Strange Sinema 62: Cinema Sequences + Nut House Nuggets - Thur. Mar 21 - 8PM

Oddball Films presents Strange Sinema 62: Cinema Sequences + Nut House Nuggets, oddities from the Oddball Archives featuring new finds, buried junk, weird smut and miscellaneous moving image mayhem. This program features an oddball assortment of amazing cinema sequences, including feature parts, excerpts, trailers and “nut house nuggets" -weird spoofs and kooky cinema oddities all culled from the rarities in the Oddball Archives. Sequences include Federico Fellini’s infamous Steam Bath Sequence (1963) from 8 ½ starring Marcello Mastroianni; Reel 2 of Radley Metzger’s stylish adult film Barbara Broadcast starring Annette Haven, Jamie Gillie and CJ Laing; silent cinema trailers featuring Lon Chaney Sr. as Quasimodo in the Hunchback of Notre Dame (1925), and as a deformed phantom who haunts the Paris Opera House in Phantom of the Opera (1925) and Paul Leni’s expressionistic comedy horror film The Cat and the Canary (1927) inspired by Broadway stage plays and the cornerstone of Universal Pictures horror genre; excerpts, intros and vintage mouthwash, cigarette, and aspirin commercials from the legendary director’s television show Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962); nightmarish comedic scenes from Neil Simon’s A Prisoner of Second Avenue (1975) featuring unemployed ad executive Mel Edison (Jack Lemon) and wife Edna (Anne Bancroft) living in the heat of a NYC garbage strike; a bizarre 1950s spoof compilation of TV and commercials: The Nut House!! (1950s) featuring Gaines Horse Food (made from dogs), a woman telling time by beating a baby carriage with a dead fish and other oddities; Paramount Studios introduces their wacky comedic team of Martin & Rossi (1966) complete with glamour girls and eye-popping Technicolor; the very weird Universal Studios featurette Fraud By Mail (1944) focuses on bizarre dangerous mail order fraud: nose shapers, spine straighteners, eye mallets, pendiculators and more;  Isaac Hayes performs the most over-the–top spectacular version of Shaft (1972) ever at the 44^th Annual Academy Awards and two early silent films by cinematic pioneer Georges Méliès La Comedie et Magique de Méliès (B+W,1903) provide some of the first examples of fade-outs, dissolves, double exposures and other camera tricks.

Plus! a naked Marlboro cigarette ad-the strangest ever!

Date: Thursday, March 21 2013 at 8:00PM.

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 RSVP Only to: 415-558-8117 or programming

@oddballfilm.com

Learn Your Lesson...Scott Baio - Fri. Mar. 15 - 8PM

Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter bring you Learn Your Lesson...Scott Baio, the first in a series of programs highlighting the most ridiculous, insane and camptastic shockucational films and TV specials of the collection.  Round one of Learn Your Lesson features a triple dose of Afterschool Specials starring 80's teen heartthrob Scott Baio (Happy Days, Charles in Charge).  Watch little Scotty grow from a teen playing a young boy on the streets, to a young man playing a stoned and hilarious teen, to a full-grown man playing a High School kid with a drinking problem. We begin with Luke Was There (1976), an NBC Special Treat and one of the first credits on young Baio's resume.  The 16 year-old plays a boy forced to a life on the streets after his mother is hospitalized, and he's reduced stealing food stamps from old ladies.  In Stoned (1980), an ABC Afterschool Special, the now 20 year-old Baio plays sophomore Jack Melon, who's tired of being an invisible nerd and finds some new friends, self-confidence and a great sense of humor when he starts smoking pot. Strangers with Candy fans will delight in an eerily familiar outdoor rap-session with Jack's hip teacher.  And finally, a 24 year-old Scott plays a senior with a bright future, but a bad habit of drinking and driving in the CBS Schoolbreak Special All The Kids Do It (1984, directed by Henry "The Fonz" Winkler).  Will Scott Baio ever learn his lesson?  Will You?

Date: Friday, March 15th, 2013 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to programming@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117

Wanderlust - The Romance of Transportation - Thur. March 14 - 8PM

Oddball Films brings you Wanderlust - The Romance of Transportation, an evening of vintage 16mm films about our need to travel and the planes, trains and automobiles (and boats and motorcycles) that make it possible. From jet-setting promotional films to safety scare films to charming historical animation, this program is sure to move you! Get jet-setting with the sizzling trailer for the 1969 sleaze classic The Stewardesses and motoring with the original trailer for Easy Rider, and then get ready to see the world, Pan Am's World (1966) with this stylish and beautiful promotional gem. Peter Fonda and Evel Knievel teach us that motorcycle riding is Not So Easy (1973). Our neighbors to the North explore The Romance of Transportation in Canada (1952) in this whimsical Canadian mid-century animation with a dynamic jazz soundtrack.  The Scenemakers (1960) is one fashionable road-trip brought to you by Penney's and Monsanto with stylish highlights of America's most beautiful sights and outfits. Princess Cruises wants you to know how a cruise makes All The Difference in the World (1970's) and the grandiose narrator is willing to pound it into your head with the help of a staff and clientele in the shortest of short-shorts.  Take a miniature train ride with Charles and Ray Eames charming and visually astonishing short Toccata for Toy Trains (1957). And learn the history and visit the vintage haunts of our own iconic transportation in San Francisco's Ageless Cable Cars (1955).  Plus, vintage car commercials and so much more!  

Date: Thursday, March 14th, 2013 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to programming@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117

Wake Up and Smell the Morning: The Ritual and Routine of Breakfast - Thur. Mar. 7th - 8PM

Oddball Films and guest curator Lynn Cursaro present Wake Up and Smell the Morning: The Ritual and Routine of Breakfast featuring the most important reels of the day.  It's a smorgasbord of  films centered around the morning meal and its importance in our daily grind. Michael Caine happily shares screen time with freshly ground coffee and attempts seduction via expert kitchen technique in two deluxe excepts from Sidney J. Furie’s The IPCRESS File (1965). In All’s Fair (1938), the Cabin Kids let loose on a pancake contest with lots of music and hint of mayhem. A craving for warm buttery treats leads a girl on a fantastical countryside journey in a food sourcing fable, Waffles (1986). Harvesting sweet gold is a vanishing way of life in Maple Sugar and Syrup, a poetic Kodascope from the late 1920s. Rush Hour Service (1971) recasts the workday diner as a battleground requiring tactical planning. A Chocolate Sandwich? (1976) uses a beloved treat to explore the part bread plays in French life. And there’s MORE! Treats from the curator’s kitchen will include her notorious gingerbread.

Date: Friday, March 7th, 2013 at 8:00PM. 

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco 

Admission: $10.00, RSVP Only to: 415-558-8117 or programming@oddballfilm.com

The Eames Legacy - Short Films by Charles and Ray Eames - Fri. Mar. 8 - 8PM

Oddball Films presents The Eames Legacy - Short Films by Charles and Ray Eames. Among the finest designers of the 20th Century, the husband and wife team are best known for their groundbreaking contributions to architecture, furniture design, industrial design and manufacturing, but the Eames’ were also brilliant and inventive filmmakers, able to illustrate the most abstract concepts with readily understood images. The legacy of this husband and wife team includes more than 100 films produced between 1950 and 1982 that reflect the rich scope of their interests. This program includes Powers of Ten (1968), their most famous film about orders of magnitude; Tops (1969), a brilliant childlike anthropological film capturing spinning tops from different cultures and eras;  IBM Mathematics Peep Show (1961) is a succinct and poignant presentation of 5 separate mathematical concepts; Toccata For Toy Trains (1957) a marvelous celebration of antique toys; A Communication Primer (1953); The Image of the City (1969), a lyrical treatise on the relationship between photography and the urban landscape ; and House: After Five Years of Living (1955), the beautiful contemplation on the home they built for themselves and lived in till the end of their lives.   Noted for their furniture designs -- the "Eames chair" in particular is considered one of the most significant and widely recognized furniture designs of the 20th century. The Charles Eames Lounge Chair set a standard for comfort and simplicity in modern design. The chair is so important in modern furniture design that it has become a part of the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art. There is so much to say about the legacy of the Eames’s that an entire period has been named after them.

Date: Friday, March 8th, 2013 at 8PM

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco
Admission: $10 - Limited Seating RSVP to programming@oddballfilm.com or 415-558-8117

Trance Cinema Live - An Evening of Ritual and Ecstatic States - Fri. Mar. 1st - 8PM

Oddball Films presents Trance Cinema Live - An Evening of Ritual and Ecstatic States with live electronic accompaniment by Jakarta musician Iman Fattah. Oddball Films continues its series of ecstatic states and global rituals with a live cinesound presentation. Sherpa High Country (1977) documents the ecstatic three days of ritual in Nepal during the Mani Rimdu ceremonies celebrated each year by Buddhist Sherpas.  In Ma’Bugi: Trance of the Toraja (1970s), women dance ecstatically and men climb a ladder of knives in a trance ritual that functions to restore the balance of well-being to an afflicted village community.  Walbiri Fire Ceremony (1977) showcases a spectacular three-day Australian Aboriginal communal ritual of penance.  In A Balinese Gong Orchestra (1971), musicians showcase their mesmerizing rhythms.  In Trance and Ritual in Bali (1972), trance dances and ecstatic spirit possession are mixed with electronics by Iman Fattah and Tanka (1976) a fierce animated vision of ancient gods and demons in the Tibetan Book of the Dead pulsates and projects from still Tanka images.
Come early for a double screen, overlapping projection of the exotic curios Belles of the South Seas and Belles of Bali (1930s).

Date: Friday, March 1, at 8:00PM.

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street, San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating - RSVP $12.00 at the door to: 415-558-8117 or programming@oddballfilm.com

Signifying Nothing: Cinema of the Absurd - Thur. Feb. 28 - 8PM

Oddball Films and guest Curator Landon Bates bring you Signifying Nothing: Cinema of the Absurd, an exciting exploration of--you guessed it!--the absurdity inherent within the human condition.  For a sort of philosophical primer we'll begin our inscrutable screening with that ambassador of angst, that emissary of alienation, that duke of despair, that prophet of pointlessness: that’s right, it’s Albert Camus in Albert Camus: A Self Portrait (1971).  This film gives a glimpse of Camus's French-Algerian beginnings, an overview of his most important works, and features rare interview footage with the man himself; and, it will be appropriately succeeded by Sisyphus (1975), a mesmerizing animation of that symbolic struggle up the mountainside of life.  We'll then make a pit-stop in the mind of Eugene Ionesco, a worthy representative of the Theatre of the Absurd, with a dramatization of his play The New Tenant (1975), in which a simple-seeming man is revealed to be obsessed with his possessions, flooding his new apartment with a never-ending stream of furniture.  A piece of furniture also figures prominently in our next film--so much so that one might even call it the main character: this film is Roman Polanski's classic short, Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958), wherein two boys, with their beloved bureau in tow, wander the city streets wanting only to find a peaceful place in the din of the modern world.  Our concluding film features yet another existential outcast, namely Herman Melville's stubborn scrivener, in that fictive forbear of the absurdist genre: Bartleby (1969).  This soul-enlivening evening of fun-filled futility is not to be missed. 

 

Date: Thursday, February 28th, 2013 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP to programming@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117

“The divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of the absurd.”

- Albert Camus

More Oddball Oscar Obscurities - Thur. Feb 21 - 8PM

Oddball Films presents More Oddball Oscar Obscurities, an evening showcasing the finest animated and live action shorts ever to be nominated for an Academy Award.  With films from the 1940's through the 1970's, from tender coming of age portraits, to experimental animation to Pepe Le Pew, with a dash of dazzling Awards-show moments, this is one night the winner will be you!  Films include (and the Oscar went to...) The Golden Fish (1959) a charming film about a boy, his fish, his bird and a sneaky cat; Skater Dater (1965), the quintessential award-winning young love/sidewalk surfing film, (with a boss soundtrack by Davie Allen and the Arrows);  Leisure (1976), Bruce Petty’s Oscar-winning animated history of time spent at play; Chuck Jones unleashes his Lothario-skunk, Pepe Le Pew, in For Scent-imental Reasons (1949); Mel Brooks heckles experimental animation in the hilarious cartoon The Critic (1963); a scintillating insect excerpt from the pseudo-documentary The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971); Saul Bass' imaginative treatise on imagination,  Why Man Creates (1968); Isaac Hayes performs the Theme From Shaft in an eye-popping, over-the-top display of glitz from the 44^th Academy Awards show in 1972; plus one of the great awards-show moments as Jayne Mansfield knocks Mickey Rooney speechless at the 1958 Golden Globes.

Date: Thursday, February 21st, 2013 at 8:00pm

Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco

Admission: $10.00 Limited Seating RSVP toprogramming@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117