Daily Briefing. Vintage Stones, Lichtenstein and Slapstick

Also: Gaza filmmakers head to Austin to see a movie in a theater for the first time.
David Hudson

Tonight at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York: The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (1968), featuring the Stones, of course, but also The Who, John and Yoko, Jethro Tull, Marianne Faithfull and Taj Mahal. Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg will be on hand "for a post-screening discussion and book signing of his captivating new memoir Luck and Circumstance: A Coming of Age in Hollywood, New York, and Points Beyond. Lindsay-Hogg takes us through an extraordinary life including boyhood encounters with Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst, Olivia De Havilland, Humphrey Bogart, Henry Miller, and a prolific career in the worlds of film, television, and music."

Through February 12, the Whitney Museum is presenting Three Landscapes, "a little-known triple screen film installation by Roy Lichtenstein, unseen since its showing at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1971 as part of the groundbreaking exhibition Art and Technology. The result of a short residency at Universal Studios in Hollywood, the films, newly restored by the Whitney on their original 35mm format, are testimony to Lichtenstein's experimentation with form and his fascination with cinema." J Hoberman in the Voice: "Ethereal yet visceral, frugal but posh, an authentic fake and a triumphantly constructed vista, Three Landscapes is a particular essence of studio filmmaking — it almost could have been made for some nouveau mogul's living room."

Coinciding with the release of the DVD box set Laurel & Hardy: The Essential Collection, and in conjunction with its Laurel & Hardy project, the UCLA Film & Television Archive presents Way Out West (1937), "restored by the Archive with funding from The Film Foundation (and the pair's only Western), and The Music Box (1932), their Oscar-winning short film about delivering a piano to the top of a flight of stairs." Tonight at 7:30. Same time, different place: The Archive presents Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein (1974) and Stan Dragoti's Love at First Bite (1979) at the Million Dollar Theater in downtown LA.

Harriet Sherwood in the Guardian back in August: "They are determined to succeed as film directors, yet they have never been to a cinema. They studied fine art at university but have never been to a gallery. They would have much in common with young conceptual artists in London, New York or Paris, but they have never left the tiny Gaza Strip. Tarzan and Arab, identical twin artists who have made an award-winning short movie and a remarkable set of cinema poster pastiches, are undeterred by the lack of training, equipment, funding, a place to show their work or a receptive audience." Tonight, after an effort "fraught with uncertainty, adventure and plenty of bureaucracy," Austin's Alamo Drafthouse welcomes the brothers to "a screening of Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers, one of Tarzan and Arab's all-time favorite films and their choice for their first movie to see in a movie theater."

In the works. Eva Mendes joins Kylie Minogue in Léos Carax's Holly Motors. The Playlist's Kevin Jagernauth: "The film, set it the near future, centers around a character played by Denis Lavant, who travels between different lives, including that of a murderer, beggar, CEO, monstrous creature and father of a family. Each cast member is playing a different role in the various 'lives' of the central character, though exact details on the roles or plot are hard to come by. Jean-François Balmer rounds out the cast." And Brad Pitt's joined Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor in Steve McQueen's Twelve Years a Slave (Playlist).

Nicolas Winding Refn lists his top ten Criterions.

The Doha Tribeca Film Festival is on through Saturday.

David Bordwell on Joan Crawford and a SoundScriber in David Miller's Sudden Fear (1952): "After more than a decade of female Gothics — aka 'woman in peril' movies, aka I-think-my-husband's-trying-to-kill-me movies — from Suspicion and Gaslight to Woman in Hiding, Miller and his colleagues found a fresh way to put a lady in a cage. Schema and revision, a key process in the history of any art form, allows ingenious artists to remake what tradition hands them. Twenty years later, Francis Ford Coppola and Walter Murch would build an entire movie, The Conversation, around the audio replay and its possibilities for objectivity and subjectivity. Over and over, the unconventional burrows inside the conventional."

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Michael Lindsay-HoggRoy LichtensteinLaurel & HardyLéos CaraxNicolas Winding RefnDavid MillerDailyDaily BriefingColumns
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