If this column seems thinner week to week than it might be, it’s partly because there is a literal hole in Cambridge’s cinematic ecosystem. The AMC Loews Harvard Square, known for its iconic mural on Church Street, has sat vacant for more than a decade, moldering in the portfolio of billionaire owner Gerald Chan. There was a time, of course, when the theater was a vibrant hub of the community, an intimate space to watch the latest blockbuster – and the area’s official “Rocky Horror Picture Show” venue since 1984.
With that in mind, the Harvard Square Business Association, in partnership with Cambridge Community Development and the Cambridge Arts Council, hosts a free outdoor movie night Saturday celebrating the theater’s once – and hopefully future – legacy. The festivities begin at 7 p.m. with a musical set by DJ Joey Finnz, with the film unspooling at 9 p.m. (Officially a “secret” until showtime, the film’s name was announced at Monday’s meeting of the City Council.)
This weekend The Brattle Theatre plays host to “In the Spectrum of Love,” a traveling program curated by Seattle’s nonprofit STArt Film Studio dedicated to LGBTQ+ intimacy in Asian cinema. The series begins Friday and Saturday with “Happy Together” (1997), the beloved gay romance from director Wong Kar Wai (more on whom in a bit), and Tsai Ming-liang’s impressionistic “Vive L’Amour” (1994). Rounding out the program Sunday are a new 4K restoration of Stanley Kwan’s “Lan Yu” (2001), presented with a reel of interviews with the director, and the area premiere of Ray Yeung’s “All Will Be Well.” If you find yourself inspired, you’re in luck: STArt is dedicated to helping first-time filmmakers fund and release their debut shorts!
The Somerville Theatre’s “Great Remakes” series continues Monday with its most unexpected entry. When the great comedic filmmaking team of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker (whose cop spoof “The Naked Gun” is back on our minds thanks to its delightful reboot) made “Airplane!” in 1980, it was widely perceived as a parody of “Airport” (1970) and the all-star disaster films that ruled the box office in its wake. But the directors found more specific inspiration in a much older film: 1957’s “Zero Hour!” in which Dana Andrews plays an off-duty fighter pilot forced to land a commercial airliner when its crew succumbs to food poisoning. To avoid litigation, the ZAZ team (who lifted large chunks of dialogue in addition to the plot) simply bought the rights to the original outright, making “Airplane!” an official remake. Who wore it better? Watch both back to back on the big screen and decide!
For its annual summer repertory series, IFFBoston returns to the Somerville to visit the “World of Wong Kar Wai.” Wong’s films, known for their lush visuals and swooning atmosphere, received the full restoration treatment from the Criterion Collection in 2020, but due to certain unforeseen circumstances that year a full theatrical rerelease was scrapped; while most have screened since then, this the first time all eight restored films have screened as a set in Greater Boston. The series kicks off Tuesday, appropriately enough, with Wong’s debut film, “As Tears Go By” (1990), a smash hit in its home country that suffused the standard hyperkineticism of Hong Kong action with the aching romantic yearning on which the director would make his name. There’s never a bad time to immerse oneself in the world of Wong Kar Wai, and there’s no better place to do so than the palatial main hall of the Somerville.
The Summer of Satire continues at The Brattle on Wednesday with two of European cinema’s most incendiary auteurs. Jean-Luc Godard was already renowned as the French New Wave’s enfant terrible in 1967, but little could have prepared audiences for the all-out assault of “Weekend.” The film, which follows a pair of wealthy narcissists (Jean Yanne and Mireille Darc) on a shaggy odyssey across a French countryside seemingly devolving into chaos, is arguably both Godard’s funniest and most confrontational film, presaging the social unrest that would grip the nation the following year. It is paired with Luis Buñuel’s equally antiauthoritarian “The Exterminating Angel” (1962), a surreal and blackly comic parable about a party of insufferable aristocrats who find themselves inexplicably unable to leave their banquet hall. In this age of oligarchs in desperate need of being knocked down a peg, we would do well to look to our brick-throwing cinematic forebears.
In his previous incarnation as a film critic, Godard once proclaimed, “The cinema is Nicholas Ray,” referring to the maverick director who made some of the most subversive Hollywood pictures of the 1950s. Ray will perhaps forever be best known for “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955), but to lovers of the outrageous his name is more frequently attached to “Johnny Guitar” (1954), which screens Wednesday as part of The Brattle’s “Summer Camp” series. This bizarre, garish, gender-swapped Western stars Joan Crawford as the magnanimous owner of a mining town saloon who finds herself embroiled in a web of intrigue involving her longtime rival (Mercedes McCambridge) and a pair of outlaws (Sterling Hayden and Scott Brady). It doesn’t take a degree in gender studies to read a sapphic subtext underlying Crawford and Cambridge’s seething frenemyship, and Ray’s technicolor imagery, including a scene in which a lynch mob barges in on Crawford calmly playing piano in full evening gown, is unforgettable. Westerns may have fallen out of fashion, but “Johnny Guitar” remains a secret handshake among the cinematic hipster elite.
Oscar Goff is a writer and film critic based in Somerville. He is film editor and senior critic for the Boston Hassle and his work has appeared in the monthly Boston Compass newspaper and publications such as WBUR’s The ARTery and iHeartNoise. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
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