‘Passport’ to Danger

The American Cinematheque’s Alternative Screen presents at the Egyptian Theatre tonight at 7 p.m. Reed Paget’s “Amerikan Passport,” an 82-minute chronicle of Paget’s tour of the world’s hot spots in 1989 and 1990. He was in China for Tiananmen Square, Berlin for the reunification of Germany, Israel for the outbreak of the Gulf War, and plenty of dangerous places in between. He worked in visits to some of the wonders of the world as well--for example, Angkor Wat--and on return home to Seattle, jousted affectionately with his grandfather, who is as right-wing as Paget is left.

While it’s wearying to relive chaos past, with all its political and moral implications, you have to admire his resilient spirit of adventure, his humanity and his lack of pretentiousness. It took him seven years to complete his film, and the note on which it ends, right here in the U.S., is truly ironic. “Amerikan Passport” also screens at the Santa Barbara Film Festival on Sunday at 11 a.m. at the Fiesta Five Theater, 916 State St. (805) 963-0023.

Also screening tonight at the Egyptian with “Amerikan Passport” are Don Hertzfeldt’s animated five-minute “Billy’s Balloon” and Mike Mitchell’s 15-minute “Herd.” In the first, a little boy has an ominous encounter with a balloon, and in the second, a young hamburger stand cook (Kent Osborne) has an even more drastic encounter with an alien. Both shorts are funny, clever and provocative. (323) 466-FILM.

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“Out of the Factory: The Films of Paul Morrissey” opens Friday at LACMA with Morrissey in person for the screening of two of his more recent films, “Spike of Bensonhurst” (1988) and “Mixed Blood” (1985). Leave it to Morrissey to take the old prizefighting movie and the Italian American comedy and turn them upside down and inside out. The humor in his frequently hilarious “Spike of Bensonhurst” comes from nonchalant bigotry and unabashed hypocrisy. It’s a daring tactic that Morrissey pulls off with his highly developed sense of caustic, yet good-natured absurdity grounded in--of all things--a profoundly conservative sensibility. In simply being honest about how people behave, Morrissey is able to show us how bizarre they really can be.

His Spike Fumo (Sasha Mitchell) is a tall, rangy good-looking kid who wants to make it as a fighter in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn’s solidly middle-class Italian American neighborhood. But he soon runs afoul of the deceptively avuncular local don, Baldo Cacetti (Ernest Borgnine). Morrissey and his co-writer, Alan Bowne, are so refreshingly casual about Spike’s ambitions as a boxer that when his big fight finally arrives, it’s not really very important. Long before then they’ve sidetracked Spike to Red Hook, where, oozing ethnic superiority, he’s determined to rid the derelict Puerto Rican neighborhood of its drug pushers and to teach the street kids how to box. “Spike of Bensonhurst” is gratifying in its corrosive yet oddly sunny cynicism.

Leave it also to Morrissey to find humor in a lethal drug war in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In “Mixed Blood” Morrissey has made one of his most outrageously effective comedies. Imagine--if you can--a low-budget sendup of “Oliver Twist,” “West Side Story” and “White Heat” combined, and you’ll have a rough idea of what it’s like. No earnest drama of the ills and injustices of the Latino ghetto for Morrissey, but rather a scabrous satire of street life, keyed to an infectious salsa beat and incorporating melodramatic plotting, ultra-violence, nonstop gutter language and a campy heroine.

Marilia Pera, of “Pixote” and the current “Central Station,” plays a Brazilian drug dealer who’s emigrated to Manhattan and is determined to grab her share of the business--and then some. The ruthlessly unsentimental tone Morrissey brings to his lurid make-believe tale points up the sheer absurdity of real-life evil in a way a more conventional film never could. In short, he accomplishes the artist’s primary and invaluable task: inviting us to see the familiar in a fresh way--while gleefully entertaining us.

“Mixed Blood” is not quite like any other film, not even in the outre Morrissey canon, and it could be a terrific turnoff for those who take it literally rather than allegorically. What its story implies, not the story itself, is what is to be taken seriously.

Morrissey will also appear Saturday, along with Holly Woodlawn, star of “Trash,” which screens at 7:30 p.m. What Morrissey does in “Trash” (1970), this sometimes uproariously funny, sometimes desperately sad work, is to draw upon the far-out scene of the Andy Warhol superstars and utilize the Pop artist’s same basic setups of extended dialogues between two or three people. He also shares with Warhol a gift for throwaway humor and a casual, non-exploitative way with sex, nudity and four-letter words.

He takes his Adonis-like hero (Joe Dallesandro, a natural actor who plays a junkie quite effectively) on an odyssey through a cross section of human urban blight. He must support his heroin habit, which, alas, makes him impotent with all the women attracted to him, in particular the transvestite (Holly Woodlawn) with whom he lives--and who truly loves him.

The film is dominated by Woodlawn’s poignant presence as an authentic Manhattan street urchin with awesome resilience combined with gnawing vulnerability. “Trash” is finally Woodlawn’s film. In the last scene, having missed a chance at welfare because she refused to give her silver wedgies to a shoe fetishist social worker (Michael Sklar), she remains undefeated: “I saw some nice garbage up on 24th St.”

Morrissey’s 1972 “Women in Revolt,” which follows “Trash,” holds up well as a sendup of the the overly solemn aspects of women’s liberation while at the same time depicting the indignities to which women are routinely subjected. Warhol drag superstars Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis and Woodlawn play three dizzy types who form PIGS (Politically Involved Girls) only to have Candy, a Kim Novak idolater, cut out to pursue Hollywood stardom; the trademark blend of Morrissey’s outrageous humor and camp pathos retains its charge. There are lots of the typical Factory nudity and casual orgies; Martin Kove, long before he became well-known on TV and in mainstream movies, turns up in the altogether as Curtis’ lover. (323) 857-6177.

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Filmforum’s Robert Frank retrospective continues Friday at 8 p.m. at the Art Center, Pasadena College of Design, 1700 Lido St. with the 28-minute Beat Generation artifact “Pull My Daisy” (1959), and two half-hour diary films: “Life Dances On” (1980), dedicated to his late daughter Andrea and collaborator Danny Seymour, and “Home Improvements” (1985). Written and narrated by Jack Kerouac, “Pull My Daisy” is a tedious vignette set in a Bowery loft and featuring a gathering of such notables as poets Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and Gregory Corso and painters Alice Neal and Larry Rivers; also on hand is a pre-”Last Year at Marienbad” Delphine Seyrig. Also known simply as “The Beat Generation,” the film plays like an inside joke but has undoubted historical value. “Life Dances On,” unavailable for review, will be followed by “Home Improvements,” in which Frank chronicles November 1983 to March 1984, moving between a cottage along the Nova Scotia coast and a Lower Manhattan apartment, a period in his life that sees his second wife June, an artist, recover from throat surgery, while his troubled son Pablo enters a psychiatric hospital. As in other films, Frank muses about the relationship between his art as a renowned photographer and experimental filmmaker and his life, and again worries that his children have suffered as a consequence of his dedication to his work. The film’s beautiful, jagged images seem suffused with pain. (323) 526-2911.

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Richard Flanagan’s sincere if gloomy “The Sound of One Hand Clapping” opens a one-week run at the Grande 4-Plex as part of its “Aussie Adventures” series. As a story of a girl in a rural immigrant community it is similar to last week’s “Fistful of Flies” but more effective. Pregnant, single and impoverished, Sonja Buloh (Kerry Fox) returns to the Tasmanian Highlands after a 20-year-absence in an attempt to come to terms with her alcoholic Polish laborer father (Kristof Kaczmarek) and to try to learn at last why her mother deserted the family when Sonja was only 3. It is a work of integrity but offers no new insights to offset its relentlessly depressing material. (213) 617-0268.