“END OF THE CENTURY” FRIDAY 9/30 8 p.m.
Since Joey Ramone died, it has been up to me to carry the mantle of goofy, pillow-lipped sex symbol. And that is a sad state of affairs.
Hearken back to when angst was blissfully distilled into pelvis-shattering punk rock and the youth really knew how to wear their tight pants. This could be a very useful primer for the less focused pseudo-hip rebel youths on campus: dark colors are the way to go. Bright colors are for A Flock of Seagulls.
Interviews with The Ramones, including the last with Joey and Dee Dee before their deaths, are interspersed with concert footage from their rough-and-tumble beginnings up until their rough-and-tumble ending. Highlight: Phil Spector kept them virtual prisoners, wielding a gun until they finished recording the 1980 album “End of the Century.”
I know you haven’t left your house since Joey died. But stop wanting to be sedated, leave the house, see “End of the Century” and say “Make my day, punk rockers.”
“THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS” SATURDAY 10/1 FREE 8 p.m.
Vanguard director Lars Von Trier (“Dogville,” “Dancer in the Dark”) calls on his personal hero Jørgen Leth, a one-time ’60s avant-garde sparkler now residing on an estate in Haiti making a good living as a cycling commentator for Danish TV. Von Trier invites him to remake his 1967 12-minute short “The Perfect Human,” which he felt turned out a bit too perfect. To stretch him as a filmmaker, Von Trier provides five sizable obstacles to this process.
Pop quiz, hotshot. How do you remake the same film five times that satisfy various obstructions imposed by film sadist, Lars von Trier?
Challenge #1: Film “The Perfect Human” in Cuba, a country Leth has never visited, and edit it so that no shot exceeds 12 frames (half a second).
Challenge #2: Film “The Perfect Human” in what Von Trier considers “the most miserable place on Earth,” Bombay’s red-light district. The film must now star Leth, and keep all human misery offscreen
Challenge #3: Though both directors detest cartoons, make “The Perfect Human” into an animated film.
Footage of the original shorts and Leth’s “obstructed” versions are interspersed with the director’s banter-y game of cat and mouse. The last two obstructions I would be a sadist myself to reveal, but let’s just say Leth is certainly up to the challenge.
“BAD EDUCATION” WEDNESDAY 10/5 8 p.m.
Pedro Almodovar (All About My Mother, Talk to Her) is current cinema’s most dazzling, intelligent provocateur. And he is on a roll.
Bad Education is a noir melodrama filtered through the id of a transsexual (and former altar boy). Gael Garcia Bernal (Y Tu Mama Tambien) plays three roles in this “Vertigo” on a mainlined heroin and crack Molotov cocktail.
FILM STUDIES DEPARTMENT OPEN HOUSE THURSDAY 10/6 8 p.m. FREE
An opportunity to meet the professors and majors (opportunity to kiss or stab me), look at the building, snag some refreshments, and view last year’s high honors theses: “Kinetoscope” (Max Goldblatt), “Items Removed from the Human Trachea” (Lynn Levy), and “Missing” (Jeremiah Friedman).