NEW YORK: The Brooklyn Academy of Music serves up "Punk 'n' Pie", a Thanksgiving-week nostalgia fest documenting the spirit of punk music (or, as the record companies asked us to call some of this stuff when I was in high school, "New Wave") as it's been captured on film. There are music films, including the '80s music-TV mainstay Urgh! A Music War, including performances by Devo, the Police, XTC, the Go-Gos, and UB40, as well as documentaries devoted to Joe Strummer, Joy Division, and Depeche Mode. Also included are Michael Winterbottom's hilarious 24 Hour Party People, Alex Cox's inevitable Sid and Nancy, and Derek Jarman's Jubilee, a real time capsule (including a glimpse of the Slits as a gang of street toughs dismantling a car) of what bad attitude looked like in England around the time of Elizabeth II's "Silver Jubilee."
In a very different vein, Film Forum is saluting one of the iconic Holllywood comediennes of the screwball romance era, Carole Lombard, in a series running today through December 2. There are some very choice double bills here, starting with the opening serve of My Man Godfrey, a screwball classic co-starring William Powell at his suavest, and Twentieth Century, a great showcase for Lombard's co-star John Barrymore at his woldest. Barrymore turns up again in True Confession, a courtroom comedy that's paired with the likable romance Hands Across the Table, both of which hook the heroine up with Fred MacMurray; she brings out the best in him. For something farther off the beaten track, there's We're Not Dressing, a fun vaudeville revue set on a desert island (featuring Bing Crosby, Ethel Mermen, and George Burns and Gracie Allen), which you get to see after you've sat through the 1934 freak show that is Bolero, an attempt to turn Lombard and George Raft into screen rivals of Astaire and Rogers's. In the words of a Bob Dylan song, you'll just sit there and stare.
BERKELEY: "A Dirty Dozen: The Films of Robert Aldrich" (November 21--December 20) at the Pacific Film Archives gives you the chance to spend the last month of fall eyeballing the movies of a director whose work never lacked for heat. A genre entertainer at heart, Aldrich was fated to be something of an independent as well for the sheer perversity of his imagination and his approach to freshening the melodramatic cliches to which he was drawn. The schedule includes what has probably turned out to be his most influential film, Kiss Me Deadly, a spectacular atomic-age take on film noir starring Ralph Meeker as Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer. But there are also lesser-known films that show how well Aldrich could match his style to the broad strokes drawn by such specialists in hambone neurosis as Joan Crawford (in Autumn Leaves and Jack Palance (in The Big Knife, a Hollywood story that pairs Palance's tortured sell-out of a movie star with Rod Steiger's studio chieftain, a ranting, quivering mass of self-righteous flesh, and Attack!, a war movie in which the cynical manuevering of his superiors reduces big Jack to an avenging golem).
CAMBRIDGE, MASS: The Harvard Film Archive, in association with the Magners Irish Film Festival, spends a weekend paying tribute to the great, toweringly eccentric director John Boorman. The mad dreamer who hatched such glittering oddities as Zardoz and Excalibur is mostly showcased at his (comparatively) sanest here; opening with the The General (1988), starring Brendan Gleeson as in a riveting performance as Martin Cahill, the Dublin crime lord and family man who once broke into Boorman's house, it includes Boorman's biggest American hit, Deliverance, as well as his biggest crowd-pleaser (and arguably his best film), the autobiographical Hope and Glory. But it also makes room for such obscurities as Catch Us If You Can, an attempt to do fcast Boorman as the Richard Lester to the Dave Clark Five's the Beatles, and Leo the Last (1970), made in London and starring Marcello Mastroianni in one of his rare English-language films.