This week on cable, a rare appearance by the great American indie you've never heard of -- because it was due to open theatrically the week after 9/11. And didn't. Better late than never...
The American Astronaut (Sundance, Sunday @ 2:00 PM)
Indie-pop-world idol Cory McAbee's first feature film is a bracing spray of garage-band silliness, a science fiction film that looks and smells suspiciously like a bar movie. The frontman and brains powering The Billy Nayer Show, McAbee suggests a hungover Scott Wilson, wiped out from last night's show but ready to play-act Cool Action Hero. The film is as nonchalantly make-believe as a treehouse game of Buck Rogers. Casually traversing the solar system and composed mostly of shadow and bass lines, McAbee's movie could've been shot almost entirely on the Bowery. An asteroid is represented solely from the interior of a low-ride gin mill, Jupiter is an old Maspeth ballroom, Venus is an open field populated by waltzing Victorian nymphos. The story involves interstellar espionage and commerce involving the trade in women and/or their clones, and was surprisingly midwifed through the Sundance Writers' Lab; it feels as if it sprang unedited from McAbee's honky-tonk daydreams, down to the song-and-dance numbers.
Gaslight (TCM, Friday @ 3:30 AM)
Amid an all-day Ingrid Bergman marathon, this 1944 Victorian suspenser positions naive maiden Bergman in a new marriage with secretive cad Charles Boyer, who, it becomes apparent, is out to drive her mad. It's a wonder Boyer had a career after this, he's that oily, but it's Bergman that won the Oscar. From whence came the verb "to gaslight," which has never ceased being a usual addition to the language.
Laura (Fox Movie Channel, Saturday @ 12:00 noon)
The chattiest, dreamiest, and wittiest of noir mysteries, Otto Preminger's 1944 film begins with a murder and a romance - cool cop Dana Andrews falls for the dead woman, personified by Gene Tierney's wall portrait. Then Tierney's heroine walks in from a weekend away, and no one's sure who the body belongs to. All in all, the film is virtually owned by first-timer Clifton Webb, the feyest and most acidic character actor of the '40s.
A conscientiously low-key dawdle written by "Terry" Malick and featuring Paul Newman as an unapologetically dopey and penniless Arizona livestock freelancer who accepts a shady deal to buy Mexican cattle and march them up across the border. Helping him is boozy, hedonistic negotiator Lee Marvin, in a filthy suit jacket and leather gloves; together, they spend most of the movie driving around in a shellshocked T-bird and wondering why the world doesn't understand them. Sometimes the movie is so faithful to the characters' reality that it loses track of its plot, but the Nixon-era, south-of-the-border sun-scorch is palpable, and the actors are clearly having a royal ball (you envy Newman, sharing a lazy film shoot in Mexico with Marvin). Released in 1972, at the height of the era.
The Wicker Man (IFC, Sunday @ 7:00 PM & 1:35 AM)
Robin Hardy's 1973 original, not the screamingly wrong Neil LaBute-Nicolas Cage remake, and you know, not a great movie. (It's famous because it was rediscovered, like a forgotten 1976 punk song, after its distributor-re-edit and slovenly theatrical dump, lending the already-unclassifiable thing the air of a secret rite.) Edward Woodward's reverent Catholic policeman infiltrates a secluded Scottish island community that has reverted to sacrificial paganism, led by Christopher Lee. But the textual thrust is slight, and the weirdness gets mired in the latent-'60s flower-child campiness, and a slew of honey-dripping soundtrack folk songs about harvest-time and agrarian rituals that by themselves could spur you to join Opus Dei.
Edge of Darkness (TMC, Saturday @ 2:15 AM)
Amid another TCM marathon, this one in honor of Errol Flynn, Lewis Milestone's 1943 propaganda piece is a stunner. A small Norweigan town (filled with American actors) covertly resisting Nazi occupation, but largely thanks to a smart screenplay by Robert Rossen, the drama seethes with a sense of tense, robust community. The fabric is tightly woven: in a stunning 8-minute-plus scene in a crowded Protestant church where more than a dozen characters debate their future -- rise up or bide time? -- while they're ostensibly attending service, the movie takes on bewitching breadth and depth, in a way that is uniquely cinematic. Even polished hero Flynn is merely a mediating figure in a thick, thoughtful crowd, including laissez-faire doctor Walter Huston, his rebel daughter Ann Sheridan, hardline innkeeper Judith Anderson, bookish codger Morris Carnovsky, etc., each given time and room to act and react and contemplate moral relativities. The bullnosed flag-waving ("If there's anyone who doubts why this war is being fought, look to Norway!" the coda narration bellows) and even outright Wagner soundtrack thefts notwithstanding, it's a disarmingly rich experience, not just a Flynn rabble-rouser.
The first all-Afghan feature to be made since the rise of the Taliban in 1996, Siddiq Barmak's movie has a primitive feel, but the story is eye-glue: a girl (12-year-old non-pro Marina Golbarhari) must masquerade as a boy in order to find work in a Muslim world. Under the Taliban, the punishments for cross-dressing -- for deceptively penetrating the masculine world -- could be capital, and the heroine botches her efforts until she is simply shanghaied into bin Laden's Islamic corps, surrounded by gun-toting boys and Nero-like Talibs.
Flirting with Disaster (Indieplex, Saturday @ 2:30 PM)
A devil's-food-rich character comedy, David O. Russell's high-concept 1996 rip is packed with unpredictable rhythms, dead-perfect line readings and hilarious peripheral characters. New dad/adopted schlemiel Ben Stiller decides he wants to find out who his biological parents are, and so a cross-country journey ensues with frustrated wife Patricia Arquette, chain-smoking social worker Tea Leoni, a raft of mistaken identities, gay cop couples, inadvertent LSD consumption, armpit sex and the meddlesome hell of Jewish parents Mary Tyler Moore and George Segal. From Leoni's look of exhausted awe when acid-manufacturer Alan Alda - while he's wrestling with a tripping dinner guest -- tells her that, sorry, it's a non-smoking house ("It must be one of those pro-acid, ex-convict type of non-smoking houses," she moans) to the moment when Stiller walks in on bi-stud Josh Brolin tonguing Arquette's armpit -- modern movies' shiveriest moment of marital violation -- Russell's movie melts like butter. One viewing won't cut it.