A Corporate ‘Target’

Christopher Wilcha’s 72-minute “The Target Shoots First,” which screens Saturday in the 9 p.m. show of the Midnight Special Bookstore’s bimonthly Documental program, is one of the most provocative documentaries the series has ever offered. Wilcha, whose major was philosophy, was hired by Columbia House, the mail-order CD giant jointly owned by Sony and Time Warner. He was made an assistant product manager of music marketing because of his knowledge of alternative rock at a time when Nirvana’s “Nevermind” came out of nowhere to become a huge seller. In any event, back in 1993, he started a video-camera diary from Day 1 of his new job, which quickly escalated when his immediate superior resigned. “The Target Shoots First” becomes an inside look at the contemporary corporate world, replete with power plays and fears of ageism, with Wilcha discovering tensions between the marketing executives on the 19th floor of a Manhattan skyscraper and the creative team on the 17th.

Charged with coming up with a new sales catalog designed to appeal to fans of alternative music, Wilcha and his youthful associates broke down walls and created a new magazine that was proving to be phenomenally successful when they received word of Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Having been hesitant from the start about committing himself wholly to a career he essentially had fallen into, Wilcha questions the value of being able to turn fans into consumers. “The Target Shoots First” has that edgy, irresistible shoot-from-the-hip immediacy that comes from recording events as they unfold. Wilcha manages to be blunt and critical without being heavy-handedly judgmental, yet is clearly a young man capable of reflection and concerned for values. He’s also a witty, amused observer of the human condition; music marketing’s loss is the documentary’s gain. However, for the moment, Wilcha is back at Columbia House, working in its Web marketing division to pay off the costs of attending California Institute of the Arts, where he earned his graduate degree in January. For information on the 7 and 9 p.m. shows: (310) 393-2923. The Midnight Special Bookstore is at 1318 Third Street Promenade, Santa Monica.

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LACMA’s “Spotlight on Bruce Weber,” the first retrospective of the famed photographer’s moving pictures, will screen Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., with Weber present to introduce the program Friday and to participate in a discussion of his work Saturday. Weber is renowned for his sensual and dramatic fashion photography featuring strikingly beautiful young men and women. Weber has twice ventured into documentaries, first with “Broken Noses,” (1987), a study of a young former boxer, Andy Minsker, who runs a Portland, Ore., boxing club for teens--it will close the series Saturday night--and “Let’s Get Lost” (1989), an equally caring portrait of the late jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, whose movie-star looks were ravaged by years of hard living. It opens the series Friday, along with some examples of Weber’s work in TV commercials and music videos, including “Blue Spanish Sky” (1991), featuring Chris Isaak, as handsome as any Weber model.

Weber clearly was captivated by the beauty of Minsker and Baker when young--the two had an uncanny resemblance to each other--but it’s the lesser-known, nine-minute “Backyard Movie” (1991) and the 15-minute “Gentle Giants” (1994) that are the most compelling. That’s because they are confessionals, in which Weber explores his homosexuality--his fascination with such divas as Elizabeth Taylor and Lana Turner, and adoration of screen hunks from Sterling Hayden to Guy Madison to Clint Eastwood and beyond. (He confides that at 20, the most important thing in the world to him was to look like Eastwood.) These two films--the first intercuts family home movies with a lithe, nude young man jumping on a trampoline--are lyrical, honest expressions of a gay sensibility. They screen Saturday at 7:30 p.m., followed by a work-in-progress presentation of “The Chop Suey Club,” which began as a four-year photographic record of Wisconsin farm boy Peter Johnson undergoing the transition from boyhood to manhood. LACMA is at 5905 Wilshire Blvd. L.A. (323) 857-6010.

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Superior artistically to “The Sheik” (1921), which established Rudolph Valentino as the screen’s definitive Latin lover, “The Son of the Sheik” (1926), screens at 1 and 7:30 p.m. on Saturday and 1 p.m. on Sunday at the Silent Movie Theatre, 611 N. Fairfax Ave., L.A., with live musical accompaniment by Michael Mortilla. The redoubtable Frances Marion adapted what proved to be Valentino’s final film from the E.M. Hull novel. It’s a heady, flamboyant tale of desert passion, easily derided and spoofed today but nonetheless full of vigor and dash, thanks to George Fitzmaurice’s spirited direction.

However, more than the original, the film unfortunately suggests strongly the possibility of a man taking a woman forcibly--and her enjoying it. As a period piece, the picture is fun but plays uncomfortably in this era of heightened sensibility. In any event, we find Valentino beguiled by a pretty dancing girl (Vilma Banky) with whom he has oasis trysts, whereas his father, the old sheik (also played by Valentino), wants to marry off his son to a cousin of his English wife (Agnes Ayres). In this pop entertainment from a past era, Valentino remains the eternal symbol of exotic glamour and romance--despite its archaic notions about sex. (323) 655-2520.

Erik von Wodtke’s “The Machines of Sex and Death” (Friday and Saturday at midnight at the Sunset 5 (8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood) is a rambling record of a downtown L.A. art happening involving Christian Ristow’s radio-controlled machines, which are designed to self-destruct or, in one instance, to engage in sexual combat. The documentary’s interviewer talks to Ristow and his crew just before the performance, and they describe, redundantly, what we’re about to see. What we’d prefer to know is how Ristow came to decide that “sex and death are the only things that really matter.”More probing questions of both the audience and the artist could not have hurt; as it stands, the film, which plays like an unedited tape of a segment from a nightly TV newscast, gives you the impression that you really had to be there to get anything out of the event. (323) 848-3500.

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Along with a revival of the recent, acclaimed Japanese film “After Life,” the New Beverly Cinema, 7165 Beverly Blvd., L.A., has brought back Hirokazu Kore-eda’s sublime 1996 release, “Maborosi” (concluding today). The film opens with a 12-year-old girl trying to persuade her elderly grandmother to come home with her, but the woman is determined to return to her native village, even though she may be entirely without funds. The girl’s mother later tells her not to worry--that it’s not her fault she couldn’t change her grandmother’s mind. We never do learn what happened to the old woman, but we soon discover this incident has been recurring in the dreams of the granddaughter, Yumiko (Makiko Esumi), now in her 20s. She’s the picture of contentment, living in Osaka in a small apartment over a store with her handsome factory-worker husband Ikuo (Tadanobu Asano), as easygoing as she is, and their baby son. Yet Yumiko has these dreams, and then, out of the blue, Ikuo lets himself be killed by a train. Yumiko’s mother takes charge, and, moving ahead in time, we see Yumiko and her son, now a toddler, on a train bound for a fishing village on the Sea of Japan to enter into an arranged marriage with Tamio (Takashi Naitoh), a young widower with a daughter a little older than Yumiko’s son. Tamio is just as good-looking and affable as Ikuo, Yumiko has made an ideal match (and knows it), and the couple’s two kids take to each other instantly.

But when Yumiko returns to Osaka for her brother’s wedding, she inadvertently learns a few more details about the last moments of her first husband’s life, and her delayed reaction to his shocking demise finally hits her hard. Even if she is not fully aware of it, she has at last embarked on a spiritual odyssey in an attempt to discover some meaning in Ikuo’s death. “Maborosi,” which means illusion or mirage, has the feel of a classic Yasujiro Ozu film. Koreda’s style isn’t as austere as the master’s--nor does it have any need to be--but Kore-eda shares with Ozu an understanding of the power of precisely composed images coupled with an innate sense of how long to hold a shot until it’s suffused with meaning. (323) 938-4038.