This rarely-seen treasure will be run at true silent speed for correct movement! The first film to match stop-motion (tabletop miniature) animation with live action, the public was amazed to see dinosaurs come to life.   Wallace Beery is half-mad Professor Challenger, leading an expedition to a Jurassic plateau in Brazil.  Based on Conan Doyle’s thrilling story, with special effects by Willis O’Brien.  We’ll also see Creation, O’Brien’s test reel for  his next feature, King Kong!  And the first chapter of a vintage serial to be continued next month.

Key Fitz - Host of show/Comedian
Danny  LoFaro - Co-Host/Comedian
El Juglar - Juggler
April Brucker - Ventriloquist
Ril Oji - Dancer
Bob James - Elvis
Jared - Sideshow performer
 
Sarah Blakemore
Reigning Queen of Everything
 
"Why everything? Oh, Darling, because a girl should never limit herself, ever."

1. THE BOX by Seth Fragomen ( 3 min, 2007)
2. THE BOLERIUM by Nathan & Keary Kenzinger ( 23 min, 2006)
3. ANIMATION BRUNCH by Steve Schmitz and Inju Keum (10 min, 2007)
4. DIG ALL JIVE by William Palminteri ( 6 min, 2006)
5. LOVE IS A GAME WE PLAY by Robert Flanagan & Suzan Al-Doghachi ( 3min, 2007)
6. THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA by Nick Zedd (18 min, 1998)
7. THE TOMORROW GODS: THE FIGHT FOR PLANET TERRA by Michael Park with music by Martin Rev (39 min, 2007)

Stephen Sondheim once said that melodrama and farce were his two favorite forms of theater because “they are obverse sides of the same coin.” The Korean writer and director of “Three-Iron,” has minted a cinematic example of that coin with Time a tale of big-city 20-somethings and the masks they wear. Throughout, Mr. Kim flips between soapy melodrama and dry, self-aware comedy. The effect is thrilling and disorienting, like walking on a trampoline.

The film starts and ends with the same scene: a woman clad in a long coat, sunglasses and a surgical mask (an echo of “Dressed to Kill”) leaving a plastic-surgery clinic and colliding with our heroine, See-hee (Seong Hyeon-ah). The impact causes the patient to drop and break a framed photograph. See-hee promises to repair it and takes it along to a coffee shop, where she’s meeting her boyfriend, Ji-woo (Ha Jung-woo).

Clearly, their relationship is doomed. See-hee accuses Ji-woo of growing bored with her and having a wandering eye, paranoid accusations that she thinks are confirmed when Ji-woo checks out a waitress, then interrupts their conversation to exchange insurance information with a young woman who dinged his parked car. When the lovers’ quarrel reaches a Jerry Springer pitch and See-hee stomps out of the coffee shop, the driver tells Ji-woo, “She must love you very much; I envy you.”

See-hee, a self-loathing basket case who once said, “I’m sorry for having the same boring face every day,” goes to the clinic glimpsed in the opening and signs up for a new face. Then “Time” switches its focus to poor Ji-woo, who knows only that his girlfriend suddenly moved away without saying goodbye. He doesn’t realize that the cute new coffee-shop waitress with the suspiciously similar name Seh-hee (Park Ji-yun) seems familiar for a reason.

As “Time” follows Ji-woo through familiar big-city mating rituals — karaoke, speed dating, thwarted one-night stands — en route to an uneasy relationship with his new/old love, it becomes clear that Mr. Kim has more on his mind than the ethics of nose jobs.

“Time” has been described as a comedy about the hollowness of relationships in a global consumerist culture, and it certainly is. The film’s three lead performances, by Mr. Ha as Ji-woo and by Ms. Seong and Ms. Park as the two incarnations of his lover, are fearlessly honest, so attuned to contemporary anxieties about sex, love and social status that the characters’ unhappiness is as squirm-inducing as the movie’s close-ups of sliced flesh.

But while the film’s cultural context is of the moment, its depiction of romantic desperation is timeless. Many scenes end on the same uneasy note, a mix of cynical dissatisfaction and desperate, almost childlike neediness. This, too, is reminiscent of Sondheim, specifically the title “Sorry-Grateful,” a song from “Company.” Like Sondheim’s Nixon-era swingers, Mr. Kim’s clueless, self-absorbed 21st-century materialists are miserable in love, and they can’t get enough of it.

Mr. Kim repeats ideas, situations and shots with musical precision. He puts certain sentiments in the mouths of different characters at different times. He lets pivotal moments play out through scrims or partitions, or as reflections in mirrors or windowpanes, depriving them of emotional solidity. He shows characters donning actual or metaphoric masks (getting new faces, moving to new places, starting new relationships) and then becoming depressed when these alterations alter little. As Sondheim’s married men sing in “Sorry-Grateful,” “Everything’s different, nothing’s changed/Only maybe slightly rearranged.”

The flyspeck insignificance of the characters’ narcissism is expressed through a recurring setting: a sculpture garden that includes a pair of giant hands topped by a connected series of increasingly small iron squares that seem to vanish against the sky. The film’s oft-repeated image of lovers photographing themselves in those palms, naïvely trying to immortalize their affection, is the closest the director comes to a moral: Don’t obsess over surfaces, because your life is not really in your hands.

Nick Zedd presents

Llik Your Idols, a film by Angelique Bosio (2007/France/69 min)

Discover! The New York underground scene of the 80's!

Throw yourself
Into an exciting, anarchic and repulsive world that you won't forget!

Featuring:

Exclusive interviews with Lydia Lunch, Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, Joe Coleman, Thurston Moore...

Never before seen footage & archives

PLUS a rare screening of Thrust In Me by Nick Zedd/R. Kern (1984)