Not on DVD
With notable exceptions such as Skidoo or Song of the South, movies are dispensed by our digital culture with all the ease and care of the soft-serve “ice cream” at an Old Country Buffet. Glutted as we are with bits and bytes and the easy availability of what seems like every single piece of media ever conceived, it’s all too rare these days to encounter the rare or the forgotten. Here’s a hurrah, then, for archivist cinephiles like the folks behind the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art’s Sultry Cinema Series, which twice this month screens films you won’t find on Netflix. At today’s free shows, at 4:45 and 7:15 p.m., the Kemper (4420 Warwick, 816-753-5784) offers Alan Rudolph’s 1978 revenge drama Remember My Name, which, like almost everything else at the Kemper, presents a hard-eyed look at the fragmented nature of modern American life. The key difference between this and, say, Crying Giant: a cast that includes Anthony Perkins, Geraldine Chaplin and a very young Jeff Goldblum. Sometimes hallucinatory and often enlivened by the blues music of Alberta Hunter, Remember My Name is a chance to feel things that anyone who rents DVDs from McDonald’s never does: surprise and discovery.
