AND SRAGOW RECALLS WATCHING MAN BITES DOG WITH DE PALMA
Just outside of Baltimore, in Hampden, is a late night coffee house with a bustling art scene called El Rancho Grande. A new monthly film series begins there tonight, kicking off at 8:30 pm with a screening of Brian De Palma's Hi, Mom!. The Baltimore Sun's Michael Sragow wrote about the film today, quoting series programmer John Lingan, and recalling sitting with De Palma seventeen years ago at a Toronto Film Festival screening of Man Bites Dog. Read on: Based on the 100 percent correct feeling that "there are generally too few places to see older movies in a public place in Baltimore," John Lingan, the managing editor of the Web site Splice Today, launches a new monthly film series at 8:30 tonight at the Hampden café El Rancho Grande (3608 Falls Road).
If Lingan and his fellow programmer, photographer Dan Stack, keep selecting films as cannily as they did for opening night, they may be in for a long, wild ride. Brian De Palma's Hi, Mom!, their debut attraction, remains a milestone of satirical yet artful guerrilla moviemaking. It stars Robert De Niro in crackling improv form. He plays a failed director of what could be called "found porn" who moves on to become a bit player in black revolutionary theater and then a bomb-planting radical.
Seventeen years ago, I sat next to De Palma at a Toronto Film Festival screening of the pseudo-cinema verite serial-killer movie, Man Bites Dog. He hooted and cheered appreciatively at every bold stroke, but afterward whispered, with a smile, "Didn't I do all that 20 years ago in the last half-hour of Hi, Mom!?" He did all that, and more: Hi, Mom! skewers conventional notions of TV, stage and movie "reality" while providing an indelible portrait of New York on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
Lingan says he chose it "because I have no idea what to expect. There could be three people there, or we could pack the coffee shop uncomfortably; either seems possible. And Hi, Mom! is a perfect fit for either scenario - you can watch it closely, even academically, or you can watch it in a cramped and crowded nontheater environment and see how everyone reacts to its unique tone and structure. It's a movie that begs to be seen outside of a theater, and maybe while you're pushed up against a stranger or sitting on the steps of a neighborhood coffee shop. We're hoping for that kind of atmosphere, because the movie is pure pandemonium."
Updated: Friday, July 31, 2009 12:39 PM CDT
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