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10:10 PM Sundance
Irina Palm (2008 BEL-GER-LUX-GB): I only include this dreadful film, which apparently earned itself a whopping £582 on opening weekend, because it lent its name to an award: the Irina Palm D’or, Britain’s equivalent of the Golden Raspberry. Each year, the folks at http://irinapalmdor.blogspot.com/ nominate the worst British films and worst performances in British films, with the gongs (so to speak) being distributed in December. Irina Palm, the tale of a bridge-player (Marianne Faithfull) trying to raise funds for a lifesaving operation, was widely acknowledged to be the worst Britflick of 2008, whilst 2010’s winner was Gurinder Chadha’s It’s a Wonderful Afterlife, a film I hadn’t even heard of before reading about it at the aforementioned blog. I think it premiered at the Can’t Film Festival, but that may just be an ugly rumor.

Sunday 04/17/11

5:00 PM Flix
The Pawnbroker (1964 USA): Rod Steiger earned a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for his performance in Sidney Lumet’s pointed examination of the unhappy lot of a Holocaust survivor. Steiger is Sol Nazerman, a Jewish intellectual who, having survived the camps, relocates to New York City, where he operates a Harlem pawn shop. The store is used as a front by local pimp Rodriguez (Brock Peters), and Sol is understandably bitter about his lot in life: he’s been through so much and now has so little, is haunted by terrible memories, and copes by emotionally shutting down and refusing to engage with those around him. One of the first American films to use the Holocaust as a dramatic device, The Pawnbroker also features some unprecedented and rather surprising nudity.

Monday 04/18/11

2:15 AM More Max
The Bank Dick (1940 USA): If you find yourself in need of some therapeutic laughter after The Pawnbroker, look no further! The Bank Dick, of course, is one of W. C. Fields’ finest features, and stars the pickled one as Egbert Sousè (“accent grave over the e”), a henpecked hubby who lucks into a job as a bank guard and then gets into trouble on a film set. It’s hilarious, almost surreal stuff, with Fields at the top of his game and a marvelous supporting cast, including Cora Witherspoon as Egbert’s harridan of a wife Agatha, Una Merkel as his daughter, Franklin Pangborn as his bank boss, and Shemp Howard as a bartender.

4:20 AM Sundance
Prodigal Sons (2008 USA): Director Kimberly Reed started life as a boy, transitioned to the fair sex as an adult, and returned home to Montana for her high school reunion planning to come out as a transgender woman to her old chums. She intended Prodigal Sons to be a film about her personal journey, but it became something else entirely when she discovered that her older brother, Mark McKerrow, was Orson Welles’ grandson! The result is an utterly fascinating documentary that no one would believe if it weren’t all true.

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