IS IT FRIDAY ALREADY? GUIDED BY WEEKEND FILMS

Sunday may be Guided by Voices Day here in New York, in celebration of their “last ever” shows tonight, tomorrow and Sunday, but there’s a lot of special film programming occurring this weekend as well. Since I’m going to the Sunday show, I’ve got to figure out how to squeeze it all in.

• Closer is the only major new release this weekend, with Zhang Yimou’s follow-up to Hero, House of Flying Daggers, opening in New York and LA. I can’t wait to see both films, although Closer will be the more interesting experience for me because I actually saw the play by Patrick Marber. I remember really liking the play too. It had a phenomenal cast featuring Natasha Richardson, Anna Friel, Rupert Graves and Ciaran Hinds. And yet, I can’t remember one thing about it. I see the trailers for the new movie, and other than the fact that there are four characters, not one thing seems familiar. Yet I still remember leaving the theater those years ago and really enjoying it. How could something so supposedly enjoyable be so utterly unmemorable? Will the film trigger my memory? (Oh yes, fascinating stuff, I know.)

• If you’re going to be home on Sunday and have HBO, you might want to tune in at 9 PM forThe Life and Death of Peter Sellers. You must have seen the ads which show how thoroughly the always fantastic Geoffrey Rush at least physically transformed into the spitting image of the late, brilliant actor. Sellers had a notoriously fascinating, and troubled, life, posthumously gaining a public reputation for not exactly being the nicest man even while always being remembered as one of film history’s most talented and versatile actors, comic or otherwise. I’ve been hearing mixed things about this HBO original film. The choice of Stephen Hopkins as director is a bit curious to me. Hopkins managed to obtain some level of Hollywood success by being the consummate hack making just plain awful bastardized sequels like A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 and Predator 2 not to mention horrible action thrillers like Judgment Night and Blown Away. Somehow, even after making the abhorrent The Ghost and the Darkness, New Line Cinema gave him a shitload of money to make the big screen adaptation of Lost in Space, which while definitely not owning the title of worst old TV series adaptation ever, it’s damn close. Hopkins managed to redeem himself a bit by joining the creators of 24 and directing a large number of the Fox series’ episodes. 24 is a show built for Hopkins sensibilities. 24 takes plenty of leaps with story logic that are alternatingly annoying and thrilling. In quick-moving hour increments on a show which requires you to check all sense at the door, his style seems to work fine. He also directed the USA Network miniseries Traffic, a reconception of Steven Soderbergh’s Oscar-winning Traffic which itself was a remake of the British miniseries Traffik. (And anyone who has seen the British miniseries and still thinks Stephen Gaghan deserved that Oscar for basically changing a few names and locations deserves to have his/her head examined.) Anyway, the story of Sellers’ life and work is enough to make me DiVo it. I just hope that Hopkins has grown as a director more than I’ve seen so far.

  (PS: If you’re into biographies, you might also want to watch one of a more documentary feel when The History Channel airs its new examination of the life of one of the most important Americans who ever lived, Ben Franklin. The History Channel’s biographies are usuallly pretty entertaining in their own rights, so check-it-out this Sunday at 9 PM, with a perfectly DiVo-able replay at 1 AM in case you’re watching something else at 9, like The Life and Death of Peter Sellers or Desperate Housewives.)

• Check-out Filmbrain’s suggestions for the last week of the South Korean Film series at the Walter Reade. As a relative illiterate on most Asian cinema, his suggestions are helpful, and I’m definitely checking out Turning Gate tonight.

• I’m hoping to finally get back down to Film Forum to catch Days of Being Wild, but you certainly won’t go wrong also stopping by today or tomorrow for a double feature of John Huston’s classic noir The Asphalt Jungle or one of Stanley Kubrick’s earliest films, the recetrack heist drama The Killing, a phenomenal look at the last days of true film noir from the first days of one of history’s greatest filmmakers. While not one of Kubrick’s more famous films to the general public, it is one of his most influential to other filmmakers, especially those who have gone on to make their own heist pictures. The film’s nonlinear narrative was somewhat unique at the time even as now many filmmakers try to use similar storytelling techniques – and often fail.

  Sunday and Monday bring Otto Preminger’s fantastic Laura . A great murder mystery with a romantic drama twist, Laura is a great example of the most successful types of noir. A police detective falls in love with the “murder victim” he’s investigating. Yeah, that would pique my interest too. Check it out along with Phantom Lady.

• And don’t forget the Visconti series still ongoing at BAM.

• Finally, as I alluded to Wednesday, the awards season for movies is upon us. I’ve got a long way to go before I’ll be putting out any top 10 lists; probably not until mid-to-late January. But Finding Neverland winning the National Board of Review’s Best Film honor is slightly absurd. I really enjoyed the movie, but this has been an incredibly strong year for film, and I feel I can say that even without having seen many of the ones we want. When all is said and done, I don’t even know that it will make my list of top films. Between the NBR, the IFP Independent Spirit Awards, and the New York IFP Gotham Awards, award’s season is gearing up and we’re going to be hearing a lot about prospective “best film of the year” choices. I’ve been busy at work and haven’t had that much time the past couple years, so I’ll talk about this more probably after the weekend.

Have a good one, and if you can’t actually go to one of the GBV shows yourself, just head outside to a bench, pop on your iPod headphones and blast their music really loud while you drink a beer. Depending on what number beer you’re on, you may not even notice the difference!