Every Angel Is Terror

Wow. Saw Metropolis last night, a restored and almost-complete version, with live score provided by Sports For Kin. That was opening night for the Southside Film Festival, and I think it's going to be hard to top -- that might have been the Lehigh Valley's cultural highlight of the season.

 

Anne and I also went to the opening-night party at Home & Planet, but it was way crowded (and I hadn't had dinner), so we slipped off to Lehigh Pizza, grabbed a bite before following the sounds of bagpipes (they had a bagpipe procession with police escort) over to the Packer Chapel at Lehigh -- which is a "chapel" in the sense that the summer mansions at Newport are "cottages;" this thing was a serious gothic pile -- where the movie was shown. Lotta people there, and Opening Night (the party as well as the show) was like a "who's who:" Anne and I walked over to the party with Scott and his brother, and we ran into Donna, and Deb & James, and also Nick & Alison, and Trevor & Christie, and some people Anne knew, und so weiter...

 

I won't do too much of a movie review, except to say that the "almost original" version was longer and very different from the one I have on VCR, some scenes that were added are crucial to character development, and to just plain moving the plot forward. The movie makes a lot more sense now. Strange to see so many new cultural touchstones this time around too: Robot-Maria as "whore of Babylon" (never noticed that before), the worker city flooding like something out of Male Fantasies, and oh! that Gernsback Continuum architecture... The whole event was a Pynchonian nerdgasm.

 

The musical performance was nothing short of amazing, a "shoegazer/post-rock" ensemble made even better by the cathedral acoustics. I said it before and I'll say it again: this was a big deal.