Introducing Jorge, the film-obsessed hero of “A Useful Life” (2010), part of the “Global Lens 2011” series at the Museum of Modern Art.
He’s 45 and still lives with his parents. For a quarter of a century he’s been a programmer — and devoted employee — at Cinemateca Uruguaya in Montevideo, the kind of theater I’d frequent. He also has a radio show devoted to movies. Clearly, his life is obsessed with cinema — the good stuff, not Hollywood junk.
Then the unthinkable happens. The art house loses its sponsor and shuts down (in the middle of a Manoel de Oliveira retro, no less), leaving Jorge (played by real-life critic Jorge Jellinek) out of work. What happens next might surprise you.
The film is one of nine features unreeling in the Global Lens series, which opens Thursday with a week’s run of “A Useful Life,” directed by Federico Veiroj. In addition to Uruguay, the nations represented are Bosnia-Herzegovina, China, Argentina, India, Georgia, Brazil, Iran and that hotbed of cinema, Kyrgyzstan.
The MoMA showcase runs through Jan. 28. Details: moma.org.
*Take a walk on the wild side with Shade Rupe’s new book, “Dark Stars Rising: Conversations From the Outer Realms” (Headpress).
It’s a collection of 27 interviews Rupe conducted over 24 years with “unique free-thinking artists.”
One is Divine, John Waters’ favorite drag queen. A rare photo shows Divine (born Harris Glenn Milstead), out of drag, floating on his back in a swimming pool.
Other subjects include underground filmmaker Jim VanBebber (“The Manson Family”), avant garde programmer Johannes Schonherr, confrontational performance artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Fassbinder protege Udo Kier, “Enter the Void” provocateur Gaspar Noé and bad-boy actor Crispin Glover.
Incidentally, Schonherr was profiled in the very first Cine File column, way back in April 1996.
*Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 epic “Battleship Potemkin” is often listed as one of the greatest films of all time, and its Odessa Steps sequence ranks among the most famous scenes in cinema. (In 1987, Brian De Palma paid homage to the scene in “The Untouchables.”)
On Friday, Film Forum (Houston Street, west of Sixth Avenue) begins a one-week run of a restored print of Eisenstein’s classic, which was inspired by the 1905 rebellion of the crew of the Russian battleship against their Tsarist officers. Details: filmforum.org
V.A. Musetto is film editor of The Post;
vam@nypost.com