humor geared toward Cho’s reputation as a “fag-hag,” as well as a hilarious
story about Scotland’s only gay bar (called C.C. Bloom, after the Bette Midler
character in Beaches).

            All
that laughing will most certainly put you in the mood for something a little
more serious, which you’ll find in Run
Lola Run director Tom Tykwer’s Heaven. Not only is this his
English-language debut, it’s the first in a series of three films (Hell and Purgatory are set to follow) written by Polish filmmaker Krzysztof
Kieslowski before his 1996 death (he planned to make them himself). Cate
Blanchett stars as a teacher in Italy whose husband dies of a drug overdose.
Tired of the police doing nothing about the dealers, she resorts to vigilante
justice and ends up in prison, where she falls for a cop played by Giovanni
Ribisi.

            Another deliciously dark offering is
François Ozon’s 8 Women. If you were bored to tears during Gosford Park, this murder-mystery might alleviate any concerns you
may have had about the state of that particular genre. It’s about a big party
at a country estate where the host is murdered by one of his guests, which are
— you guessed it — eight women. The female cast reads like a who’s who of
French cinema — Catherine Deneuve (The
Musketeer), Fanny Ardant (Ridicule),
Emmanuelle Beart (Mission: Impossible),
Isabelle Huppert (The Piano Teacher),
Virginie Ledoyen (The Beach) and
Danielle Darrieux (Young Girls of
Rochefort).

            Want something even darker? The
Grey Zone is about as bleak as you can get. Written and directed by Tim
Blake Nelson (the guy who wasn’t Clooney or Turturro in O Brother), Zone tells
the story of the Sonderkommando, a rag-tag bunch of World War II concentration
camp prisoners who help the Nazis exterminate hordes of Jews in exchange for a
few special privileges, like better food and the possibility of living for a
couple extra months. The unlikely castmates include Steve Buscemi, David
Arquette, Daniel Benzali, Harvey Keitel, Mira Sorvino and Natasha Lyonne.

            Special
guests are on the menu over at the Dryden Theatre at the George Eastman House.
One night after the showing of his film, Bus
Riders Union, an informative documentary about public transportation in Los
Angeles, Haskell Wexler will be in town to screen Medium Cool (October 19),
one of the ’60s biggest and best independent film milestones. Rochester’s own
Robert Forster stars as a Chicago-based television cameraman who witnesses the
anarchy of the 1968 Democratic Convention. And Forster himself will be in town
the following evening to introduce Alligator (October 20), the highly
entertaining John Sayles-penned thriller from 1980.

            The
fun continues the following weekend, when legendary horror producer Richard
Gordon comes to the Dryden to show Fiend Without a Face and The
Haunted Strangler (October 26). And that’s just to whet your whistle
for the scariest film on the Dryden’s calendar — Hell House, a documentary
about a Pentecostal church in Dallas whose members put on an extravagant
fire-and-brimstone haunted house every Halloween. Frightened onlookers witness
depictions of botched abortions, drunk-driving fatalities and death via AIDS.
Take a frightening peek at the people who elected Dubya as their governor
before the country didn’t elect him president.

            If
music is more your style, the Dryden is still the place to be. They’ll be
showing a brand-new, fully restored version of what many consider to be the
greatest concert film ever made — Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, which
documents the Band’s farewell concert in 1976. But if you’re tired of kicking
it old school, then you won’t want to miss I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, a
behind-the-scenes look at Wilco and the making of their dazzling album Yankee
Hotel Foxtrot, which just might be the best rock-and-roll story in the last
decade.

            Hey, don’t forget that the fall is
film festival season in Rochester! After the big festival in Toronto comes to a
close, local film lovers can look forward to ImageOut (October 4-12), which celebrates its aluminum (read: 10th)
anniversary this year, boasting a program that includes a sing-a-long version
of Grease with director Randal
Kleiser, All the Queens Men with Matt
LeBlanc and Eddie Izzard, Beijing love story Lan Yu, a drag-and-glitter documentary about San Francisco’s The Cockettes, and Native American
Sherman Alexie’s brilliant The Business
of Fancydancing. For more information, visit their web site at
www.imageout.org.

            After giving you a few weeks to get
your bearings, the High Falls Film
Festival (October 30-November 3) hits the screen after its wildly
successful inaugural bow last year.

            Announced titles to date include Love Liza, which won Fairport native
Gordy Hoffman the top screenwriting award at this year’s Sundance fest (his
brother, Philip Seymour Hoffman, stars); Personal
Velocity, which was written and directed by Rebecca Miller (daughter of
Arthur) and stars Parker Posey, Fairuza Balk and Kyra Sedgwick; and Daughter From Danang, a documentary
about the effects of Nixon’s “Operation Babylift” 22 years after its Vietnamese
orphans were adopted by American families (it was named Best Documentary at
Sundance). And that’s in addition to panels conducted by actress Lainie Kazan
and cinematographer John Bailey. Check their site at www.highfallsfilmfestival.com.

This article appears in Sep 11-17, 2002.