Palmer Lipcon Auditorium
Palmer Museum of Art, Penn State

Thursdays at 7 p.m.
The "Come as You Are" film series and coffee hour, supported by The Knight Foundation as part of a grant from the Centre County Community Foundation, is a arts-oriented entertainment alternative for University and local communities. The films are free, and most have never played in local theatres. February's "Come as You Are" series, which coincided with Black History Month programs and events, included films by Spike Lee and the African-American silent film director Oscar Micheaux. April's schedule features the instant cult classics American Movie (1999) and Radio Head: Meeting People is Easy (1999). A complete listing follows.

April 5, 2001
Basquiat (1996, 108 min.)
The first theatrical film about an American painter, Basquiat is the story of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat told by his contemporary and friend, Julian Schnabel. The film traces Basquiat's voyage from his early days sleeping in a cardboard box in New York's Tompkins Square to the esteemed position he assumed in the history of modern art before his death in 1988 at the age of twenty-seven.

April 12, 2001
Radiohead: Meeting People is Easy (1999, 98 min.)
Where most rock documentaries simply record concerts and the daily grind of the road, here filmmaker Grant Gee's lenses focus on an important though less well chronicled aspect of the big-time music business: the PR tour. With Super 8 and hand-held video cameras Gee followed the British band Radiohead on its 1997-1998 world tour for an unsettling glimpse of countless photo sessions, vapid interviews, and tedious press junkets. The San Francisco Examiner praised the film as "Kubrickian in its atmospheric melancholy, foreboding disorientation and technical mischief."

April 26, 2001
American Movie (1999, 107 min.)
Chris Smith's brilliant documentary of the trials and tribulations of two would-be filmmakers in Menominee Falls, Wisconsin, and the making of their 35-minute epic Coven, which will be shown after American Movie as an added bonus.