Did you read about those scientists who just created a synthetic life form in the lab? Don't these guys watch movies? Maybe they missed Splice, but David Cronenberg's The Fly should not be overlooked on cable this weekend, for a stomach-acidy dose of what can happen when you toke around with alleles and recombinative genes and shit like that. Plus: Paul Newman, Mel Gibson, Paul Robeson and Isabelle Huppert in a power suit...
The Fly (Retroplex, Sunday @ 10:10 PM)
Some remakes are destiny, and this 1986 triumph took a crummy old Vincent Price movie and turned it into a tragic romance, albeit a tragic romance marinated in genetic confusion, bodily decay, ubermensch deliriums and Jeff Goldblum crawling on the ceiling.
Cool Hand Luke (TCM, Saturday @ 10:15 PM)
A whole day of Paul Newman at TCM, including this beautiful, American New Wave ode to not fitting in, with Newman as a guileless Southern ne'er-do-well rebel who bucks the chain gang system and eventually becomes an idol. Full of crucifix imagery, but it's not a Christ story -- it's about the messiah reflex, and Newman's Luke is just the ordinary schmuck put up on a shaky pedestal.
Vanishing Point (Cinemax, Saturday @ 5:15 AM)
Sometimes the '60s-'70s were just so much ripe cheese, as in this 1971 road movie in extremis, in which so-laconic-he-might be-dozing Barry Newman (no relation) "delivers" a Dodge Challenger across the West in defiance of every law, tragic statute and notion of responsible driving. And here he's a folk hero. Outlandishly silly, in love with the American highway as movies only were in the Nixon era, and blessed with a killer ending.
The Emperor Jones (Retroplex, Friday @ 6:00 AM)
For the Age of Obama, here's the best film by Hollywood's first black leading man -- Paul Robeson, legendary baritone and civil rights activist, and remarkable presence in far too few movies. This little-seen 1933 creaker, directed by Dudley Nichols, sticks close to the Eugene O'Neill play about a loudmouthed con who finds himself the king of a Caribbean island.
Ang Lee's 1999 Civil War epic stars Tobey Maguire and Skeet Ulrich as rockin' Southern boys bushwhacking through the war-fringe arena of Missouri and Kansas, where North/South, good/bad dichotomies were so muddied that it amounted to a free-kill zone. It's a strange, disquieting movie without a clear political thrust -- the most tribal and ethically fraught conflict in American history is opened up beyond the cable TV thumbnail sketches, so that whether you and I are good slavery-hating, Lincoln-loving liberals or an unreconstructed reactionary bigots, we don't know exactly how to feel about the carnage.
Jesus' Son (The Movie Channel, Friday @ 2:45 AM)
Alison Maclean's chilly, mopey materialization of Denis Johnson's story-cycle might be the supreme screen portrait of '70s drug culture. The lovable dopenik, embodied in a guileless trance by Billy Crudup, spends the movie of his life between places, waiting for something, waking up in the dead center of nowhere or wandering rain-sodden highways. The vignettes have a hilarious integrity, particularly the hang-out with a Stetson-sporting hot dog (Denis Leary on fire) who takes our easy-going hero to rip out an empty house's wiring and sell the copper for a fix, and the unforgettable sketch-comedy of orderly work with a pill-scarfing buddy (Jack Black) the night a man calmly wanders into the hospital with a hunting knife buried in his eye.
Mad Max (IFC, Saturday @ 9:35 PM & 4:00 AM)
It's 1979, Mel Gibson is not a star yet, and in post-apocalyptic Australia, survival in the semi-savage outlands is all a matter of driving. If you haven't seen it without the horrible American-accent dubbing it received here at first, now's your shot.
Comedy of Power (Sundance, Saturday @ 3:25 PM)
Claude Chabrol's 2006 crime drama fictionalizes the notorious corporate-scandal "Elf Affair" that sent scores of corrupt French CEOs and oil execs to prison in 2003. That may sound dry, but Chabrol is less concerned with procedural details and more into character and social intercourse. Namely, we live it through the gimlet eyes of Isabelle Huppert as the chief investigating judge, who takes no greater delight in her work than when she can corner a rich man and maker him sputter in horrified rage. Huppert, 53 at the time and as vibrant a force as ever, makes for a great workaholic avenging angel, dangerously underfed and self-amused, and pathologically invulnerable -- even as the murder threats pour in.
River's Edge (Outermax, Saturday @ 3:15 AM)
A key American film of the Reagan-Bush years, and if it was shocking at the time (1986), that's because movies didn't normally rip from the headlines with such cold-eyed matter-of-factness. It's happened more than once in real life: on the edge of some impoverished, delinquent-parent Pacific Coast endsville, a disaffected teen strangles his girlfriend, and then, over the course of several days, show the body to his friends, who do nothing. Chilly and grim, it's the American high school years as a stoner Samuel Beckett play, abetted by an alert cast (Keanu Reeves began his peerless pothead routine here, and Dennis Hopper, as a local nutcase, is outstanding). Then there's Crispin Glover, as a maniacally overwrought drama queen in black wool cap, feels as if he'd dropped in from a high school rendition of Grease.