Skewering Mediocrity

Dan Zukovic’s “The Last Big Thing,” which the American Cinematheque’s Alternative Screen series presents tonight at 7:30 at Raleigh Studios, is a distinctly original and brilliant work, a corrosive skewering of the mediocrity swamping American life. Zukovic himself stars as Simon Geist, a wildly eccentric gadfly who lives with his devoted, frazzled girlfriend (Susan Heimbinder, very funny). He lives, by way of a comment on uniformity, in a house in one of those immense tracts 30 miles out of L.A. where all the structures, in the pink neo-Spanish style, are virtually identical.

It is Simon’s mission to interview people for his new magazine, the Next Big Thing, zeroing in on up-and-coming people in the arts and popular culture. Never mind that the magazine doesn’t exist; it’s but an excuse for him to tell the interviewees off in breathtakingly withering fashion. He figures that in this manner, he will gain a reputation that will turn him into the “last big thing” of the 20th century, but will this Geist really have his Zeit after all?

Typical of his weirdness is his obsession with his discovery that when peering at a chrome bullet-shaped commercial trash can--it creates the fun-house mirror distorting effect--he looks like the tormented man in Edvard Munk’s famous painting, “The Scream.”

It takes a while for Zukovic, who has been an actor, playwright and a maker of several short films, to develop a sense of pace, but “The Last Big Thing” hits its stride and heads in an unfalteringly imaginative and unexpected direction. (L.A. composer-musician Cole Coonce’s score contributes strongly to the film’s vitality.)

Zukovic is not only a visionary but also a terrific director of actors, including himself. Mark Ruffalo, as a hunky struggling actor, and Pamela Dickerson, as a beautiful model, prove to be not nearly as stupid or as defenseless as Simon assumes them to be.

While showing its smarts on its sleeve, “The Last Big Thing” is lots of fun, which cannot be said of Peter Greenaway’s “The Falls,” which the Cinematheque is screening Friday at 9 p.m. at Raleigh as part of its ongoing Greenaway retrospective. Anyone who endures the numbing 185 minutes of this 1980 work deserves a free pass to the entire series.

In “The Falls,” Greenaway tediously explores the effects of an unexpected catastrophe, referred to as a Violent Unknown Event or VUE, through capsule bios of 92 survivors, exactly the number of new languages generated by the calamity.

What really interests Greenaway is ornithology--it seems that VUE involved birds and humans in some weird way--and the creation of nonsense languages. While watching aerial shots of England and various reconstitutions of archival footage--and, at one point, merely pans of rows of mobile homes--we hear whimsical gibberish on the soundtrack. Sometimes, though, we get to see folks sitting at desks as they read the script out loud.

“The Falls” takes its title from the prefix “Fall,” added to the surnames of those survivors, spanning Falla to Fallwaste. A dry British sense of humor is mandatory.

“The Falls” will be preceded at 7:15 by the 44-minute “Death in the Seine,” in which Greenaway’s passion for visual filigree--images that are framed in one manner or another and frequently featuring inserted images and swaths of superimposed manuscript--finds one of its more effective expressions. In this speculation on death in the wake of the French Revolution, Greenaway contemplates 23 of the 506 corpses taken from the Seine between April 1795 and September 1801. (213) 466-FILM.

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“Pan African Visions ‘97” presents the documentary “Albert Schweitzer, The ‘Great White’ of Lambarene,” tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the James Bridges Theater in UCLA’s Melnitz Hall. It was unavailable for preview.

The 90-minute 1995 film will be followed by Dani Kouyate’s leisurely “Keita, the Voice of the Griot” (1995), which pulls us into the world of the African epic as an elderly griot tells a young boy the origin of his family name, explaining that Sundiata Keita was the 13th century founder of the mighty Mandingo empire.

So caught up is the boy in the tale, which takes days to tell--and which we see dramatized in flashbacks--that his schoolwork begins to suffer, suggesting a tug between a materialist present--the boy’s family is well-off--and a spiritual past. (310) 206-8170.

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In Paul Cox’s “Four Million Houseguests” (opening Friday at the 3-D Imax Theater in the Irvine 21 Megaplex at the Irvine Spectrum), an inventor grandfather introduces his 11-year-old granddaughter to a different world, one that can be seen only through the world’s highest-powered microscopes.

While off to Mongolia, the grandfather (voice of James Garner) leaves clues in his enchanting lakeside cottage that will lead young Elly (Charlotte Sullivan) to peer through his Rube Goldberg-like “Illuminator.”

With it, she discovers how even the most dreaded household bugs are things of astonishingly delicate beauty when they are seen super-super close.

This exquisite 45-minute film, envisioned by the distinguished Australian director and realized by an army of Imax technicians, heightens an appreciation of how amazing the universe really is. It is for audiences of all ages. (714) 832-IMAX.

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Let’s hope that at least the cast and crew of “Underworld” had a good time making the film in the beautiful city of Vancouver, because it’s no fun watching it up there on the screen; it might work better on the stage. It’s an instance of the gangster picture at its most tediously allegorical and philosophical.

In it, an ex-con (Denis Leary) who has used his just-completed seven-year sentence to become a self-styled jailhouse psychotherapist is bent on avenging an attack on his gangster father that has left the older man comatose.

He has rounded up his longtime pal (Joe Mantegna), a shady nightclub operator who may or may not have been involved in that attack, and threatens to talk him to death.

After delivering the ex-con’s torrent of menacing word-play and jokes that only rarely are funny, director Roger Christian and writer Larry Bishop (who also appears in the film) let “Underworld” slide into a sentimental parable on mortality, redemption and forgiveness, especially between father and son, represented by Mantegna and his father (Abe Vigoda). Opening Friday at selected theaters.

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Now that you’ve seen or heard about “Grosse Point Blank,” you can catch up with the picture that inspired its title, John Boorman’s 1967 “Point Blank,” screening Friday at 7:30 p.m. in a retrospective of crime films. “Point Blank” is like brass knuckles in the teeth. The rapid pace, the restless camera, the quick cuts, the sudden spurts of violence leave you reeling. And there’s no getting steady on your feet before another knockout punch.

Lee Marvin stars as a man determined to get back the $93,000 he had been cheated out of by his best friend and two-timing wife, and he winds up making a one-man attack on a crime syndicate. Angie Dickinson, never better, is just the woman to tame such a man.

Set in San Francisco and Los Angeles, “Point Blank” demands total attention: Everything is up there on the screen, but the viewer must supply his own connections.

Also screening (at 5:20 p.m. and 9:20 p.m.) is Robert Aldrich’s classic 1955 take on Mickey Spillane’s “Kiss Me Deadly’.’