Gas-s-s-s! (Indieplex, Saturday @ 2:35 AM)
Roger Corman's big-budget (for him) post-apocalyptic hippie comedy, made in 1971 and subtitled or It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It, is nothing if not a film shaped like an acid trip, complete with pratfalls, pseudo-philosophy, and screamingly riotous comedy that isn't at all funny but then is because it's not. Beginning, more or less, in Dealey Plaza (!) and hitting the road across the wasteland and through a series of mutated movie-genre vaudeville skits, all of it skewering American nationalism on sharp sticks, the scenario paints a dire portrait of the 'Nam-era, but it's far from gloomy. It is, rather, completely dippy. The litany of drugged-out grade-school surrealisms tends to dull the social satire, but it's always fun.
Another Day in Paradise (IFC, Sunday @ 6:15 PM & 12:00 midnight)
A man of obvious and uninterrogated obsessions, photographer/filmmaker Larry Clark made this 1999 junkie saga after his breakout film Kids, following a quartet of loudmouth shooters as they motor from crime to crime scoring and getting high. Starring James Woods, Vincent Kartheiser, Natasha Gregson Wagner and Melanie Griffith (doing what might be her best film work in an underwritten role as the healthiest-looking 40-ish scag whore in the Western Hemisphere). Cliched but full of raw danger, as with the eye-popping money scene wherein Melanie Griffith shoots smack directly into her crotch, the movie is not much helped by the fact that Clark still, in deep middle age, finds nothing quite as interesting as skinny, semi-nude teenage boys. As Steven Soderbergh said in Schizopolis, he's the happiest man in his pants.
Howl's Moving Castle (IFC, Saturday @ 3:00 PM)
Loosely adapted from a popular 1986 teen fantasy novel by Brit genre priestess Diana Wynne Jones, this hallucinogenic Hayao Miyazaki beaut from 2004 airily occupies a hybrid past, half fin de siècle Ruritania, half WW II siege, and half Tolkienian magic play. Giant battle planes rain bombs on Tudor Euro-cities but also unleash swarms of flying war demons with pig snouts and top hats to combat intervening wizards. Castles walk on chicken legs. Fire demons babble in Billy Crystal's Borschty accent. Like all Miyazaki, it's a constantly bewitching movie because nothing, absolutely nothing, happens the way you think it might.
Pirates of the Caribbean wasn't the first film based on a theme-park ride (rather than vice-versa). This 2002 mutant, plotted after The Blues Brothers, was easily the most bizarre children's film made in this country since the '80s. Huge, semi-caricatured, Hensontronic talking bears pepper the otherwise realistic Southern landscape, occupying mostly service-industry jobs -- the prospect of a truly berserk, Planet of the Apes-type race-relations metaphor looms but then collapses in a drawling muddle of cheap jokes. The heavily fanged bears are convincing and threatening enough to make you hope for a royal When Animals Attack maiming, particularly during dance numbers featuring failed Disney Records ingenues Krystal Harris and Jennifer Paige. The only catharsis offered is the sight of Christopher Walken wearing a bandolier of rainbow-tufted tranquilizer darts.
Crooklyn (Indieplex, Friday @ 7:05 PM)
A real return to childhood, Spike Lee's 1994 memoir film (co-written with two of his siblings) is all about the filmmaker's youth growing up in '70s Brooklyn amid five kids, a proud jazz musician father (Delroy Lindo), a no-bullshit mom (Alfre Woodard), and an atmosphere thick with infectious pop songs, Norman Lear sitcoms, urban street games, and a day and age when many urban neighborhoods were communities instead of war zones.
Cool Hand Luke (TCM, Sunday @ 2:00 PM)
Stuart Rosenberg's 1967 American New Wave touchstone, in which Paul Newman plays a laconic oddball who just cannot acclimate to his new life on a Southern chain gang. Masterful because of its subtext: if you pay attention, there are Christ symbols everywhere, but Newman's Luke is no Jesus. What the film is actually about the pervasive human impulse to create Christ figures, sometimes out of the unlikeliest people imaginable.
Pusher (Sundance, Friday @ 12:00 midnight & 4:30 AM)
In Nicholas Winging Refn's 1996 debut, Denmark seems like little more than a snake pit of narcotic squalor. The hero is Frank (Kim Bodnia, half Stanley Tucci and half Tom Sizemore), a mid-level dope dealer up against the local kingpin when he has to jump into a lake with a ton of dope to avoid the cops. The thing is alive with details: the conversations that you think will provide exposition but instead get completely sidetracked; the live-wire-torture scene that ends, abruptly, when the lights go out; the way Frank, as the clock slowly runs out of time, becomes less expressive, not more. Refn made two sequels, and his new film, Valhalla Rising, is imminent in theaters.
Le Doulos (Sundance, Saturday @ 8:05 AM & 3:00 PM)
The old French gangster film that inspired the doubling-back structure of Quentin Tarantino's first few films, this drizzly, mordant Jean-Pierre Melville film tracks a hood out of stir (Serge Reggiani) as he tries to figure out if buddy Jean-Paul Belmondo ratted on him or not, or who did, which are real questions for us, too, since Melville withholds information and doesn't allow us to trust anyone, either. Made in 1962, when the world was a gray terrarium of trench-coated Cold War intrigue.