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Teen Streets: A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints

The story behind writer-director Dito Montiel’s debut feature, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, gives off a few vibes of a less awesome variation on young Orson Welles’ triumphalist arrival at RKO sixty-six years ago. The not-quite-so-young Montiel prepped for his inaugural opportunity as a downtown (Manhattan) bar bouncer and music-scene habitue, and later, by writing the semi-autobiographical “memoir” of the same title about his formative years in the Borough of Queens’ Astoria section.



It Ain't the Hotel California: Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont

“I feel like I’ve been trapped in a Terence Rattigan play,” a character named Ludovic Meyer says at one point, not entirely in jest, in Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. If you’re old, or theatrically savvy, enough, the movie may make you feel a little like that yourself.



Playing Hard is Hard Work: Cinnamon

The comedian Albert Brooks once cracked that if an alien were to learn about life on Earth by watching our movies, he’d be convinced that the planet was swarming with cops. The world depicted in most of the movies we watch is an alternate reality, often bearing little resemblance to our world or our lives.



Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple

Only Charles Manson ranks higher as a modern bogeyman in the American consciousness than the Reverend Jim Jones, a ranking that places gruesomeness over quantity: The Manson murders may have been grislier, but in numbers they can’t begin to compete with the more than 900 people who died at Jones’ camp in the jungles of Guyana. And it remains the more ungraspable atrocity—even allowing for the number of children, elderly and infirm who were fed the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, how could so many people be induced to take part in mass suicide? The new documentary Jonestown does its best to answer those and other questions in a running time of less than 90 minutes, which is clearly not enough; it answers some questions but raises many more. It is most valuable for trying to show what drew people to Jones’ congregation in the first place: his insistence on racial equality and social equity, mixed with the skills of a trained Pentecostal preacher, made his vision of a man-made utopia seem possible to people of the 1960s and 1970s who were primed for the Age of Aquarius. Which is not to say that Jones’ followers were hippies: Director Stanley Nelson interviews survivors of Jonestown along with members who left earlier to paint a portrait of them as average people yearning for a better world. That rationality makes their recounting of the events of November 18, 1978 even more chilling than you might imagine. Nelson (the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” fellowship) has also assembled an astonishing amount of film and audio showing Jones and the Guyana camp, and you can hardly blame him for wanting to display it, even if the time might have better been spent going into a little more detail. For what it is, though, Jonestown is a valuable addition to the our understanding of demagoguery at its extremes, It plays on Wednesday and Thursday, December 6 and 7, at the Emerging Cinema screen of the Market Arcade Film and Arts center.





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