THE PANDEMIC STREAMING WORLD: Oscilloscope, Kino Lorber, Music Box Films

[Chris Knipp]

AMERICAN PLAYHOUSE, 1985: Bill Duke's The Killing Floor


DAMIEN LEAKE AND ALFRE WOODARD IN THE KILLING FLOOR

This made-for-TV film about a young black man come to Chicago from the South during World War I, restored as explained below in a text from UCLA, becomes part of Film Forum's exclusive Virtual Cinema starting June 12. It's unusual in its focus on African Americans in union labor organizing, and all the characters are based on and have the names of real people. It has a unique interest at this time. Details on IMDb HERE.

Rich in characters and played against a canvas red with the blood of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, this critically acclaimed independent film tells a true story of how a group of black and white slaughterhouse workers attempted to break race barriers to build an interracial union for the first time in the brutal Chicago Stockyards. Damien Leake stars as Frank Custer, a young black sharecropper from Mississippi—one of tens of thousands of southern blacks who journeyed to the industrial north during World War One, hoping for more racial equality. When he lands a job as a laborer on “the killing floor” of a giant Chicago meatpacking plant, he finds a place seething with racial antagonism. White immigrant workers are determined to improve their bargaining power by bringing the new black migrants into the union for the first time, but many blacks resist, having had bitter experience with whites. When Frank decides to support the union, his best friends from the South turn against him.

The screenplay by Obie Award-winning playwright Leslie Lee is based on a story by executive producer Elsa Rassbach, whose independent production company engaged Bill Duke to direct it as his first feature film. In 1985 The Killing Floor was invited to numerous festivals, including Cannes, and won the Special Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival among many other awards. The film had already premiered to acclaim in 1984 in the PBS American Playhouse series. Originally The Killing Floor was planned as the pilot production for a PBS series of ten historical dramas exploring the little-known history of American workers that Rassbach developed together with a team of leading historians and several screenwriters. The characters and events in the film are authentic and were discovered through research in historical archives.

Utilizing the original negatives and other 16mm original materials, UCLA Film & Television Archive has digitally restored the film in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 and the events that led up to it.—Jan-Christopher Horak

DCP, color, 118 min. Production: Public Forum Productions, Ltd. Producer: Elsa Rassbach, George Manasse. Director: Bill Duke. Screenwriter: Leslie Lee, Elsa Rassbach, Ron Milner. Cinematographer: William Birch. Production Designer: Maher Ahmad. Editor: John N. Carter. Music: Elizabeth Swados. Cast: Damien Leake, Alfre Woodard, Dennis Farina, Ernest Rayford, Moses Gunn, Clarence Felder.

Preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive from a 16mm safety color original picture negative and a mono 16mm safety audio mag track MTI Nova Restoration, laboratory services and DCP by UCLA Film & Television Archive Digital Media Lab. Special thanks to Elsa Rassbach, Sundance Institute Collection at UCLA Film & Television Archive.


Part of:
2019 UCLA Festival of Preservation

Zhang Yimou’s
SHANGHAI TRIAD
OPENS JUNE 26

Fritz Lang’s
INDIAN EPIC
OPENS JULY 24

[Chris Knipp]

Also recommended:

THE VAST OF NIGHT (Andrew Patterson 2019) - on Amazon Prime from May 15



Did not know about Patterson's charming little sci-fi feature in a low-keyed style till this week when Anthony Lane reviewed it in The New Yorker - along with a very unfavorable writeup of Josephine Decker's Shirley featuring Elizabeth Moss as the writer Shirley Jackson. I skipped the review - both reviews - (till later) and went right to the movie. The Vast of Night turns out to be a remarkable, highly assured, and quite delightful debut by Patterson and in my book one of the best films of the year. Do not watch the trailer of The Vast of Night, which tells too much. Watch the movie. 89 mins. Metascore: 84%.


Sierra McCormick in The Vast of Night


Jake Horowitz in The Vast of Night

SOMETIMES ALWAYS NEVER



I also will be recommending, and publishing a review of, the British Scrabble dramedy SOMETIMES ALWAYS NEVER (Carl Hunter 2018), with Bill Nighy, which goes into new virtual theater release Friday, June 12, 2020.

[Chris Knipp]

Gorgeous new restorations of 3 Classics
of early cinema for Pride Month

PIONEERS OF QUEER CINEMA

Available by VIRTUAL CINEMAS
across the U.S. starting 6/12

including
NY - Film Forum starting 7/3
LA - Laemmle Theatres & Lumiere Cinema starting 6/12

VIEW TRAILER

"Gorgeous new restorations" is the language of the press release, but they are.
I've never seen this, not even the frequent repertory item MÄDCHEN IN UNIFORM. I have screeners and will report on Filmleaf.

[Johann]

What a thread Chris!!

Huzzah and thank you.

[Chris Knipp]

Thanks, Johan.

[Chris Knipp]

This by te prolific South Korean auteur was in the Main Slate of the 2016 NYFF, but I didn't cover it then. I will watch it now on virtual cinemas and add it to Filmleaf's 2016 Festival Coverage section.
HONG SANG-SOO: YOURSELF AND YOURS 당신자신과 당신의 것 (2016)


LEE YOO-YOUNG AND KIM JU-HYUK IN YOURSELF AND YOURS

[NYTimes, Gabe Cohn, June 5, 2020.]
Watch on virtual cinemas.. Alcohol and love infuse Yourself and Yours, a new movie from the South Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo. It kicks off with a breakup: Young-soo (Kim Ju-hyuk) tells Min-jung (Lee Yoo-young), his girlfriend, to quit drinking. She quits him instead. The plot that follows involves mystery and despondency. “Hong’s formal confidence yields a movie that’s very simply constructed and utterly engrossing,” Glenn Kenny wrote in his review for The New York Times. He named the film a Critic’s Pick. "There are a lot of scenes done in a single shot, usually static, but when there’s a zoom (his preferred camera flourish), it’s unfussy and direct," Kenny wrote. "He puts you in tune with the world of his sad-sack characters immediately, and their rhythm becomes the rhythm of the story." The film was released overseas in 2016, but is just now having its stateside debut; it’s available this weekend from many virtual cinemas, including Film at Lincoln Center's.

[Chris Knipp]

VAST OF NIGHT (Patterson) - is a brilliant opening and blah follow up, but the opening is a calling card for great things to come from this young director and if you love great direction, don't miss it.

Maybe after getting a reality check from reading Mike D'Angelo's review of VAST OF NIGHT (on Amazon since May 15) I should say "almost one of the year's best," because he is right - Patterson is a brilliant new director, but the last two thirds don't have the follow-through to make this a great sci-fi movie. D'Angelo's subscription-only Patreon reviews that I get now come on Letterbox'd later, but I don't know when. I'll just quote a little of it. He gives it a 63/100. That's pretty decent for him, but not a "year's best" score. Remember, this is free if you have Amazon and I still highly recommend that you watch it. Also when it comes, Carl Hunter's 2018 British SOMETIMES ALWAYS NEVER with Bill Nighy, digital this Friday June 12 and on demand in July.

63/100

For half an hour or so, the most exciting indie debut I'd seen in years. Every Amazon Prime subscriber should at the very least watch the film's first act,. . . [but] The narrative... is really weak. Kind of astonishingly weak
But please, someone, give this man a good idea. That's all he needs. I can't even remember the last time I saw a first-time American director create such a credible, distinct, arrestingly specific milieu from the ground up. (Actually, I can: Robert Eggers. But he had the advantage of going way more archaic. . .
) Despite knowing in advance that The Vast of Night is science fiction, and then being assaulted by a bad Rod Serling impression in the first 30 seconds, I kept thinking of films like Diner and Metropolitan and Dazed and Confused, along with the early Jeffrey/Sandy scenes in Blue Velvet. Unlike those filmmakers, Patterson isn't mining his own past (or a warped vision of his past, in Lynch's case), which arguably makes his wizardry even more impressive. Everything's so insanely detailed, with so much evident creative thought expended on each seemingly irrelevant aspect (most of which are in fact irrelevant, but gloriously so—the purloined trombone!) of each shot and interaction, that the cumulative effect exposes just how thinly imagined most contemporary indies are. Wouldn't have worked without actors as strong as Sierra McCormick and Jake Horowitz, both of whom handle Hawks-speed badinage with insanely casual ease even as they navigate Patterson's magnificently complex traveling shots. . .
[He has some quibbles, but the main, big one is simply that the material once the "story" "kicks in" is too thin, and in this he is right.]
--Mike D'Angelo's review. )