A Joe Dante cinema inferno, a night silent shorts with original music and live entertainment, and festivals of Cary Grant movies, British noir, and classic Bollywood musicals all compete for your attention this week. And that doesn’t even take into account the theatrical debuts of Cannes Film Festival award winner The Kid on a Bike and Oscar winning documentary Undefeated. Read on to plan you cinema fix this weekend…
Joe Dante’s The Movie Orgy is legendary in some circles. Neither a feature nor a documentary nor even a compilation, at least in the conventional sense, The Movie Orgy was first created in 1968 by movie-mad buddies Joe Dante and Jon Davidson, spliced together from Dante’s collection of films, serials, trailers, shorts, TV commercials, and other 16mm ephemera, not simply strung end to end but intercut, stirred around, one big melting pot of pop culture bouncing between genres and media.
Glenn Erickson reviewed a 2008 screening at The New Beverly in Los Angeles: “The resulting psychological profile of Dante and Davison proves that their wicked sense of humor and sarcastic outlook began long before their association with Roger Corman: this explains where Airplane! came from. ” Dennis Cozzalio was at the same screening and wrote up his take for his website, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule: “The Movie Orgy isn’t really a movie. It’s more like a hallucinatory party for the certifiably movie mad.”
The current incarnation, which Joe Dante digitized for digital screenings (the original version was literally spliced together, making it quite fragile), runs just over 4 ½ hours.
Grand Illusion presents a single showing of this event to celebrate its 9th anniversary as an independent, non-profit cinema on Saturday, March 31 at 7pm. The event is free but you must RSVP. Send to movieorgy [at] grandillusioncinema [dot] org.
And while we’re on the subject of “events,” the one-night celebration “The Sound of Silence with a Side of Schtick” presents an evening of movies and music with live performances between the shorts. It’s a modern take on the cinema programs of old, playing out on Thursday, April 5 at The Uptown. The shorts in the program include the landmarks Voyage dans la lune by George Melies and The Great Train Robbery by Edwin S. Porter and Orson Welles’ 1934 “student film” The Hearts of Age, which are accompanied live with original compositions performed live by a chamber orchestra, and magicians and comedians perform in between. Details at SIFF website here.
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