Everything From Sublime to Silly

Special screenings sometimes have something for everyone, and this is one of those weeks--with offerings from the sublime to the absurd.

Film buffs get a chance to see one of the most acclaimed French classics--”Grand Illusion,” Jean Renoir’s 1937 antiwar film--screening Friday at 6:30 p.m. at the Museum Education Center of the Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. It is part of the museum’s World Cinema series. $3-$5. (949) 759-1122.

Families will get the chance to see two of the most popular children’s stories ever told, “The Three Little Pigs” and “Little Red Riding Hood”--along with “The Three Little Wolves” and “Mickey & the Beanstalk”--in Disney’s 1932-33 animated-cartoon versions, also screening Friday, at 1 p.m., at the Huntington Beach Central Library, 7111 Talbert Ave. They are part of the library’s Summer Film Festival, which continues through July 31. $1. (714) 375-5107.

One could recommend crossing over, but mainly in the direction of the Disney cartoons. (Toddlers are unlikely to be interested in seeing legendary director Erich Von Stroheim--Hollywood’s most terrible enfant terrible, famously billed earlier in his career as “the man you love to hate.” He gives his best, typically fetishistic, performance as a World War I Prussian officer--the sort of role he specialized in as an actor.)

“Grand Illusion” is set in a prisoner-of-war camp and loosely based on a combination of Renoir’s experiences during the war and the memoirs of a French officer who escaped German captivity many times.

Von Stroheim plays the German camp commander. Jean Gabin and Pierre Fresnay play French officers held prisoner. As civilians, Gabin’s character was a mechanic, Fresnay’s an aristocrat like Von Stroheim’s.

The film makes the case that class affiliations and social status are stronger than language and nationality, stronger than patriotism: Fresnay and Von Stroheim have more in common than do Fresnay and Gabin.

What is the grand illusion?

For film scholars Adam Garbicz and Jacek Kinowski, it is “the belief that the causes of wars are national animosities.” For film historian David Shipman, “the great illusion is that men must hate each other in war.”

Critic Pauline Kael put it better. The two aristocrats “share a common world of memories and sentiments,” she wrote. “Though their class is doomed by the changes that produced the war, they must act out the rituals of noblesse oblige and serve a nationalism they don’t believe in. [Fresnay] sacrifices his life for men he doesn’t really approve of--the plebeian [Gabin] and the Jew Rosenthal [Marcel Dalio].”

“Renoir,” she concludes, “directed this elegy for the death of the old European aristocracy, and it is one of the true masterpieces of the screen.”

If your taste runs to newer films,

you might try catching director-actor-composer Vincent Gallo’s celluloid debut, “Buffalo ‘66,” which opens Friday for a week at the Port Theatre, 2905 E. Coast Highway, Corona del Mar. $4.50-$7. (949) 673-6260.

The film features Anjelica Huston and Ben Gazzara as parents of the central character, Billy (Gallo), who has been in prison--a secret he has kept from them. Billy wants to impress them by coming home with a beautiful blond wife.

Touted for the performances of its two leads--Gallo and Christina Ricci as Layla-- “Buffalo ‘66” boasts fine work from Huston and Gazzara and sharp cameos by Mickey Rourke, Jan-Michael Vincent and Rosanna Arquette.

Finally, for the kids again, “Tom & Huck” (1995) screens Friday at 8:15 p.m. at Arovista Park, Elm and Sievers streets, as part of Brea’s Family Films in the Park series, which continues Fridays through Aug. 14. Free. (714) 990-7100.

Twain’s delinquent sons of Hannibal, Mo.--Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn--go on many dark adventures in this slow-moving adaptation of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” They raft down the Mississippi and get caught up in a murder, cave-ins and treasure hunting.

“Tom & Huck” stars Jonathan Taylor Thomas (of the TV sitcom “Home Improvement”). Thomas plays Tom cockily, a fitting performance by the “hunk-idol of the prepubescent set,” according to Newsday critic John Anderson, who reviewed the movie for The Times. But Brad Renfro plays Huck as “more dullard than naif, and more ignorant than innocent.”

A warning to those youngsters unfamiliar with Twain’s writings: “Finn is Twain’s greatest creation,” Anderson wrote, “the portrait of native intelligence led astray by superstition and unchallenged racism. He was not, however, thuggish, which is what Renfro makes him.”

In L.A. and Beyond

Outfest ‘98, the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, continues through Monday at various venues with more noteworthy films.

Tanya Wexler’s “Finding North” (DGA, Friday at 5 p.m.) features a grieving gay man (John Benjamin Hickey) who leaves New York to fulfill his late lover’s wishes by taking an extended and complicated journey to a small Texas town where the dead man was born and raised. Tagging along quite unexpectedly is a klutzy heart-of-gold Brooklyn motormouth (Wendy Makkena), who falls in love with Hickey. There’s a decided aura of contrivance in the way Wexler sets up her story, but it gets better and better as it goes along, with Makkena at last able to break through her stereotyped role. Wexler leaves us to wonder just where the strong emotional bond that develops between these two will ultimately take them.

Susan Muska and Greta Olafsdottir’s “The Brandon Teena Story” (DGA, Friday at 7:15 p.m.) is a heart-wrenching documentary that is all the more impressive for being a first film. In 1993 a 20-year-old female preoperative transsexual left a troubled life in Lincoln, Neb., to move to the not-too-distant town of Falls City, which has a population of less than 5,000. If Brandon found Lincoln an increasingly inhospitable place for a young woman trying to pass as a man, she could scarcely have picked a worse place in which to try to start a new life.

The irony is that the young women Brandon courted in Falls City remember her for possessing a sensitivity and respect decidedly lacking in the local folks. Inevitably, Brandon’s true gender would be discovered, provoking an instance of homophobia and ignorance carried to horrific extremes.

Muska and Olafsdottir could coast on the inherent strength of their material but they give it full shape and meaning with their acute perceptiveness and compassion.

Guinean filmmaker Mohamed Camara’s “Dakan” (Destiny), which was first shown locally at the Pan African Film Festival in February, screens Friday at the DGA at 9:15 p.m. and Saturday at 7:15 p.m. It’s a love story of much charm, humor, courage and imagination.

Manga (Aboubacar Toure), raised by an adoring single mother, and Sory (Mamady), son of a rich, self-made contractor father, are college students who fall in love in their profoundly homophobic society. Manga’s mother simply denies the very existence of gays while Sory’s ambitious, hard-driving father, who intends his son to become his business partner, is apoplectic. “Dakan” becomes an odyssey for the lovers, full of unexpected developments and consequences.

Director Jeanette L. Buck and writer Kim McNabb’s “Out of Season” (DGA, Friday at 9:30 p.m.) is a strikingly subtle and moody love story set in picturesque Cape May, N.J., the venerable seaside resort, during off-season. Showing up at a coffee shop is black-haired, black leather-jacketed Micki (Carol Monda), a most attractive, distinctive young woman with attitude to spare. Behind the counter is Roberta (Joy Kelly), as lovely as she is wary. Micki has come to care for her terminally ill widowed uncle (Dennis Fecteau), who is close friends with Roberta. Since both are upfront, unattached lesbians you wonder why Micki and Roberta do so much skirmishing, but Roberta, perhaps before we do, realizes that Micki is a restless will-of-the wisp and therefore a potential heartbreaker. The way these women sort out their emotions and priorities is at once engaging, credible and satisfying.

John Huckert and John Matkowsky’s “Hard” (DGA, Saturday at 9:15 p.m.) is one of the festival’s highlights, a rigorous, appropriately but not exploitatively violent and dynamic low-budget thriller in which a gay LAPD detective (Noel Palomaria) becomes the target of a serial killer (Malcolm Moorman). Tense, credible, expertly written and played with sharp commentary on what professional life can be like for gay police officers and on the corrosive self-hatred that can fuel gay serial killers.

“Edge of Seventeen” (John Anson Ford Amphitheater, Sunday at 8:30 p.m., following the 7:15 p.m Outfest ’98 awards ceremony) is a classic gay coming-of-age story, told with the utmost perception, sensitivity and humor by writer Todd Stephens and director David Moreton.

Chris Stafford’s Eric, a delicately handsome youth rounding out his junior year in high school, is having a struggle with his sexual identity. He’s reached the point that he can no longer deny to himself that he’s attracted to his own sex but feels overwhelmed with what to do about it. What about his loving family who are prepared to make sacrifices to send him to New York so that he can pursue his music studies? What about the girl (Tina Holmes) who would like him to consider her more than just a friend?

In attempting to answer these questions Eric will cause a great deal of pain for himself and others, but his rite of passage is one that countless gays and lesbians have experienced.

Not all the festival films are winners: “The Unknown Cyclist” (DGA, Saturday at 7 p.m.) is a contrived, synthetic TV-like drama about a gay man’s dying wish that his lover (Stephen Spinella), his homophobic twin brother (Vincent Spano), his loving ex-wife (Lea Thompson) and his slacker pal (Danny Nucci) participate in the West Coast Cycle for AIDS. “Mob Queen” (Sunset 5, Saturday at 11:30 p.m.) is a hopelessly inept, sub-Damon Runyon gangster comedy set in 1957 that wastes its gimmick, which is that its glamorous streetwalker heroine, with whom a mob boss falls in love, is actually a guy.

Outfest ’98 concludes on an appropriately festive note with a gala premiere at Mann’s Chinese of Tommy O’Haver’s “Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss.” A giddy romance inspired by glossy ‘50s women’s pictures, it stars Sean P. Hayes as a young photographer seeking romance and a career in Los Angeles.

Billy yearns for the seemingly unattainable, movie-star handsome Gabriel (Brad Rowe) while Billy’s mentor (Richard Ganoung) silently yearns for him. O’Haver is unfailingly clever in turning a modest budget to advantage with his terrific sense of pastiche--there’s even a drag trio lip-synching vintage pop tunes that serves as a Greek chorus and a bridge between sequences.

“Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss” is the just the right lighthearted dessert for an ambitious and wide-ranging festival. For full schedule and ticket information: (213) 782-1135.