Settling the Scorsese

The unsinkable, unthinkable James Cameron notwithstanding, is there a more honored or ubiquitous director at the moment than Martin Scorsese?

This week, the Film Society of Lincoln Center laid on a huge tribute to Scorsese with le tout New York--otherwise known as Hollywood-on-the-Hudson--in attendance.

A few days earlier, in a small, deluxe Manhattan theater, Tibet’s Dalai Lama, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was launching a 16-city American tour, got his first look at “Kundun,” Scorsese’s recent biopic about him, with the 55-year-old director at his side.

Next week Scorsese will preside over the 10-person jury that will pick the competition winners at the 51st International Cannes Film Festival on the French Riviera.

He also figures prominently in Peter Biskind’s new bestseller, “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood” (Simon & Schuster).

The book records Scorsese’s reaction to the Motion Picture Academy’s denial of a 1980 best picture Oscar to “Raging Bull,” regarded by many critics as not only his best film but also one of the best by any director.

“When I lost for ‘Raging Bull,’ ” Biskind quotes Scorsese as saying, “that’s when I realized what my place in the system would be, if I did survive at all--on the outside looking in.”

Scorsese has not won an Oscar for best picture or as best director despite a large, multifaceted body of work that displays his rare, possibly unmatched, fluency in all sorts of movie formats, styles and subjects.

His roughly two dozen pictures range from “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” “Taxi Driver,” “New York, New York” and “The Last Waltz” in the ‘70s, to “The King of Comedy,” “The Color of Money” and “The Last Temptation of Christ” in the ‘80s, to “GoodFellas,” “Cape Fear,” “The Age of Innocence” and “Casino” in the ‘90s.

Scorsese basically launched his career in 1973 with “Mean Streets,” his third picture, described 20 years later by former Times film reviewer Peter Rainer as “the key movie of its generation--the one great example of how a feature-length American movie made on a shoestring could nevertheless express a film artist’s deepest torments.”

“Mean Streets,” screening Friday to Sunday at the Port Theatre (2905 E. Coast Highway, Corona del Mar), stars Harvey Keitel as Charlie and Robert De Niro as Johnny Boy, hoodlums who grew up together in New York’s Little Italy and whose violent lives go from bad to worse when they come into conflict. $4.50-$7. (949) 673-6260

The mean streets of the title are both real and metaphorical. They embody a vicious world contested by mobsters but also by the spiritual teachings of the Catholic Church. Conscience has corrupted Charlie’s racketeering soul, so to speak, awakening his sense of sin and guilt.

Biskind’s book reveals that Scorsese’s backers at first wanted Jon Voight for the starring role of Charlie. Then De Niro wanted it. In the end, De Niro’s mercurial portrayal made Johnny Boy, though a smaller role, the more riveting.

Following “Mean Streets” at the Port, “Bang” (1997) will play Monday to May 14. Directed by Ash, a one-named British filmmaker, this low-budget ($30,000) hit recounts a day in the life of an actor who decided to take her destiny in hand by assuming the identity of an L.A. motorcycle cop.

The Port’s Merchant-Ivory retrospective closes today with “The Householder” (1963)--the first collaboration of producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Jhabvala who adapted her coming-of-age novel about an ingenuous youth--and “In Custody” (1994), based on Anita Desai’s novel about the decline of Urdu, a northern Indian language long valued for its beauty. $4.50-$7 (each film).

Special screenings in Orange County continue Friday with “The Revolt of Job” (1983), a Hungarian film about the essence of faith by Imre Gyongyossy and Barna Kabay, in the Crystal Cove Auditorium, 7 and 9 p.m., at the UC Irvine Student Center on campus (on Pereira Drive, near Bridge Road). $2.50-$4.50. (949) 824-5588.

The movie, screened by the UCI Film Society and set in a Hungarian village in 1943, tells the story of an elderly Jewish couple who adopt a Catholic boy because they want to pass their wealth and knowledge on to him before the Nazis consume their country.

Also at UCI, the Visualizing Eros series presents a double bill today at 7:30 p.m., “To You, From Me” (1994) and “A Chinese Ghost Story” (1987) at the UCI Film and Video Center in the Humanities Instructional Building, Room 100 (Bridge Road, near Pereira Drive). $4-$6. (949) 824-7418.

On Saturday at 7 p.m., the continuing Festival of Mexican Cinema of the 1990s presents “Solo con tu pareja” (Love in the Time of Hysteria) (1991) at the UCI Film and Video Center. Directed by Alfonso Cuaron, who also directed this year’s “Great Expectations” and “A Little Princess” (1995), this comedy is about a playboy suffering from writer’s block, the flu and too many romances. $4-$6. (949) 824-7418.

On Wednesday, “Raising Arizona” (1987), Joel and Ethan Coen’s off-the-wall comedy about a newlywed couple that kidnaps a baby to complete the family, screens at 7 p.m. in the Argyros Forum, Room 208, at Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Free. (714) 744-7018.

The picture, starring Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter, upset Arizonans when it was released. They didn’t cotton to being portrayed as trailer-dwelling hayseeds who rob banks and, among other things, leave their baby in the middle of a highway--twice. Nor did they like seeing a biker who shoots lizards and blows up bunnies with hand grenades.

Yet enough moviegoers found its mayhem so funny that “Raising Arizona” has become a cult hit in an arsenal of films--including “Blood Simple,” “Barton Fink,” the extraordinary “Fargo” and, most recently, “The Big Lebowski”--that have propelled the mystique of the Coen brothers.

In L.A. and Beyond

With “Glam,” which begins midnight screenings Fridays and Saturdays at the Sunset 5, writer-director Josh Evans follows up his venturesome debut film “Into the Goldmine” with an even riskier business, a classic tale of innocence and corruption in bad old Hollywood that evolves into a spiritual odyssey.

Evans really is fearless: He’s made the kind of picture that those who aren’t ready to go along with him will dismiss as arty and pretentious but that pays off for those willing to go the distance.

As a filmmaker, Evans is a visionary, able to suggest dimensions beyond his sharply observed surface reality. Abruptly dropped into present-day Hollywood is a young man, an All-American type named Sonny Daye (William McNamara), who has a beatific expression and utters not a word. He has come to stay with his sole relative, Franky Syde (Frank Whaley), a manic, motor-mouth Hollywood wannabe struggling to survive.

Sonny may say nothing, but he writes (and writes and writes) and what pours forth is some kind of religious vision--shrewdly not spelled out, which overwhelms Franky, who also sees it as a hot screen property. But who is Sonny--a prophet, some kind of god, Jesus returned--or what?

The individual who responds to him on a personal basis, and vice versa, is Vanessa (Natasha Gregson Wagner), a beautiful young rising star who is the lover of a veteran major producer (Tony Danza), a crude Hollywood survivor whose vulnerability is his terrifying jealousy regarding Vanessa.

Sonny serves as a lightning rod in the Hollywood that Evans evokes so well and with such economy: There are the power players drained of humanity, and the young aspirants, smart, well-educated yet slipping away into drugs while a TV keeps sending video messages that raise the spiritual questions that so concern Evans. Yet for all its seriousness, “Glam” is often scabrously, satirically funny. (Evans got his mother, Ali MacGraw, to play a journalist in the unenviable position of trying to get Sonny to open up while trying to get Franky to shut up.)

Evans also writes great riffs for his actors to run with, and he gets players as different as Danza and Jon Cryer (as one of Franky’s strung-out pals) to go right to the edge, with terrific results. Cinematographer Fernando Arguelles gave “Glam” a great, stylish look and mood, and Geoffrey Moore and Evans composed a wonderfully varied and expressive score. “Glam” is a right-now movie that suggests a contemporary “The Day of the Locust.” The film is rated NC-17 for a scene of explicit sexuality and some sexual language. (213) 848-3500.