The hip Japanese film “All About Lily Chou-Chou” (2001) didn’t do as well as it should have when it played here last July.
Now, thanks to the pioneering Two Boots Pioneer Theater (Avenue A and Third Street in the East Village), the tale of teen angst is getting a second chance – a one-week revival starting on Wednesday.
Director Shunji Iwai zeroes in on 14-year-old Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara), who escapes the unhappiness of family and school life in a small town – especially a sadistic bully who extorts money from him – by losing himself in the music of a pop diva named Lily Chou-Chou.
At two and a half hours, “Lily” is a tad indulgent. Yet anybody who suffered at the bottom of the high-school popularity totem pole (like Cine File) will sympathize with the put-upon Yuichi.
The film has a young, colorful look befitting Iwai’s roots as a music-video director.
And the soundtrack nicely blends pop with, unexpectedly, the classical work of French composer Claude Debussy.
Info: (212) 254-3300.
* Speaking of hip Japanese flicks, “Dead or Alive: Final” (2002), the last part of a trilogy by ultra-cool Takashi Miike, bursts into the Cinema Village (12th Street, east of Fifth Avenue) on Nov. 29.
It’s the year 2346 and an oppressive dictator has made the use of a birth-control drug mandatory, setting off a revolt. Stay turned.
* The Museum of Modern Art has moved its exhibits to Queens while its Midtown building is getting a major facelift.
But the film program is staying in Manhattan, at the Gramercy Theater (East 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue).
Tomorrow at 6:15 p.m. will be a rare screening of “Prix de Beaute” (1930).
Fresh from her triumph in Berlin with “Pandora’s Box” and “Diary of a Lost Girl,” 22-year-old Louise Brooks – at the peak of her fame and power – went to Paris to make this, her last European film.
She would return to Hollywood for a series of minor roles leading to her giving up the screen altogether in 1938.
Even after more than 70 years, Augusto Genina’s “Prix de Beaute” is beautiful and powerful, thanks mainly to Brooks.
As Lucienne Garnier, the Parisian office worker whose victory in the Miss Europe beauty contest leads to tragedy, Brooks is almost constantly on screen, the camera fixated on her one-of-a-kind face.
Perhaps only Garbo could have carried it off so well. The finale is a knockout.
MoMA will be showing the silent version, with French intertitles and simultaneous English translation.
Info: http://www.moma.org.
* As luck would have it, one of Brooks’ German goodies, G.W. Pabst’s “Diary of a Lost Girl” (1929), unreels Wednesday at BAM Rose Cinemas in Brooklyn; (718) 636-4100.
V.A. Musetto, The Post’s filmeditor, can be e-mailed atvam@nypost.com