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Thanks for the Memories

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TIMES STAFF WRITERS

“As a memory piece of acute psychological insight,” Times film reviewer Kevin Thomas wrote in 1997, “Eve’s Bayou” “is as evocative of time and place as a work by Truman Capote or Tennessee Williams.”

High praise indeed for this atmospheric story of a family riven by sibling rivalry and sexual jealousy, which was the recipient of an Independent Spirit Award for best first feature, a National Board of Review Award for best directorial debut and a standing ovation at the Telluride Film Festival. “Eve’s Bayou” will be screened at UC Irvine tonight, with writer-director Kasi Lemmons in attendance.

Schooled at New York University, UCLA and the New School for Social Research in New York, St. Louis-born Lemmons drew upon childhood memories of staying with her grandmother in Tuskegee, Ala. She wrote the screenplay--her first--after acting in several films, including “Silence of the Lambs” (in which she was Jodie Foster’s roommate) and “Vampire’s Kiss.”

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In a 1997 interview, Lemmons said she was influenced by the magic-realism of authors Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

“I wanted to create a piece that was lyrical and visual, with characters speaking in the rhythms that I remember from my childhood,” Lemmons said. “Something I hadn’t seen before, an African American Southern Gothic.”

The story is seen through the eyes of 10-year-old Eve Batiste (Jurnee Smollett). The film opens at a lavish party at the gracious Batiste home. Eve and her volatile older sister, Cisely, both try to dance with their father (Samuel L. Jackson), a physician who dispenses his swashbuckling charm on the ladies, to the distress of his glamorous wife (Lynn Whitfield).

When Eve spies her father in a furtive moment of intimacy with a guest, her innocence begins to unravel. She turns first to her aunt Mozelle (Debbi Morgan)--a psychic whose clients are women abandoned by their men--and then to Elzora (Diahann Carroll), a powerful voodoo woman.

The film, steeped in the superstitions and rituals of Louisiana Bayou country in the early ‘60s, was widely praised for its powerful acting and languorous cinematography (by Amy Vincent), which lingers on the mists, gardens and pools of the lush setting.

* MPAA rating: R, for sexuality and language. Times guidelines: Too intense and mature in its themes for children. Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes.

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Film and Video Center at UCI, Humanities Instructional Building, Room 100, off West Peltason Drive. 7 p.m. $6 general; $4 students, faculty, staff and senior citizens. (949) 824-7418. Web site: https://www.humanities.uci.edu/fvc.

Documentary Looks at Female Rockers

Another first-time filmmaker, Lisa Apramain, looks at issues of anger, sexism, identity and ambition among female rock musicians--including Courtney Love and Joan Jett--in “Not Bad for a Girl,” a scrappy, grainy 88-minute piece that’s part of “20 Questions: Person, Place or Thing,” a wide-ranging group of 20 video documentaries. They are being screened free, five days a week, through March 28 at the Long Beach Museum of Art.

Videos in the exhibition--any of which can be played on request during museum hours--range from a survey of the Eighth Annual Double Dutch Jump Rope Championships in New York City (“Pick Up Your Feet: The Double Dutch Show,” by Skip Blumberg) to an investigation of juvenile sex offenders in Middle America (Beth B’s “Voices Unheard”).

Subjects of other videos include the Rev. Peter Popoff, a Pentecostal evangelist, faith healer and Bible smuggler; the disappearance of a young woman in Arizona; promiscuity and sexual mutilation in Eritrea, East Africa; the history and ethos of the Hopi through the eyes of a Bow Clan storyteller; and the public and private lives of people in a working-class Los Angeles community.

* Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd. Free. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday; 10 a.m.-8 p.m. Friday. (562) 439-2119.

Tati Satirizes Modern Life

Wandering through an unrecognizable Paris of steel and glass skyscrapers filled with high-tech gadgets, poor Mr. Hulot is trying to keep an appointment, but the forces of modernism seem to be conspiring to trip him up.

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Jacques Tati’s 1967 film “Play Time,” which screens at UCI on Friday, playfully satirizes the artificiality of modern life with sight gags and delicious sound effects. A suave perfectionist (unlike his klutzy screen persona), Tati built a miniature city at one-fifth scale outside Paris for the film.

Born Jacques Tatischeff in 1908--the grandson of the last Russian czar’s ambassador to France--Tati was a popular French music hall entertainer who branched out in the ‘30s to write, direct and act in comic films about simple people befuddled by a mechanized world.

Tati’s earlier films include “Jour de Fe^te,” from 1949 (about an inept village postman); “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday,” from 1953 (a pipe-smoking free spirit summers at a stuffy resort); and the Oscar-winning “Mon Oncle,” from 1958 (Mr. Hulot becomes a bewildered cog in the wheel of his brother-in-law’s plastic pipe factory).

* In French with English subtitles, color. 108 minutes, unrated.

UC Irvine Film Society, UCI Student Center, Crystal Cove Auditorium. 7 and 9 p.m. $4.50 general, $3.50 UCI faculty, staff, senior citizens and students at other schools; $2.50 UCI students. (949) 824-5588.

‘Black Rock’ Exposes Small Town’s Secret

Part of a three-part series of classic Hollywood films about social injustice, John Sturges’ “Bad Day at Black Rock” (1955) screens Friday at the Orange County Museum of Art.

A one-armed World War II veteran (Spencer Tracy) comes to town to give a military decoration to the parents of a Japanese man who died while serving in the U.S. Army. In the course of one day, he deals with the unhelpful, xenophobic townspeople and discovers a terrible secret.

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The film boasts a roll call of famous actors of the day, including Lee Marvin (playing a dimwitted, sadistic cowboy), Ernest Borgnine (a slimy ne’er-do-well), Walter Brennan and Anne Francis.

Sturges, who died in 1992 at age 82, was a no-nonsense guy who once described a director as “a doer” and said he intended his films to explain “why our side won.”

* In CinemaScope, color, 81 minutes, unrated. Orange County Museum of Art’s Lyon Auditorium, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. 6:30 p.m. $5 general, $3 students, seniors, museum members. Introduction by Arthur Taussig, the museum’s adjunct curator of film, and discussion after the screening. Refreshments available. (949) 759-1122.

It’s Only Sex

The Long Beach Gay & Lesbian Film Festival will present P.J. Castellaneta’s lively “Relax . . . It’s Just Sex.” This crowd-pleaser, which opened Outfest ‘98, is a lot like other modestly budgeted L.A. thirtysomething movies in which most everyone lives in old Spanish flats or houses with trendy decor. It’s talky with humor that comes from TV sitcoms rather than life, yet Castellaneta digs deeper.

He’s also got an established actress in the versatile Jennifer Tilly to anchor his film. Tilly plays a witty and amusing woman with a desire for children, a live-in boyfriend not quite ready to settle down and a need to play den mother to her gay and lesbian friends who, like her, are beset by romantic problems. The film’s key accomplishment is to present a network of friendships spanning sexual orientation and various races and ethnicities too.

* Sunday at 4 p.m. at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center at Cal State Long Beach, 6200 Atherton St. (562) 434-4455.

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