Subtitle fever

Plus, Haskell Wexler and Sundance

Okay, you've already broken your millennium vows of cut-down-on-smoking, only-safe-sex, and reaching out with a palm branch to problematic ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends. Is there any way to atone for such a quick collapse of character? Yes, my friend, I offer a simple way to make your already-crummy year 2000 right. Everything will turn karmically copacetic if you make and carry through on the following resolution: I WILL ATTEND LOTS OF FOREIGN-LANGUAGE MOVIES WITH SUBTITLES.

This is not a joke, gentle reader. In the US, subtitled films are truly madly deeply a vanishing species. At one time, seven percent of American box office came from films in languages other than English. The latest figure: a dire 0.7 percent. Distributors turn away from films by major directors from France, Germany, and Russia, and there's not a chance for pictures from "peculiar" countries like, say, Poland or Holland.

What happened? The common wisdom is that it's young people who have dumbed down, who, except for a goofy night at a Hong Kong programmer, have turned 100 percent USA-centric, and who are too lazy, or too disinterested, to deal with subtitles. My own observations are, unfortunately, in line with the above. During a year of programming the Harvard Film Archive, I learned that practically the only foreign-language films guaranteed to attract undergraduates (or, for that matter, Harvard film-production students) are cult head trips like Wings of Desire and Solaris. Alas, I've been to the Brattle on those depressing, barren nights when a masterpiece of world cinema is revived for an audience half-dead, half-asleep.

Where are the kids? Am I totally unfair? I'd love to hear from youthful readers, those who break the stereotype and, perhaps even more, from those who shun films from foreign lands: assuming you are smart and educated, please tell the Phoenix what keeps you away from subtitled movies? You can reach me at gpeary@world.std.com.

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The Sundance Channel in January is a particularly right-on month: 85 films are airing that have played at the Sundance Film Festival, in a series that reaches back to Brookline resident Ross McElwee's 1987 documentary road comedy Sherman's March (January 15 and 28). Also, four films from the 1999 Sundance Festival are getting their TV premieres:

Nancy Savoca's The 24 Hour Woman (January 28 and 31). This all-over-the-place examination of professional women and the baby question stars Rosie Perez as the work-obsessed producer of a vapid morning talk-variety show who suddenly faces pregnancy and the travails of having an infant while devoted to a Type-A schedule. Meanwhile, the program's producer is thrilled: the pregnancy can be tracked on the program, and the baby is due during sweeps!

Fernando Pérez's Life Is To Whistle (January 23 and 29). Three people in today's Havana, connected by magic realism. There's enough poetry here for a half-dozen movies, and it's surely Pérez's courageous insistence on a non-feel-good conclusion that kept this multi-prize festival winner from a Miramax pick-up.

Julian Goldberger's Trans (January 14, 18, 22, 26, 20). This hard-nosed little film by a talented new director follows the escape route, through the Everglades and beyond, of a bruised adolescent who has dashed away from a Florida prison for under-18 detainees. The well-handled cast are seedy non-professionals.

Andrew Shea's The Corndog Man (January 21 and 25). My favorite, a grotesque comedy shot in South Carolina concerning a chubby-bottomed bozo of a boat salesman (Noble Willingham in a robust, flamboyant performance worthy of Flannery O'Connor) who is suddenly hounded by a telephone voice threatening to reveal his insidious racist past. Shea can direct and edit, and he can write inspired Southern trash dialogue: "You ain't got enough sense to pour piss out of a boot."

A basic cable guy, I don't get the Sundance Channel. I could by dialing 1-800-SUN-FILM.

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Haskell Wexler has been one of Hollywood's premier cinematographers (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Bound for Glory), but he's also a radical film director, whose independent feature Medium Cool (1969), shot with his actors thrust among Mayor Daley's rioting Chicago police, remains an essential document of the political 1960s. Wexler has never cooled, and he's back now with a rousing agit-prop, Bus Riders Union (January 19 through 24 at the Harvard Film Archive), which he directed and photographed on video. It traces the heroic four-year struggle in LA to make the Metropolitan Transit Authority take notice of the eroding rights of the city's "public-transportation-dependent," the 91 percent of that populace -- overwhelmingly poor and minority -- who ride the buses.

Or try to ride the buses. If they don't break down. If they ever come. If they aren't Third World overcrowded. The Bus Riders Union, a group of multicultural organizers, has been leafleting LA buses and marching on MTA meetings with its demands. Lower fares. Buses running into the nights. "No seats, no fares." Most important, the BRU wants the city to stop squeezing the bus system dry by transferring the bulk of money to the spiffy new rail system for suburban commuters, who are overwhelmingly white and wealthy.

Wexler arrives January 19 at the HFA with members of the Bus Riders Union. Watch out, Boston's MBTA!