The Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque (11141 East
Blvd., 216.421.7450, cia.edu/cinematheque) celebrates its
23rd anniversary this weekend with the showing of three
exclusive movies. At 5 p.m. Saturday, it screens The Boys: The
Sherman Brothers Story, a documentary about the songwriting
duo responsible for the tunes in classic films like Chitty Chitty
Bang Bang and Mary Poppins. Turns out, the guys didn’t like
each other very much and never hung out when they weren’t working.
That’s followed by a 7 p.m. screening of 1930’s The Big
Trail, a film Cinematheque director John Ewing is
particularly excited about.
“The Big Trail is something we wanted to show for years and
just never got around to it,” says Ewing. “It’s shot in Cinemascope 20
years before there was Cinemascope. It’s been recently restored by the
Museum of Modern Art, and we’re getting the print from the 20th Century
Fox film archives. It’s not just a really good western and John Wayne’s
debut as a leading man — it was also done in this Cinemascope
process called Grandeur. It will fill the wide screen. Nobody has shown
that film in this format since it came out, and I’m not sure it even
played Cleveland in that format.”
The evening is capped off with a 9:30 p.m. showing of
Surveillance, a gritty noir flick directed by
Jennifer Lynch (director David Lynch’s daughter) that’s every bit as
twisted and perverse as the films by her dear mad dad. Tickets to each
film are $8.
From time to time, the West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church
(20401 Hilliard Rd., Rocky River), hosts screenings. At 7 p.m.
Saturday, it will show Addicted to Plastic, a
documentary about plastic (the material, not the credit cards most of
us are also addicted to). Twelve years in the making, the film includes
stops in 12 countries and shows to what degree the substance is taking
over landfills. One solution: a biodegradable plastic substance made
out of plants. The screening is free and open to the public.
At 8 p.m. Saturday, the Beachland Ballroom (15711 Waterloo Rd.,
216.383.1124, beachlandballroom.com) hosts a
benefit for the local film Bullseye, a short comedy that producers are struggling to finish. Gil Mantera’s
Party Dream frontman Ultimate Donny hosts, and local bands the Hot
Rails, Lighthouse and the Whaler, and Big Sweet are slated to perform.
Tickets: $10.
This article appears in Aug 5-11, 2009.
