culture
The Toronto Underground Cinema Gets Re-made/Re-modelled
The local rep mecca will host a new series of double bills curated by the A.V. Club and a team of film-savvy collaborators.
Image courtesy of the A.V. Club. Illustration by David O'Connor.
Fittingly, in a week that sees the release of Martin Scorsese’s barely-for-kids-film-preservation-parable—about a boy who steals spare parts to repair a cherished relic—Toronto’s recently constituted branch of the A.V. Club is launching a new series of double bills that celebrates filmmakers’ collective inclination to make new movies from the appropriated elements of those that have gone before. Dubbed “Re-make/Re-model,” the initiative is spearheaded by A.V. Club editor and former Torontoist film maven John Semley, and its first screenings will take place this evening at the Toronto Underground Cinema.
The inaugural selections are John Boorman’s 1967 Point Blank and Brian Helgeland’s 1999 Payback, both adapted from Richard Stark’s pulpy crime thriller The Hunter. Via email, Semley explained that the entire project was conceived partly as a pretext to pair these two films: “In all honesty, the whole thing was reverse-engineered. I’ve always wanted to double-bill Point Blank and Payback, because I think both films are great, but great for entirely different reasons. That the films were based on the same source material only enlivens this.”
He added that he was also inspired by Universal’s recent pre-make of The Thing: “I wasn’t in love with that movie or anything. But it struck me how diligently and efficiently it works as both a prequel to John Carpenter’s film and a remake, essentially hitting all the same narrative beats. It was admirable: a way of working around the complaints usually levelled against remakes for being unoriginal or creatively bankrupt. I wanted to find more films like this, ones which have been remade in ways which are compelling, and seem something other than profit-driven (if a Hollywood film can ever be something other than profit-driven).”
Although the series will take a brief hiatus during the holidays, the A.V. Club plans to host a screening on the third Thursday of every month, and have lined up potential contributions from local cinema luminaries Adam Nayman and Jason Anderson (both of The Grid and Cinema Scope Magazine). Nayman hopes to feature 1950’s D.O.A., by Rudolph Maté, and Neveldine/Taylor’s 2006 Crank, a pair of frantic films linked by their doomed, poisoned protagonists. Anderson’s mooted contribution is a double bill of Werner Herzog’s fiction/non-fiction efforts Rescue Dawn from 2007, and its decade-older documentary counterpart Little Dieter Needs to Fly.
With such illustrious curatorial talent on board, the Underground’s nascent series could yet rival TIFF’s Lightbox as a platform for programming that considers classic films in new, intellectually engaging ways. As for Semley’s selections, they’re sure to be no less inspired. His fondness for Point Blank for example, self-professedly owes to Lee Marvin’s performance, and the fact that “he’s just this old guy, but you feel like he’d rip your face off and wear it as a hat if you ever looked at him cockeyed.”
The A.V. Club‘s head honcho will offer such gems live and direct this evening when he introduces Point Blank at 7 p.m. and Payback at 9:30 p.m.