Wedding Blues Here, Life or Death There

Norman Korpi and Clint Cowen’s sly and funny “The Wedding Video,” which screens tonight at 7:30 at the Egyptian as an American Cinematheque Alternative Screen offering, reunites Karpi with other former colleagues from MTV’s “Real World.” It gleefully reveals the discrepancies between the unedited footage shot by an unseen videographer--and relentless interviewer--for a wedding video and the polished final product.

(Deletions include a couple of wedding counselors squirming out of a gig when they discover the wedding couple is gay.) There’s a lot of edgy, less-than-flattering behavior on the part of pals who’ve gathered for their friends’ wedding that winds up on the cutting room floor.

Korpi plays a likable, pleasant-looking young man who wants to tie the knot in a formal ceremony with his spectacularly handsome and muscular lover Sky (Brien Perry), whom he does not know is a porn star, although everyone else seems to. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll seem the order of the day as the friends gather to party and pitch in to help prepare for the wedding. (Eerily, this movie was shot at the Benedict Canyon estate where actor Anthony Dwain Lee, having allegedly brandished a fake gun, was shot dead by a policeman called there to investigate a complaint about a loud party held last Halloween.)

Playing with “The Wedding Video” is Tom Schroeder’s rueful “Bike Ride,” which relates in six minutes of minimalist white-on-black animated images an arduous but futile journey in pursuit of true love. Lloyd E. Rigler Theater at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. (323) 466-FILM.

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The Laemmle Theatres’ current American Independents cycle has been notably uneven but ends on a high note with Wonsuk Chin’s lively, venturesome dark comedy of the supernatural, “Too Tired to Die” (Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. at the Sunset 5). Chin strikes an ambitious note with his cinephile unhero, Kenji (Takeshi Kaneshiro, popular Hong Kong singer and star of “Chungking Express”), awaking from a dream that plays like a silent movie, in which a little Arab boy in Old Baghdad is fleeing Death (a veiled woman) and her minions.

Not long after, on his way to meet a pal (Michael Imperioli) at a cafe in his downtown Manhattan neighborhood, Kenji encounters the little Arab boy being chased by the same trio. In catching the boy for Death, who turns out to be Mira Sorvino, he has bought 12 hours before his own demise is to take place.

Chin places a snappy spin on a familiar old premise, which offers an amusing take on the downtown scene, in which Kenji has been a handsome dilettante, sponging money from home while not striving too hard to discover what he wants to do with his life.

Not surprisingly, Kenji is eager for a bit of romance before he’s to check out, and his desperate attempts in this direction are a source of humor but also what ultimately brings out his dire fate. Along the way, he encounters the world-weary Pola (Geno Lechner), soon to depart for Paris, and the exquisite Hye Sook Kim, the much younger lover of a prestigious artist (Ben Gazzara); Jeffrey Wright is the garrulous intellectual perpetually hanging out at Kenji’s neighborhood cafe. Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500. “Too Tired to Die” also screens May 19 and 20 at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica, (310) 394-9741.

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Fernando Trueba, Oscar-winning Spanish director (for “La Belle Epoque”), describes his new film, “Calle 54,” as a “musical banquet” to which he invited his favorite Latin jazz musicians to perform at a Sony recording studio on Manhattan’s 54th Street. For some, the distance from their homes was a matter of blocks, but others came from as far away as Stockholm, Havana and Cadiz, Spain, as well as Miami. Trueba in turn filmed all of them in their own cities. His tribute adds up to a joyous occasion.

“Calle 54” returns Friday for regular engagements at the Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, (310) 274-6869, and the Playhouse 7, 637 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 844-6500.

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The American Cinematheque’s third annual Festival of Film Noir, one its most popular events, opens Friday at the Egyptian at 7 p.m. with the 1950 John Huston classic “The Asphalt Jungle” and will present 24 films through May 27 featuring many personal appearances. Remembered today perhaps more for a brief but incendiary appearance by Marilyn Monroe, “The Asphalt Jungle” will now be placed in its perspective as an archetypal “perfect crime” thriller with one of Huston’s fabled casts, which is to be represented at the Egyptian by James Whitmore and Marc Lawrence.

Not to be overlooked is Friday’s 9:45 p.m. second feature, the enduringly potent but lesser-known “Hangover Square” (1945), directed by the stylish John Brahm. Set in 1908 London, it stars Laird Cregar as a promising young pianist-composer who suffers blackouts triggered by severely discordant noises during which he is driven to murder. Unaware of this lethal compulsion in the musician, his pioneering psychiatrist friend (George Sanders) recommends he balance work with play, which leads Cregar to a music hall, where he is bedazzled by a sexy and ambitious singer (Linda Darnell), who coaxes the composer to write a series of songs that will launch her into the big time. (Bernard Herrmann’s superb score is a major asset.)

It’s obvious where the film is heading, but its superlative acting and direction makes the getting there thoroughly engaging. Cregar was as tragic as any of the heavies he so memorably portrayed in his five-year screen career. In his determination to escape type-casting, Cregar embarked upon a crash diet that killed him at 28 in 1944; “Hangover Square” was his final film. Also at the Cinematheque: the 2001 Skyy Vodka Short Film Award Winners and Finalists Marathon, Tuesday, 7:30 p.m.

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One of the most famous movie stills, a staple of the anthologies, shows a bespectacled Harold Lloyd clutching the hands of a huge clock on the corner of a building high above South Broadway in downtown L.A. It’s from “Safety Last” (1923), which screens Friday through Sunday at the Silent Movie Theatre, 611 N. Fairfax Ave., L.A.

Produced and coauthored by Hal Roach, it’s a dazzling comic gem, with Lloyd’s scaling of that tall building a classic sequence in which hilarity at its most inspired and suspense at its most excruciating in equal parts have been blended to perfection.

Lloyd plays a small-town young man who comes to the big city to seek his fortune. He tries to impress his sweetheart (Mildred Davis, soon to become Mrs. Lloyd) back home by sending her gifts that eat up the meager $15-a-week pay he earns as a yardage clerk in a department store.

Lloyd’s human spider act is but a grand finale to the string of inspired gags that precedes it. Through the laughter incited by the film’s comic exaggerations there emerges a sense of the grim realities of a superficially more genteel era.

Interestingly, Lloyd’s middle-class, upwardly mobile Everyman is easier to identify with than Chaplin’s tramp or the imperturbably stone-faced Keaton. After seeing “Safety Last,” directed impeccably by Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, one can understand critic Andrew Sarris’ remark that if Lloyd wasn’t as great an artist as either Chaplin or Keaton, he was “often funnier just the same.” (323) 655-2520.