Calendar: Week 2

April 6 - April 12

Margot at the Wedding
Noah Baumbach, 2007 - 91 min.

Writer and director Baumbach follows up The Squid and the Whale with another painfully accurate look at the strained relations of family and friends within New York’s intelligentsia. Margot (Nicole Kidman) takes her son to spend a weekend with her sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who is about to marry a whimsically erstwhile artist. Self-deprecating humor and hostile intra-familial ploys run rampant as Baumbach uses familiar tools to create a surprisingly fresh and entertaining story. Watch for Jack Black’s breakout artistic role. No, seriously. 35mm.

No Country for Old Men
Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007 - 122 min.

The Coen brothers have brought us everything from bowlers who pack serious heat to wood chippers that pack serious feet. And in their latest effort, which recently won Best Picture of the year at the Oscars, they disappoint neither in shock, nor in substance, nor in style. With beautiful cinematography at once reminiscent of old Westerns and consciously in contrast to them, the Coens retell Cormac McCarthy’s tale of the serial killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem at his terribly and unforgettably coiffed best). Josh Brolin delivers a breakout performance as Chigurh’s valiant foe. 35mm.

Showboat
James Whale, 1936 - 110 min.

Universal’s decision to assign a British director who’d made his name on Frankenstein and The Invisible Man to their lavish screen treatment of Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat aroused much skepticism. Whale, aided by the largest budget granted him to that time, strove to bring this panoramic ode to American popular culture to the screen with the utmost authenticity. Irene Dunne hated Whale, but few today would argue with the results: a stirring, expansive fusion of music and pathos. Paul Robeson’s rendition of “Ol’ Man River” is justly remembered as one of the high points of cinema. 16mm.

Ulysses
Joseph Strick, 1967 - 140 min.

Common consensus is that Joyce’s great novel is the very definition of the impossible adaptation: mammoth in scope, endlessly allusive in structure, and microscopic in its attention to detail both physical and psychological. It must have taken self-confidence bordering on hubris for award-winning documentarian Joseph Strick to set himself the task – and perhaps he even succeeds. Brilliant or demented, his dedication and vision are everywhere in evidence. Whether a grand experience of cinematic transformation or an instance of mid-brow kitsch, it’s unforgettable. 35mm.
Introduced by Assistant Professor Liesl Olson.

Beauty and the Beast
Jean Cocteau, 1946 - 96 min.

A romantic classic and one of the most deservedly popular French films of all time. It’s an enchanting and elegant adaptation of the classic fairy tale. A traveling merchant happens upon the castle of a hideously ugly beast (Jean Marais) with magical powers. When the beast sentences the merchant to death, his beautiful daughter (Josette Day) agrees to take his place. The lonely, tormented, beast initially disgusts her, but over time she gradually comes to feel love for him, and that love eventually transforms him. Disney stole many of Cocteau’s brilliantly inventive touches for its animated version of the same story.In French; subtitled. 35mm.

Peeping Tom
Michael Powell, 1961 - 101 min.

This masterpiece from director Michael Powell (The Red Shoes) was suppressed upon release due to its intimate and graphic engagement with the voyeuristic impulses implicit in filmmaking. Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm) was tortured by his scientist-father during childhood. As an adult, he works in a British film studio, but spends his off-hours serially killing women and recording their expressions of fear with his 16mm camera. Predictably clobbered by critics, Powell’s film led to his own downfall, but also survives as a testament to his uniquely profound wisdom regarding the nature of cinema. 35mm.

***Schedule Change*** Vámonos con Pancho Villa
Fernando de Fuentes, 1935 - 92 min.

During the mid-1930s Cárdenas sponsored efforts to elevate production standards of Mexican films: subsidizing a deluxe studio, giving filmmakers access to artillery, and investing one million pesos in the superproduction Vámonos con Pancho Villa. De Fuentes’s account of the Revolution is less than Glorious: the rural band of six leones who join Villa’s army gradually shrinks as each member meets an increasingly grisly and absurd death. Without any market outside Mexico, Vámonos con Pancho Villa tanked, though later it was judged the best and most serious film ever made in Mexico. In Spanish with English Subtitles. Archival 35mm.

King Kong
Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933 - 104 min.

Intrepid filmmaker Carl Denham takes his cast and crew to the remote Skull Island. Star Jack Driscoll’s love for the starlet, Ann Darrow, is established early on, but Driscoll soon finds he’s not alone in his feelings. The island’s natives worship a giant gorilla, and capture the starlet as an offering. While Driscoll and the others venture to save her, King Kong battles with the scaly, prehistoric foes. Darrow is rescued from Kong, but the ape has developed a love for her that brings the story to its sky-high climax. King Kong is engrossing, and a beautiful example of early stop-motion animation. 16mm.

Atonement
Joe Wright, 2007 - 130 min.

This adaptation of Ian McEwan’s acclaimed novel, with an Oscar winning score and starring beauties Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, is a passionate and painful story of injustice, guilt, love and lust. In 1935 England, a young girl accuses her sister’s lover of a despicable crime he didn’t commit. While she’s completely incapable of understanding the ramifications of her actions, their effects are still devastating. The film follows the lovers’ (Knightly and McAvoy) attempts to undo the damage and find happiness together, while the young girl comes of age in war-torn London. 35mm.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Tim Burton, 2007 - 117 min.

It’s hard to imagine typical movie-musical fans enjoying the dissonant score and violent plot of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Sweeney Todd, a work more frequently performed these days in opera houses. But the film works, thanks to Burton, no stranger to the macabre himself. Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter dramatically reinvent the roles of the titular barber and his assistant, who slit customers’ throats and bake them into pies, while remaining true to Sondheim’s original. 35mm.