If you spent the holiday weekend soaking in the sun (instead of seeing The Nice Guys, which you should totally still do), you might still be feeling a little sluggish today. Fortunately, two movies screening in town tonight (Tuesday May 24) offer you the chance to kickstart your brain.
Down at the Lightbox, TIFF Cinematheque’s Canadian Open Vault series offers a shot of adrenaline, marking the 20th anniversary of Michael McNamara’s The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati with a free screening at 6:30 pm.
A filmed adaptation of star Alan Williams’s Cockroach Trilogy monologues, it follows the actor’s ferocious character – here called The Captain – as he rages around a series of desolate Windsor locations, a lost revolutionary decrying the triumph of capitalism and conservative policy into the void.
Comparisons were thrown around at the time between The Captain and David Thewlis’s acidic Johnny in Mike Leigh’s Naked – and those comparisons were warranted, as Leigh helped Williams stage the early London performances of the first Cockroach play in the 80s. But 20 years later, The Captain feels like a comrade-in-arms to Slavoj Zizek. He’s a philosopher who sees the inner workings of popular culture and can’t stop himself from enlightening anyone who’ll listen.
Williams and McNamara will be in attendance at the screening, and their stories alone should make for a great night: the making of The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati is a story of miserable working conditions, technical disasters and general desperation. Honestly, it’s amazing that the finished film feels as light and lively as it does.
If you’re after something more cerebral, wander north to Innis Town Hall, where the people behind the Toronto-based magazine Cinema Scope are making a rare venture into theatrical exhibition. (Full disclosure: Scope editor-in-chief Mark Peranson is my cousin, and I’ve written for the magazine.)
Sixty Six
In collaboration with U of T’s Cinema Studies Institute, Cinema Scope is premiering Lewis Klahr’s Sixty Six, an experimental drama assembled out of 12 short films created through collage and stop-motion. Klahr draws on comic panels, catalogue ads and still photographs – most sourced from the late 60s – to create a series of oblique, elliptical narratives, culminating in Lethe, a 20-minute piece that appears to be about a woman trying to rescue a man – her husband? Her lover? – from slipping out of reality and into another plane of existence. (The Greek myth of Lethe offers one possible explanation for what’s happening, but not necessarily the only one.)
The closest analogue in terms of pop-art storytelling would be Roy Lichtenstein, but Klahr’s work is far more oblique than Lichtenstein’s direct, ironic representation. We have to connect the dots ourselves, teasing out the connections between one set of images and the next. The experience is uniquely personal and focused, even for cinema you are almost guaranteed to have a different interpretation of Sixty Six than the people sitting on either side to you.
Tickets are $8 in advance or $10 at the door. The screening is sponsored by The Beguiling, which probably carries every comic book Klahr used as a resource while making his movie.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
