PIPING HOT PFEIFFER

 

Beginning May 10

Metrograph In Theater

 

Nine-Film Spotlight on Michelle Pfeiffer Highlights Key Moments from the Indelible Screen Icon, Including 35mm Presentations of the Actress's Star Turns with De Palma, Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, and More

 

 

Opening with the silver screen icon's unforgettable performance as Catwoman in Tim Burton's deliciously dark Batman Returns (1996) screening on 35mm, Metrograph presents Piping Hot Pfeiffer, celebrating American actress Michelle Pfeiffer as a decades-strong tour de force of modern Hollywood cinema, beginning tonight on May 10 at Metrograph In Theater.

 

“She’s so crystalline in her beauty,” Pauline Kael wrote of Michelle Pfeiffer in 1989, “that people may not recognize what a talented actress she is.” In fact, by the late ’80s, Pfeiffer had already begun pulling in heaps of industry plaudits, and 35 years on it’s hard to argue that she’s been “slept on,” but the sheer breadth of her superlative cinematic output is still worth marveling over—as this showcase proves. From her breakout role in Brian De Palma’s Scarface to her late ’80s/early ’90s golden age, encompassing roles in Dangerous Liaisons, Married to the Mob, The Age of Innocence, and beyond, a focus on a screen actress of startling range, actorly intelligence, and coiled force.

 

Titles include The Age of Innocence, Batman Returns, Dangerous Liaisons, Dangerous Minds, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Frankie and Johnny, Married to the Mob, Scarface, and The Witches of Eastwick.

 

Piping Hot Pfeiffer runs from May 10 to July, with select encore screenings to follow. 

 

#배트맨2 BATMAN RETURNS

dir. Tim Burton, 1992, 126 min, 35mm

 

Burton and star Michael Keaton’s first Caped Crusader film was a pop culture phenomenon; their second was no slouch at the box office itself, but an altogether spicier dish to serve to unsuspecting multiplex audiences: an unremittingly grim, gloomily gothic blockbuster featuring Danny DeVito as a grotesque Penguin, commanding a fleet of heavily armed flightless seabirds to raze Gotham City; a deliciously plummy Christopher Walken playing a corrupt industrialist who happens to share his name with the lead of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu; and an ideal foil/love interest for Batman/Bruce Wayne in the form of Michelle Pfeiffer’s slinkily SM-suited Catwoman, putting her stamp on the role for time immemorial.

 

#순수의 시대 THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

dir. Martin Scorsese, 1993, 139 min, DCP

 

One breathtaking composition follows another in Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece about social mores (and taboos) amongst New York’s viperous moneyed classes in late 19th-century New York, brought to life by an all-star lineup of craftspeople including cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, production designer Dante Ferretti, and composer Elmer Bernstein. In front of the camera there are Daniel Day-Lewis and Pfeiffer suffering beautifully as wealthy lawyer Newland Archer and Countess Ellen Olenska, the divorced pariah whom he yearns for; of Pfeiffer, Scorsese would later say she “can play conflict with her eyes and face better than almost any movie star.”

 

#위험한 관계 DANGEROUS LIAISONS

dir. Stephen Frears, 1988, 119, DCP

 

Pfeiffer shines in the role of the devout Madame Marie de Tourval, subject of a wicked wager between fellow pre-Revolutionary French aristocrats Glenn Close and John Malkovich, who has been tasked with seducing this unsuspecting prey. A crackling adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos’s novel, with a crisp, cutting screenplay courtesy Christopher Hampton, delivered by the dead game cast, which includes up-and-comers Uma Thurman and Keanu Reeves. “A first-rate piece of work by a director who’s daring and agile… It’s heaven, alive in a way that movies rarely are.”—Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

 

#위험한 아이들 DANGEROUS MINDS

dir. John N. Smith, 1995, 99 min, 35mm

 

Based on My Posse Don’t Do Homework, the autobiography of ex-Marine-turned-schoolteacher LouAnne Johnson, Dangerous Minds gives Pfeiffer the plum part of the tough, tenacious Johnson who, upon joining the faculty at a California high school, is faced with the difficult task of activating her classes of lethargic and hostile students, almost all of whom come from low-income homes. A ringing box-office success, this proudly melodramatic To Sir, with Love for the hip-hop ’90s made a triple platinum hit out of Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise.”

 

#전설적인 베이커 형제들/ 사랑의 행로 THE FABULOUS BAKER BOYS

dir. Steve Kloves, 1989, 114 min, 35mm

 

Working-class lounge pianist brothers Beau and Jeff Bridges find a new level of professional success—and new emotional complications in their lives—after adding sultry vocalist Pfeiffer to their act in Kloves’s romcom musical, lent an elegant sheen by the cinematography of Michael Ballhaus. “This romantic fantasy has a ’40s movie sultriness and an ’80s movie-struck melancholy. Put them both together and you have a movie in which ’80s glamour is being defined… When Pfeiffer (who does her own singing) delivers ‘Makin’ Whoopee’ while crawling over a grand piano like a long-legged kitty-cat, she rivals Rita Hayworth in Gilda.”—Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

 

#프랭키와 조니 FRANKIE AND JOHNNY

dir. Garry Marshall, 1991, 118 min, 35mm

 

Terrence McNally adapted his own breakout off-Broadway two-hander into this sassily charming vehicle for Pfeiffer and Al Pacino, triumphantly reunited eight years after sharing the screen in Scarface, here playing an emotionally brittle yet optimistic waitress at Manhattan’s Apollo Cafe and her new co-worker, an ex-con short order cook who takes her aback when he starts pitching woo to her. Transferring his two-act to the screen, McNally opened it up to the scenery of the city, while adding tasty supporting roles for Héctor Elizondo, Nathan Lane, and Kate Nelligan as the eponymous duo’s gum-snapping boy-crazy colleague.

 

#마피아의 아내 MARRIED TO THE MOB

dir. Jonathan Demme, 1988, 104 min, 35mm

 

When two-timing Long Island mobster “Cucumber” de Marco (Alec Baldwin) is bumped off during an extramarital tryst, his long-suffering wife, Angela (Michelle Pfeiffer), sees the chance for a new life and splits town… with besotted mafioso big Dean Stockwell and Matthew Modine’s FBI agent right behind her. An idiosyncratic, romantic tale of would-be self-reinvention set against an affectionately observed backdrop of offbeat Americana and an unexpected David Byrne score, and a wild ride of a road trip that concludes with a showstopping face-off in Miami Beach. Pfeiffer plays her mob moll part with the requisite big hair and no-bullshit ’tude, but at the same time lends the role a fund of humanity that goes beyond stereotypes, saying of it: “I didn’t want to do a parody… I tried to play it more as a homage.”

 

Please note that this 35mm print features Spanish subtitles.

 

#스카페이스 SCARFACE

dir. Brian De Palma, 1983, 170 min, 35mm

 

De Palma’s ultraviolent, ultra-quotable, ultra-colorful, ultra everything remake of Howard Hawks’s gangster classic is the crass flipside to The Godfather, a massively deranged and gleefully disreputable tale of the rise and plunging downfall of a Cuban immigrant turned Miami drug kingpin. Al Pacino throws himself into the title role with the fury of an angry Rottweiler, while Michelle Pfeiffer glowers gorgeously in her breakthrough role as his trophy wife. Featuring cinema’s second most shocking shower scene and a script by Oliver Stone, Scarface is the film of the Reagan ’80s.

 

#이스트윅의 마녀들 THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK

dir. George Miller, 1987, 118 min, DCP

 

The battle of the sexes takes a supernatural turn in this devilishly delicious adaptation of the John Updike bestseller of the same name, in which a trio of single women living in small-town Rhode Island (Pfeiffer, Cher, and Susan Sarandon) are seduced in turns by a mysterious stranger newly arrived in town (Jack Nicholson, giving peak Nicholson), a self-proclaimed “horny little devil” who unleashes their heretofore dormant capacity for witchcraft—and, to his great regret, their capacity for revenge. A fleet-footed and often hysterical sex comedy, directed with dash by Mad Max’s Miller, in his first production on American soil.

 

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