Spring 1999 (1)
Fri, Sat, and Sun, Jan 22,23,24 at 7 and 9:30 plus a
3:00 Sunday Matinee
LOLITA
With all that is truly scandalous in the movies these days - namely the dimwit
dramaturgy and the anything-for-a-buckism that passes for Hollywood entertainment
- it is something of a shock to realize that Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita still has
the power to offend. Proof is the book's new movie adaptation, directed by Adrian
Lyne, scripted by Stephen Schiff and starring Jeremy Irons as the passionate pedophile
Humbert Humbert, a man entranced by nymphets... As far as its subject matter goes,
this Lolita is shocking, all right, but it's not exploitative. Neither, of course,
was Nabakov's 1955 novel nor Stanley Kubrick's antic, brilliant 1962 movie version.
Lolita, in whatever form it takes, should be shocking. But this new movie incarnation
makes its appearance during a particularly schizophrenic time in our culture.
Despite all the media attention given over to the sexual exploitation of children,
there has never been another time when the image of the nymphet has been so fawned
over and commercialized. Nymphets peer out at us, posse-like, from fashion pages
and movie screens. What in the end may prove shocking to audiences of this new
Lolita is not so much its cast of characters as the apparent seriousness of its
intent. (Peter Rainer, Westword)
UK, 1997. Color, in English. 137 mins.,
35mm.
Wed, Jan 27 at 7 and 9pm Only!
MA VIE EN ROSE
Ma Vie en Rose is the first film of a very talented, funny and tender filmmaker
named Alain Berliner. Its extraordinary hero, 7-year-old Ludovic, is a boy quite
certain that when he grows up he will be a girl. His unshakable conviction, not
to mention his habit of dressing in girl's clothing, throws his suburban bourgeois
parents into a tizzy. Their son's difference is a problem for everyone but Ludo
himself, the calm center of a storm that shakes the family, and their angry scandalized
community, to its roots. The issue of gender is a delicate one, and Berliner and
screenwriter David Ansen navigate this tricky terrain with charm, tact and sudden
bursts of whimsy as the film takes us inside Ludo's candy-colored, TV-inspired
fantasies. Young Georges Du Fresne may be the most enchanting child actor to come
along in years. Ludo's story, told with the bold strokes of a fable, will break
your heart and make you smile, often at the same time. (David Ansen, Newsweek)
Belgium, 1997. Color, in French with
English Subtitles. 88 mins., 35 mm.
Thurs and Fri, Jan 28 and 29 at
7 and 9pm.
LOVE IS THE DEVIL
When George Dyer, amateur boxer and part-time burglar, breaks in through the skylight
of a painter's studio in swinging London, it is his misfortune that the artist
is most definitely in residence. "Take your clothes off," says Dyer's intended
victim, who turns out to be the painter Francis Bacon, "come to bed, and you can
have whatever you want." So begins the tortured love affair between Bacon, the
late 20th century's premier visual interpreter of charnel house romance, and the
younger man who would become his muse, model, and millstone. Dyer's three roles
make up a miserable triptych in Love Is the Devil, a first feature by British
writer-director John Maybury... Though Maybury was denied the use of Bacon's paintings,
Love Is the Devil evokes the artist's visual signature with astonishing and disturbing
results: actors' faces, distorted by barroom mirrors and cracked windows, morph
into twisted masks; their bodies seem to be ripped open, as if consumed by fire...
Despite an uncomfortable intimacy with Bacon's visions, Love Is the Devil is in
the end, as the subtitle says, "a study for a portrait" of a maddeningly elusive
artist, who recognizes the destructive demon within himself and then watches,
transfixed and delighted, as the beast runs wild. (Justine Elias, Village Voice)
UK, 1998. Color, in English. 90 mins.,
35mm.
Sat and Sun, Jan 30 and 31 at 7
and 9:15 plus a 3:00 Sunday Matinee.
THE EEL
The Eel is Japanese master Shohei Imamura's first film in eight years (and the
movie that shared the Palme d'Or with Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry at the
1997 Cannes Film Festival). Violence is not verbal, nor sex consensual, in Imamura's
films - his wildly sensationalist oeuvre is populated by a raunchy assortment
of killers, prostitutes, and pornographers. ("I am interested in the lower part
of the human body and the lower part of the social structure" is the one-sentence
manifesto that emblazons the Cinematheque Ontario's recent monograph on his work.)
The Eel's pre-titled prologue is a movie in itself. Tipped off by an anonymous
letter, the innocuous salaryman Takuro - played by Koji Yakusho of Shall We Dance?
- returns home early from an all-night fishing trip and, catching his wife in
flagrante, stabs her to death. Eight years later, the wife-killer is paroled from
prison, along with pet eel, and sets up shop in shop in some obscure corner of
Japan... Ferocious yet gentle, its tone shifting once more to gangster drama and
then black comedy, The Eel concludes with a lunatic yet symmetrical turn of events
that culminates in an unexpectedly hallucinatory and touching ending. Ultimately,
The Eel is the unconscious made tangible. (J. Hoberman, Village Voice)
Japan, 1998. Color, in Japanese with
English subtitles. 117 mins., 35mm.
Wed, Feb 3 at 7 and 9pm only!
BEAUMARCHAIS L'INSOLENT
One can see why the veteran director Edouard Molinaro (best known for his comedies,
especially La Cage au Folles I and II) would have gone for Beaumarchais as a subject.
In fact, picturesque as the hero's adventures may seem, the real Beaumarchais'
life was much more fantastic than that depicted in the film, which leaves out
copyright lawsuits, allegations that he murdered his first wife (whose name Beaumarchais
took), harp lessons for the king's daughters, and arms dealing in Holland. The
decision to simplify was, however, a wise one, and indeed Beaumarchais' problem
is whether it wants to show its multi-faceted hero Beaumarchais as playwright,
political activist, philanderer or opportunist. In the end, the film opts for
the pleasing myths of eighteenth century France - as the cradle of revolution
culture and libertinage - all rolled into one character, played by the gifted
Fabrici Luchini... Connoisseurs of well-crafted costume dramas will find much
pleasure in Beaumarchais (decors and costumes are glorious) and should rush to
see it in the cinema. (Ginette Vincendeau, Sight & Sound)
France, 1996. Color, in French with
English subtitles. 100 mins., 35mm.
Thurs and Fri, Feb 4 and 5 at
7 and 9:30pm
A SOLDIER'S DAUGHTER NEVER CRIES
The movie is told through the eyes of Channe, a girl whose father is a famous
American novelist. In the 1960's, the family lives in Paris, on the Ile St. Louis
in the Seine. Bill Willis (Kris Kristofferson) and his wife, Marcella (Barbara
Hershey), move in expatriate circles ("We're Euro-trash"), and the kids go to
a school where the students come from wildly different backgrounds. At home, dad
writes, but doesn't tyrannize the family with the importance of his work, which
he treats as a job ("typing is the one thing I learned in high school of any use
to me"). There is a younger brother, Billy, who was adopted under quasi-legal
circumstances, and a nanny, Candida, who turns down a marriage proposal to stay
with the family. All of this is somewhat inspired by fact. The movie is based
on an autobiographical novel by Kaylie Jones, whose father, James Jones, was the
author of From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line and Whistle... The movie was
directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant, from a screenplay by
their longtime collaborator, the novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. [A Soldier's Daughter]
is one of their best films. (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times)
UK, 1998. Color, in English. 124 mins,
35mm.
Sat and Sun, Feb 6 and 7 at 7 and
9pm plus a 3:00 Sunday Matinee
THE WIZARD OF OZ
Nothing could be more welcome than Warner Bros.' reissue of MGM's 1939 The Wizard
of Oz. A work of almost staggering iconographic, mythological, creative and simple
emotional meaning, at least for American audiences, this is one vintage film that
fully lives up to its classic status and should play with outstanding success
to contemporary audiences of all ages. Happily, Warners has done a first-rate
job in technologically reproducing and enhancing the look and sound of the picture.
The initial black-and-white Kansas section has been printed in an attractive,
subtle sepia, and the special effects involved in creating the twister are outstanding
even by today's standards. On a dramatic level, these early sequences depicting
Dorothy's farm life and the characters around her possess an impressive economy
and generate a surprising amount of feeling on their own. The moment when Dorothy
opens the door on the riot of color that is Munchkinland still represents one
of the great visual coups in the history of American cinema, and leads to the
extended musical sequence involving the little people that has no known equivalent;
even while reveling in the fabulous music, clever lyrics, berserk art direction
and costume design, and amazing faces and voices on display, film-wise viewers
will no doubt also ponder the sheer perversity of the scene's conception as well
as the real-life challenges that went into finding all these pint-size performers.
(Todd McCarthy, Variety)
US, 1939. Color, in English. 101 mins.,
35mm.
Wed, Feb 10 at 7 and 9:15pm
only!
GÉNÉALOGIES D'UN CRIME
Director Raul Ruiz along with his co-writer Pascal Bonitzer center Généalogies
D'un Crime on actual events of a Viennese child psychologist who said that our
personalities were developed by the time we turned five. She also predicted that
her toddler nephew would become a murderer and indeed he did kill her later in
his life. Several times throughout the film, a poem is read aloud about how a
man fell in love with the ghost of a woman he killed and later the ghost killed
him. This sets the film's circular kharmic direction. Catherine Deneuve plays
Solange, a lawyer who takes on a case right after the death of her young son.
The case consists of a young man named Rene who killed his famous psychologist
aunt named Jeanne Higgins. While investigating the murder, Solange stumbles on
Jeanne's journal of Rene's sordid life and soon Solange loses herself in Jeanne's
persona... Like a precocious kid obsessed with games, Director Raul Ruiz circles
so quickly and so deftly around his characters that audiences must give their
utmost attention to appreciate the crazy repercussions of each fleeting scene.
The film is perfect for Catherine Deneuve fans who loved her in Roman Polanski's
Repulsion and Luis Bunuel's Tristina... Like the Addams Family meets Lars Von
Trier's The Kingdom, Généologies D'un Crime is a hilarious yet disturbing
comedy with a gothic tone. (Blue Velvet, Movie Magazine International)
France, 1997. Color, in French with
English subtitles. 113 mins., 35mm.
Thurs and Fri, Feb 11 and 12 at 7pm
only!
GONE WITH THE WIND
The epic love story set against the Civil War returns to the big screen with a
restoration that utilizes Technicolor's new, state-of-the-art three-strip dye
transfer process. The new prints revive the vivid color and hues which made Gone
With the Wind such an epic event in film history. In addition, 12 minutes of the
film's negative have been digitally restored to eliminate scratches, photochemical
smudges and other imperfections. The film has remastered sound and is being presented
with Max Steiner's original music composed for the audience's entrance into the
theater, intermission and exit. Gone With the Wind will also be projected in its
original aspect ratio of 1:33 x 1, allowing audiences to see 1/3 more of the image
(on the top and bottom) than previous modern day moviegoers have experienced.
For movie fans everywhere, this will be a truly memorable motion picture event
that can only be experienced in a theater setting.
USA., 1939. Color, in English. 22 mins.,
35mm.
Sat and Sun, Feb 13 and 14 at 7
and 9:30pm, plus a 3:00 Sunday Matinee
HAPPINESS
Solondz's cinema of cruelty was introduced to the world with his 1996 indie hit
Welcome to the Dollhouse, a portrait of the tormented 12-year-old Dawn "Weiner
Dog" Weiner, which not only offered the antidote to 40 years of domestic sitcoms,
but remains the funniest, bleakest movie on the subject of suburban adolescence
ever produced in this country. This shopping mall Los Olvidados was not to every
taste (The New Yorker declared it "hateful"), and Happiness, which has already
strewn its share of psychological debris at the Cannes and Toronto film festivals,
is scarcely less splenetic. His ambitions having grown, Solondz creates in Happiness
a world of Weiner dogs. A portrait of an upper-middle-class, nominally Jewish
extended family, this is the Hannah and Her Sisters that the Woodman might make
today, with an explosive assist from the Farrelly brothers... Even more than in
his previous film, Solondz's style is clinical - if not pathological - in its
lack of inflection. Every character is simultaneously the prisoner of desire and
the victim of rejection. The mode is less black comedy than a particularly brutal
and impassive mode of psychological slapstick. Winner, International Critics'
Prize 1998 Cannes Film Festival. (J. Hoberman, Village Voice)
USA., 1998. Color, in English. 134 mins.,
35mm.
Wed, Feb 17 at 7 and 9pm only!
POST COITUM
Brigitte Rouan's first feature as director, Outremer ('90), dealt with familial
and romantic problems in a post-colonial setting. Her second feature is set in
Paris with the director herself taking the central role of Diane Clovier, a 40-ish
wife and mother who works for a small publishing house. She loves her lawyer husband,
Philippe (Patrick Chesnais), and her sons, and she's good at her work. But everything
falls apart when she meets 20-something Emilio (Boris Terral), a handsome, outgoing,
utterly charming and quite amoral type who works for an aid agency... Rarely has
amour fou been as graphically and deliriously played onscreen as in this handsomely
produced film, and Rouana herself participates in some fairly steamy sexual encounters
with her lithe co-star. Yet the film's in-depth analysis of this woman's needs
and long-repressed yearnings ensures that pic isn't exploitative. Diane may be
foolhardy, and blind to the hurt she's causing her family, but she's also terribly
human, and Rouan's fine, warts-and-all performance explores every nuance of the
character.
France, 1997. Color, in French with
English subtitles. 97 mins., 35mm.
Thurs and Fri, Feb 18 and
19 at 7 and 9pm
WORLD'S BEST COMMERCIALS 1997
The World's Best Commercials is a human zoological exhibit, a freak show of the
beautiful and the profane, at once profound and idiotic. The commercials are by
turns touching, scary, wacko, oblique, witty and lewdly hilarious. The range of
products and messages run the gamut from Pepsi-Cola's loonily cruel "soap on a
rope" - an ad in which an ordinary guy imagines sharing a shower stall with supermodel
Claudia Schiffer - to a Dutch enigma made for an insurance company that features
U.S. President Bill Clinton and a nasty voodoo doll... Compiled annually by Toronto's
Ad-films, it is a slick showcase of the black arts of advertising, presenting
some of the most original and diverse commercials from around the globe. According
to Adfilms executive Keith Stinson, this compendium is designed primarily for
North American audiences and gives them a rare opportunity to see how products
and social messages are presented in foreign markets as far afield as Thailand,
Argentina, Finland and Krgyzstan. (John Haslett Cuff, The Globe and Mail)
Canada, 1997. Color, in English. 75
mins., 16mm.
Sat and Sun, Feb 20 and 21 at 7 and
9pm, plus a 3:00 Sunday Matinee
SLAM
The first time we see Ray Joshua, the young black hero of director Marc Levin's
impressive feature debut Slam, we get a vivid taste of the conflicting forces
that rule him... Like love Jones, last year's look at creative black twentysomethings
in Chicago, Slam tells the world that poetry is cool. It's not only cool, Ray
comes to believe, but it's a reason for being, a reason to get out and go straight.
Convincing an audience - any audience - of that in 1998 is a pretty tall order.
But Levin has chosen just the right actor to bring it off. On the screen, the
noted New York City performance poet Saul Williams embodies two Rays: The lean,
cat-quick one we first meet, full of sinew and wile, knows the ways of the street;
the starved-looking, acetic Ray we come to know later, artistic and vulnerable,
aspires to heaven. Even the timbre of his voice - an uncanny aural double for
the young Sidney Poitier - suggests transcendence. In his tortured journey from
one kind of "slam" (the city jail) to another (the poetry reading in a nightclub
that transforms his destiny), we find the saga of everyone who looks and looks
and eventually sees the light. (Bill Gallo, Westword)
US, 1998. Color, in English. 103 minutes,
35mm.
Wed, Feb 24 at 7 and 9pm only!
LA VIE DE JESUS
Bruno Dumont's first feature, a study of small-town boredom and desperation, adopts
the title of the most famous work by the unorthodox theologian Ernest Renan. This
1863 historicising of Christ's biography presents him as human, a great leader
around whom supernatural narrative have been spun. Dumon reveals himself as an
uncompromising new talent by sticking to the film title's invocation of Renan's
spiritual humanism. In an early sequence, twenty-year-old Freddy (an unemployed
epileptic) and his friends stand silently in a hospital room around the comatose
AIDS sufferer Cloclo until one of them seeks solace in a nearby biblical print
of the raising of Lazarus. It is the film's one explicit reference to Renan, who
considered the miracle a deliberate fraud. Cloclo does not rise from the dead...
La Vie de Jésus is centrally concerned with physical being and unrecognized
spiritual needs. Dumont emphasizes throughout the bodies of his protagonists and
their involuntary distresses and ecstasies. (Richard Falcon, Sight & Sound)
Winner of both the 1997 Prix Jean Vigo for best first feature and the International
Critics Prize, 1997 Chicago Film Festival.
French, 1997. In French, with English
subtitles. 96 minutes, 35mm.
Thurs and Fri, Feb 25 and 26 at 7
and 9:15pm
TOUCH OF EVIL -RESTORED PRINT
Touch of Evil, the project with which - some 16 years after Citizen Kane - the
42-year-old Orson Welles tried (and failed) to stage a Hollywood comeback, is
a movie of transcendent movieness and still-astonishing virtuosity... As re-edited
according to the Welles memo, the "restored" Touch of Evil is less transformed
than it is more itself. The credits have been removed from the justly celebrated,
four-minute, over-under-sideways-down opening crane shot. The Tamiroff scenes
are funnier, the soundtrack is additionally layered, the chronology is sharper...
Citizen Kane gave what would eventually be called "film noir" a new visual vocabulary
and narrative structure; Touch of Evil effectively rung down the curtain on one
of the most fertile movements in Americaan popular culture (as far as Hollywood
went, the next new move would be made by Alfred Hitchcock with Psycho.) Not for
nothing did Welles have Dietrich tell him, "Your future is all used up." (J. Hoberman,
Village Voice)
U.S., 1958. B&W, in English. 111
mins., 35mm.
Sat and Sun, Feb 27 and 28 at 7 and 9pm, plus a 3:00 Sunday
Matinee
GODS AND MONSTERS
Watching this marvelous adaptation of Christopher Bram's acclaimed novel is like
a filmic epiphany, a small but superhuman effort haunted by entrancing images
and exciting performances that filmmaker Bill Condon conjures up in his speculative
and seductive account of the final days of James Whale (played by Ian McKellen),
without question one of Hollywood's most welcomed (and, regrettably, later disenchanted)
additions in its golden age. As a bit of background, Whale's openly gay lifestyle
was long rumored to be the reason for his banishment just ten years after his
successful debut as director of Journey's End. (And, later, Frankenstein and The
Bride of Frankenstein.) However, in this fictionalization, we pick up years later
as an aging but dapper Whale leads a semi-reclusive life in a self-imposed exile,
his longtime personal relationship with MGM executive David Lewis (later a producer
at RKO) now ended on a seemingly friendly level, and his departure from his decade
in Tinseltown now more fully understood as a particular disenchantment from a
changing corporate leadership within the film industry. (Elias Savada, Nitrate
Online)
U.S., 1998. Color, in English. 105 mins.,
35mm.
Thurs and Fri, March 4 and
5 at 7pm only! Special Price: $4 stud./$5 gen.
MUSIC AND FILM - M2F
The Modern Music Festival '99 presents 8 short films in two evenings of screenings
and open discussions with filmmakers and composers. Music and Film explores the
integral nature of art music and experimental film and the subsequent landscape
they create. Print I (Thursday) begins with Stan Brakhage and composer James Tenney.
The duo speak about their more than forty-year collaboration as depicted by the
films Interim, Ellipsis..., and Christ Mass Sex Dance. Brakhage's film incorporating
the music of John Cage, In Between, is also screened. Print II (Friday) offers
a second night of screenings that include Phil Solomon's Remains to be Seen (music
of Charles Ives), and The Exquisite Hour (music of Ives and Renaldo Hahn, sound
design by Solomon). Russ Wiltse and Hobart Bell collaborate in the Boulder premiere
of Trilogy, blending the musical score of Charles Eakin, the poetry of American
Kenneth Patchen, and the lithographs of German artist, Paul Wunderlich. The electronic
music score of John Drumheller merges with the visual images of Robert Schaller's
A Trip to the Beach in this brief set of three vignettes. Five filmmakers and
three composers will be on hand for one-on-one discussions with audience members
in this Modern Music Festival first. The festival is dedicated to the creative
works of living artists bringing together
Sat and Sun, March 6 and 7 at 7 and 9:15pm, plus a
3:00 Sunday Matinee
CELEBRATION
Though it dedicates itself to avoiding directorial egotism, in accordance with
strict rules of the Danish filmmakers collective known as Dogma 95, Thomas Vinterberg's
Celebration is still a virtuoso feat. Five years out of film school and colosally
assured, Mr. Vinterberg strips away the conventions of ordinary filmmaking (as
per the group's manifesto) and furiously devises new, unfettered ways of telling
a story... Dogma 95, in brief: Look, Ma, no genre stories or superficial action.
No special lighting or extra sounds. No tarting up the location with props; no
optical tricks; no camera work that isn't hand-held. No black-and-white or flashbacks.
And for the director, goodbye to an actual credit and so-called personal imprint.
"My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings," say
the group's Vows of Chastity. "I swear to do so by all the means available and
at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations." The Celebration,
which easily accommodates allusions to both Cries and Whispers and The Godfather,
features a large, credible cast... They and Mr. Vinterberg (who wrote the screenplay
with Mogens Rukov) suceed dizzyingly well in making this a party to remember.
(Janet Maslin, The New York Times) Winner of the Special Jury Prize,1998 Cannes
Film Festival.
Denmark, 1998. Color, in Danish with
English subtitles. 105 mins., 35mm.