May 12, 2008
Film fest ends with 'Underworld,' 'Death House,' secret
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Today is the final day of the 10th annual Maryland Film Festival. Check out these highlights:
• For the chance to experience films the way your grandparents (and great-grandparents) saw them, see Josef von Sternberg's 1927 Underworld, a silent and one of Hollywood's first gangster flicks. The three-piece Alloy Orchestra, whose scores for silent films qualify as national treasures, will be on hand for the musical accompaniment. (11:30 a.m., Charles 1)
• Jeffrey Schwarz's Spine Tingler! The William Castle Story, profiles one of Hollywood's greatest hucksters, the guy responsible for The Tingler, a 1959 Vincent Price flick where selected seats in the theater were wired, the better to elicit screams from the audience. They don't make 'em like Castle anymore. (12:30 p.m., University of Baltimore Student Center)
• Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) plays host to a screening of Dusan Makavejev's 1971 WR: Mysteries of the Organism, a "psychedelic freak out" (to quote the MFF film guide). According to imdb.com, the thing even has a plot, something about two Yugoslavian girls having an affair with a Russian skater. (2:30 p.m., Charles 1)
• Good at keeping a secret? Wanna know something that nobody else knows - or can ever know? For the third year running, the festival presents a secret screening of a major studio film that you'll never be able to talk about. (Everyone in the audience has to sign a pledge to that effect.) Two years ago, the secret feature turned out to be a major Oscar contender. But don't ask me what it was, because they'd kill me if I told you. (5 p.m., Charles 1)
• At the Death House Door, the latest film from Hoop Dreams' Steve James and Peter Gilbert, looks at the execution of a Texas prisoner who may have been innocent, and at a death-row chaplain whose job leads to a reversal of his stance regarding the death penalty. (5 p.m., MICA's Brown Center)
• Melvin van Peebles is usually ticked off about something. Find out about his latest gripes in Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-Itchyfooted Mutha, the latest autobiographically inspired effort from the man who gave the world the incendiary Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. What a way to close this year's festival! (7:30 p.m., Charles 1)
Copyright © 2008, The Baltimore Sun
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