Akira Kurosawa

Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude and “genre bending” hipster, chose several films for Jonathan Lethem Selects, a month-long film series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. As the 2006/2007 chair of the Friends of BAM board, he chose High and Low, This Sporting Life, La Collectionneuse, The Lineup, Murder by Contract, Ruggles of Red Gap, Straight Time, Love Streams, and Shame.

Tonight at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m., it’s 1963’s This Sporting Life, a movie about a working class coal-miner-turned-star rugby player directed by Lindsay Anderson.

Lethem feeds us a heaping spoonful of pretension (and a name-drop for our own Andrew Sarris!) in this interview on the BAM site:

Matthew Buchholz: Looking at the films you selected for the series here at BAM, is there any thread connecting all of them?

Jonathan Lethem: Well, at the risk of the tautology, "the thread in the Jonathan Lethem Selects films is that Jonathan Lethem selected them," when I glance at the list that resulted I can't keep from thinking that the only thing those films all have particularly in common—apart from the excellence which makes me confident of thrusting them on other viewers—is that they form a kind of descriptive outline (like the arctic explorers standing in an arc around the submerged frozen spaceship in the Howard Hawks/Christian Nyby version of The Thing) around my cinematic obsessions."  read more »