Naqoyqatsi (January 28 & 29 at 3:30 p.m. at the Cleveland Museum of Art Morley Lecture Hall)

It took almost as long for the second set of Star Wars theatrical features to appear as it did for Godfrey Reggio to come up with the finale in the trilogy that KOYAANISQATSI started in 1983. The good news...No Jar Jar Binks.

But the insipid all-CGI space creature would fit right in, however.

The title of this non-narrative would-be mind blast translates as "war as a way of life," which made for great ad copy in the post-9/11 era but seems only tangentially related to the subject material, which is the rise of a digital age and a computer-linked world economy/culture, replacing the natural/physical world of the earlier two features.

Much of the film is, in fact, virtual, rendering pixel-created soldiers, pop idols, lovers, landscapes, and moving windows and frames of alternating elements. Corporate logos like Levi and Coca Cola and the symbols of the world's great religions alternate with each other (get it, huh, get it, huh?). 

Powaqqatsi (January 28 & 29 at 1:30 p.m. at the Cleveland Museum of Art Morley Lecture Hall)

This 1988 nonfiction feature was second installment of director Godfrey Reggio's `qatsi' trilogy, preceded by KOYAANISQATSI and followed many years later by NAQOYQATSI. This one is arguably the most accessible, beneath the symbolism and MONDO CANE-style juxtaposition of luxury and Third World poverty.

Hopi-speakers shall no doubt recognize the title as translating as "life in transformation," and theme is reflected in scenes shot in developing nations around the world, where women, children and laborers, along roadsides and in mud ditches, toil to subsist and build.

Meanwhile gleaming skyscrapers and concrete highway overpasses rise in the background, but it is uncertain whether any of the ragged low-caste peasants here will ultimately benefit from the high technology and globalization, or just end up being but bricks in the retention-wall.

Koyaanisqatsi (January 27 at 7:30 pm and January 28 at 11 am at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[KOYAANISQATSI screens Friday January 27th at 7:30 pm and Saturday January 28th at 11:00 am at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr. 

"Koyaani-what?!" The title means "life out of balance" in Hopi, and life's balance (or the need for it) is at the core of this impressive, if slow-moving and resolutely non-linear 1983 nonfiction film by Godfrey Reggio, which got a high-profile boost from Francis Ford Coppola in its initial release.

There's no story as such, zilch narration and no characters, unless you count buildings and mountains and one memorably tumbling piece of aerospace hardware. 

The film begins with a series of peaceful natural scenes reminiscent of a New Age meditation video. We then move into the unnatural world man has created, beginning with a mining camp -- humanity's rape of the environment. The pace (and the powerful musical score by famed experimental composer Philip Glass) gets increasingly hurried and chaotic as we are shown cities with almost-psychedelic footage of traffic head- and tail-lights whizzing by at night, buildings undergoing demolition, etc.

Ornette: Made in America (August 15th and 18th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[ ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA screens Saturday August 15th at 9:15 pm and Tuesday August 18th at 8:30 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

I just figured out how Bill Cosby could engineer a career comeback. He could co-star in a bunch of Woody Allen movies. Maybe Roman Polanski could be the guest director. Thank you, you've been a great audience. Drive safely. Good night.

Oh, is there a movie review to do? Sorry, I've been so busy filling out job applications, I didn't notice. Just as I didn't notice this past June when "free jazz" composer and Afro-American arts icon Ornette Coleman died at 85 of a heart attack. I suppose since it wasn't a police shooting incident or anything sordid, it didn't make the headlines - except possibly in Fort Worth, Texas, where Coleman is a favorite local son.

The celebration of "Ornette Coleman Day," September 29, 1983 (I remember that day; I think I was filling out a job application. Nothing came of it) in Fort Worth kicks off ORNETTE: MADE IN AMERICA, the eccentric 1985 docu-meditation on Coleman that was also the final feature of maverick counter-culture filmmaker Shirley Clarke. 

The Last Movie (July 25th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[THE LAST MOVIE screens Saturday July 25th at 9:20 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

I had read a bit about THE LAST MOVIE while growing up, all of it negative. Various critics made out that actor-director Dennis Hopper's followup to his trendsetting hit EASY RIDER was a great example of a sophomore disaster, as a drugged-out "artiste" of cinema, spoiled rotten and riding high on the success of the earlier picture (plus various hallucinogens and pharmaceuticals), was given free reign to do as he pleased, and turned in an unwatchable, pretentious hippie-influenced mess.

(Making him, oh, how radically different from any other filmmaker over the past 40 years? Just asking)

THE LAST MOVIE even had an entry in Michael Medved's anonymously co-authored book of film-depreciation The 50 Worst Films Ever Made (And How They Got That Way), one of my favorite volumes of bilious film lore in the 1970s, even though, once VHS was invented and I actually started SEEING some of the 50 worst films ever made, I discovered that many of them weren't all that bad after all.

Then, one day in the late 1990s, the last time I had any expendable finances or hope the future, I conducted a mass-purchase of cassettes on behalf of my friends at the late, great B-Ware Video and Books in Lakewood. In the cache I actually found a VHS release of THE LAST MOVIE on the obscure United Video of America label. 

Inland Empire (July 11th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[INLAND EMPIRE screens Saturday July 11th at 8:05 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

INLAND EMPIRE is to cult-hero director David Lynch what KILL BILL was to cult-hero director Quentin Tarentino. No expense or indulgence spared, no reins, no guardrails, and everything that makes this idiosyncratic filmmaker the...thing that he is, an unadulterated Lynch-a-thon. Never mind his "mainstream" success in Twin Peaks or even the bizarre trivia that George Lucas wanted Lynch for RETURN OF THE JEDI; this feature is the fellow back to  his roots in grainy, grotesque and troubling avant-garde/experimental cinema, shooting in international locations without a completed script, having at his disposal a megabucks cast and winding up with a three-hour running time. 

It was also more or less self-distributed by Lynch city by city, during its non-studio 2006 release. In Cleveland INLAND EMPIRE was booked for an unprecedented seven-day run at the Cleveland Cinematheque. Director John Ewing told me at the time that fans  were coming in from as far as Pittsburgh and Cincinnati just to see it.