In a very special brothel known as “The Balcony,” the customers live out their wildest dreams, oblivious to a revolution going on outside. Directed by the award-winning Joseph Strick and based on acclaimed French avant-garde dramatist Jean Genet's play, this star-packed film features Shelley Winters as the brothel’s madam and Peter Falk as her police-chief lover, who enlists her help in halting the revolution. A young Leonard Nimoy heads the rebels, and Lee Grant is the madam’s executive assistant who longs to return to her former role as just “one of the girls.”

This month theme: The New York Subway

El Juglar - Juggler
Jared - Sideshow performer
and others...

Sarah Blakemore
Reigning Queen of Everything
 
"Why everything? Oh, Darling, because a girl should never limit herself, ever."

This month theme: The New York Subway

El Juglar - Juggler
Jared - Sideshow performer
and others...

Sarah Blakemore
Reigning Queen of Everything
 
"Why everything? Oh, Darling, because a girl should never limit herself, ever."

Mystery train. The two most evocative words in the language, suggesting streamliners into the night and strangers whose eyes meet in the club car as the train's rhythm creates an erotic reverie. But trains are no longer quite like that in America, and the opening shots of Jim Jarmusch's new film show two young Japanese tourists in a faded Amtrak coach, listening to their Walkmans as the train pulls through the outskirts of Memphis.

The girl is an Elvis fan. Her boyfriend believes Carl Perkins was the true father of rock 'n' roll. They have come to visit the shrines of Memphis: the Sun recording studios, for example, where rock 'n' roll was born.

In the hands of another director, this setup would lead directly into social satire, into a comic putdown of rock tourism, with a sarcastic visit to Graceland as the kicker. But Jarmusch is not a satirist. He is a romantic, who sees America as a foreigner might - as a strange, haunting country where the urban landscapes are painted by Edward Hopper and the all-night blues stations provide a soundtrack for a life.

The tourists arrive in Memphis and drag their luggage through the cavernous train station, and walk to the Sun studios, where a guide rattles off her spiel about Elvis and Carl faster than an auctioneer could. Then they check into the Arcade Hotel, one of those fleabags that has grown exhausted waiting for the traveling salesmen who no longer come. This is a hotel out of a 1940s film noir, with neon signs and a linoleum lobby, and a night clerk who has seen it all and a bellboy whose eyes are so wide, he might be seeing everything for the first time.

Other people will check into this hotel during the movie's long night of mystery. There is a woman who needs to spend the night somewhere before she flies to Rome with the ashes of her husband.

Pursued by men with lust in their eyes, she runs into a woman who has just broken up with her boyfriend, and they decide to share a room for a night. Meanwhile, on the other side of town, some men are drinking too much and get into a disagreement, and drive off into the night in a pickup truck, and stick up a liquor store, and then they also head for the Arcade Hotel.

The soundtrack is from a local radio station, and Presley's version of "Blue Moon" is heard at one time or another during all three of these stories, providing a common link. An offscreen gunshot provides another link. And so does the ghost of Elvis, who seems to haunt the movie with his voice and his legend - and who appears to the woman whose husband has just died.

There is a strange appropriateness there. It is not her own husband who appears in the night, spectral and mysterious, but Elvis, and his legend seems to inspire the film. But this is not the Elvis of the supermarket tabloids, just as "Mystery Train" is not about dusty Amtrak coaches. The movie is about legends, and people who believe in them, and in fact it is the movie that believes most of all.

Jarmusch believes in an American landscape that existed before urban sprawl, before the sanitary sterility of the fast-food strips on the highways leading into town. His movies show us saloons where everybody knows each other, diners where the short-order cook is in charge, and vistas across railroad tracks to a hotel where transients are not only welcome, they are understood.

"Mystery Train" is Jarmusch's third film, after "Stranger than Paradise" and "Down by Law." In all three there is the belief that America cannot be neatly packaged into safe and convenient marketing units, that there must be a life of the night for the drifters and the dropouts, the heroes of no fixed abode and no apparent place of employment. These are the people that songs like "Mystery Train" are about, and although in fact their lives may be flat and empty, in Jarmusch's imagination they are the real inhabitants of the city, especially after midnight.

"Mystery Train" is not a conventional narrative, and it is not how the story ends that is important, but how it continues. It is populated by dozens of small, well-observed moments of human behavior, such as the relationship between the night clerk (Screamin' Jay Hawkins) and the bellboy (Cinque Lee), or between the two teenage Japanese tourists (Masatoshi Nagase and Youki Kudoh), whose entire image of American reality is formed out of popular culture.

The best thing about "Mystery Train" is that it takes you to an America you feel you ought to be able to find for yourself, if you only knew where to look. A place of people who are allowed to be characters, to be individuals, who do not have to graduate from Hamburger University to stand over a grill. The train is the perfect metaphor in this movie. It's not where it's been that's important, or even where it's going. It's the sound of that whistle as it finds its way through the night.

Reviewed by Roger Ebert

w/ music from Walter Baker & an after-party featuring the dreams of the congregation of details
myspace.com/thedreamsensemble

Andrea Baker is the author of like wind loves a window (Slope Editions, 2005) and the chapbooks gilda (Poetry Society of America, 2004) and true poems about the river go like this (Cannibal Books, 2008).

Jim Behrle is the author of She’s My Best Friend (Pressed Wafer), City Point (Pressed Wafer) and The (Purple) Notebook of the Lake (Braincase).  He sleeps on a floor in Greenpoint. 

Brenda Iijima is the author of Animate, Inanimate Aims (Litmus Press, 2007). and Around Sea (O Books, 2004).  Some of her work can be viewed on-line at The Philly Sound Blog and can be downloaded from Wickedness. She lives in Brooklyn, New York where she runs Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs.

Dorothea Lasky was born in St. Louis in 1978.  Her first book of poems, AWE, was published in the fall of 2007 from Wave Books.  Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Phoebe, 6x6, Crowd, Coconut, jubilat, Lungfull!, Knock, Carve, Foursquare, and Skein, among other places. She has been educated at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Harvard University, and Washington University.  Currently, she lives in Philadelphia, where she studies education at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tim Peterson is the author of Since I Moved In, which received the Gil Ott Award from Chax Press. He edits EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts and curates a portion of the Segue Reading Series.

Thibault Raoult was a Dolin Scholar at the University of Chicago, and, for two years, OFF(icial) poet-in-residence at Brown University. I’ll Say I’m Only Visiting emerged from Cannibal Books (Brooklyn) in Nov/07; a second run is expected in coming-season. A new volume, El p.e. [physical education of the elevated train, emerges from Projective Industries in the coming months. Born in Pithiviers, France, raised in Rochester, NY, Thibault generates the dreams [of the congregation of details—a most real e-(s)tat(e) near 3Coasts.

Craig Morgan Teicher's first book is Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems.  His second, Cradle Book, a collection of fables, will be out from BOA Editions in 2010.  He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

Dara Wier's books include Remnants of Hannah (Wave Books 2006); Reverse Rapture (Verse Press 2005); Hat on a Pond (Verse Press, 2002) and Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon U. Press, 2001).  A limited edition, (X in Fix), a selection of 5 longer poems, including a section from Reverse Rapture, is printed in RainTaxi’s Brainstorm series.  She works as a member of the poetry faculty and director of the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her book, Reverse Rapture has been recently awarded The Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives 2006 book of the year prize.

Late night TV show generated by an experimental machine is missing it's host Jared Whitham.
Willam Maier brakes into the government lab to find Jared. But the machine is more powerful than anyone could have imagined. Can Will resist the power of hosting his own show. . Join us as a test audience member and become part of a this TV episode forever.

This very amusing and philosophically rich animated film from Australia is based on John Gardner's book Grendel in which he attempted to bring the Beowulf saga to life for contemporary audiences. Writer and director Alexander Stitt believes that over the course of history, monsters have served as vital incarnations of human fears and fantasies.

Grendel is a 12-foot high, green and spotty beast who lives in an underground Scandinavian cave, circa 515 A.D. He's a philosophical giant given to random journeys in the kingdom of King Hrothgar. Although Grendel eats a few people from time to time, he's really obsessed with ideas such as destiny, guilt, and love. When neither of the King's two right-hand men can rid the woods of "the Great Boogy," Hrothgar summons Beowulf from England to slay the beast.

Alexander Stitt has dome a marvelous job bringing this epic to the screen. Peter Ustinov (Grendel), Keith Mitchell (Beowulf), and Arthur Dignam (King Hrothgar) provide the voices for the main characters. The animation is clever and sophisticated. Grendel Grendel Grendel is lively entertainment for those looking for something special in their monthly film going jaunts.

Review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

Le Samouraï
Jean-Pierre Melville
1967 95 minutes

``Le Samourai'' was released shortly after its writer-director, Jean-Pierre Melville, made two other gangster films, ``Le Doulos'' and ``Le Deuxieme Souffle,'' and a dozen years after his classic noir thriller ``Bob le Flambeur.'' It's now available for the first time in its uncut original 35mm version.
A brief description of ``Le Samourai'' reveals its roots in the Warner Bros. gangster flicks of the '30s and '40s, but instead of saluting that genre and its gritty mythology, Melville spins them through a sleek, intensely formal lens -- and delivers a film that resembles Japanese Noh drama as much as it does the American pulp of ``Scarface'' or ``White Heat.''
Shot in cool grays, ice blues and murky greens, ``Le Samourai'' opens with a shot of Delon in his sparely furnished apartment. A steady rain falls outside his window, a caged bullfinch chirps. As Delon rises to face another day he's clearly a lone wolf -- removed from the path of human society.
There's romance in that kind of passionless, self-sustained life, and one of the intrigues of ``Le Samourai'' is the way Melville draws us to Delon, provides almost no information about him and then alternately challenges and intensifies our attraction to him.
Early in the film, Delon tells a group of older men at a card game, ``I never lose, not ever.'' It's an Eastwood/Dirty Harry kind of line, but when he's brought in for questioning by police, and remains a prime suspect even after he's released, romance evaporates and ``Le Samourai'' takes on a pitiless fatalism.
``Le Samourai'' is beautifully assured and has a strong consistency of visual style and tone, but I can't say I had a great time watching it. Melville's stark, minimalist style is pretentious after a time, and even though Delon's lack of warmth is appropriate to the character, it's easy to tire of his android-with-batteries, model-on-the-runway acting style.
To each his own. Filmmakers as diverse as Quentin Tarantino and Paul Schrader were influenced by Melville, and Hong Kong action director John Woo calls the film ``the closest to a perfect movie that I have ever seen.''

OR

Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows)
Louis Malle
1958 92 minutes

As French crime thrillers go, this is about as good as it gets. It's also an important film historically, and to top it off, the jazz score, by Miles Davis, is famous in its own right.
Made in 1958, "Elevator to the Gallows" was the first feature in Louis Malle's long directorial career and probably his best. The story is pure pulp fiction, about a murder plan that goes bad, but what really counts is the fatalistic atmosphere.
A disaffected veteran (Maurice Ronet) sets out to kill his boss, an arms dealer, and winds up missing a rendezvous with his girlfriend (Jeanne Moreau), who thinks she's been betrayed. Meanwhile, a juvenile delinquent (Georges Poujouly) and his girlfriend (Yori Bertin) steal the veteran's car and wind up in a bloody scrape with two foreign tourists.
The heart of the picture is the Moreau character's odyssey, much of it at night and accompanied by poetic internal monologues, as she visits bars and cafes in search of her missing lover. The film is also about the passing of the older generation in France and young people's ill-fated hopes for escape.
The black-and-white cinematography of Henri Decae, who went on to work with Jean-Pierre Melville and Francois Truffaut, gives the movie the clarity of a dream and offers a vision of the City of Light as melancholy and haunted.
Because of the film's mood and style, its low budget and use of location shooting, and because it offered a turn on what was considered an American genre, some historians cite it as one of the first examples of the French New Wave. (In the grand academic tradition of hairsplitting, others consider it a predecessor to that movement.)