Calendar: Week 4

April 20 - April 26

Charlie Wilson's War
Mike Nichols, 2007 - 97 min.

Tom Hanks is Texas congressman Charlie Wilson, who, with help from a disgruntled CIA operative and a fundamentalist Christian, succeeds in arming Afghani insurgents against the Soviets. Wilson is that rarity of rarities, a red-blooded American in habit and address with a liberal heart of gold. Whether this portrait is accurate or not, the politics of this farce are easy to agree with, if a little too narrow to embrace. Nichols seeks to expose the whim and pettiness behind politics, while always keeping his caricatures tasteful and his statements lighthearted. 35mm.

There Will Be Blood
Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007 - 158 min.

Darker than billowing smoke, but conscious of the modern, Blood dispenses with the psychological nicety of an Horatio Alger story and tells us how the clashes between capitalism and religion, work and family, can drive a man mad. Daniel Day-Lewis delivers his Oscar-winning performance as Daniel Plainview, a California oilman whose gravelly voice and rotten demeanor evoke John Huston’s landmark performance as Noah Cross in Chinatown. With strong work from a stellar Paul Dano and a subtle Ciaran Hinds, this thriller drinks your milkshake. It drinks it up! 35mm.

One More River
James Whale, 1934 - 90 min.

The most handsomely British film ever made in Hollywood and perhaps the most unjustly overlooked film of Whale’s career, One More River was elegantly adapted from the last novel of Galsworthy’s Forsynthe Saga. It treats the platonic relationship that Diana Wynyard begins on a cruise ship with Frank Lawton after being brutalized by her husband Colin Clive. The divorce trial that ensues is among the most exacting and least histrionic in the cinema, aptly condemning the puritanism of the British legal system. One More River typifies the kind of mature storytelling that the Production Code soon snuffed out. 35mm.

Christabel
James Fotopoulos, 2001, 74 min.

A rendering of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, Christabel presents itself as a kind of internal travelogue, following the titular character in her relationship with another woman. Fotopoulos wrote, ‘One of the reasons I like that poem is that it’s so interior – it’s like a barrage of imagery close to the type of fragmentation that I try to do in my movies,’ and said, ‘One way most adaptations fail is they focus on one aspect of something. But it’s impossible to focus on one aspect of anything. You have to head in, and take on all the aspects.35mm.

Jour de fête
Jacques Tati, 1949 - 79 min.

Among the most important talents to emerge in the postwar period is the great actor/director/comedian Jacques Tati. In this, Tati’s first feature, he stars as a bicycle-riding mailman in a quaint, provincial village in central France. While watching a newsreel at a Bastille Day fair, he seizes on the bright idea of modernizing the post office to conform with American-style standards of speed, efficiency, and mechanization. Influenced by Chaplin and Keaton, the humor, which includes some brilliant slapstick, is mostly visual; the mood, however, is oddly melancholic, and the plot is fresh and surprising.In French; subtitled. Archival 35mm.

Seconds
John Frankenheimer, 1966 - 107 min.

Frankenheimer’s third installment in his unofficial “paranoia trilogy” (Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May), is a modern reworking of Faust, and his most disturbing film. Arthur Hamilton is a wealthy middle-aged man dissatisfied with life. Conveniently, he meets an agent of “the Company”, which offers individuals a new life. Following reconstructive surgery and the staging of his own death, Hamilton emerges as Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson), but finds that his new life is not what he’d hoped it would be. The film features excellent and experimental cinematography by James Wong Howe. 35mm.

La Mujer del Puerto
Arcany Boytler, 1933 - 76 min.

Widely cited as ‘the first singular Mexican film,’ La Mujer del Puerto was ironically directed by Arcany Boytler, a Russian expatriate who had trained under Eisenstein. Boytler synthesized the influence of German Expressionism cinema and French poetic realism to craft a germinal version of the fallen woman who would become a staple of the Mexican cinema. Andrea Palma plays Rosario, a woman from Veracruz who becomes a prostitute after her cheating fiancé kills her father and leaves her destitute. Boytler’s vision of Rosario’s lot is atmospheric and parallels Mizoguchi’s geisha films. Note: in Spanish with French Subtitles. Archival 35mm.

Three Ages
Buster Keaton, 1923 - 75 min.

Admittedly, dinosaurs appear only in a small portion of Buster Keaton’s feature-length debut as a director. Yet that small portion involves Keaton riding a dinosaur, which is worth the price of admission alone. A parody of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, the film depicts Keaton in love with Margaret Leahy in three different time periods – the Stone Age, ancient Rome, and Roaring Twenties America. The film will be preceded by Winsor McCay’s short Gertie the Dinosaur, one of the most highly regarded and important of all animated films, giant reptiles or not. 16mm.
Accompanied by pianist Daniel Sefik.

Juno
Jason Reitman, 2007 - 90 min.

If you haven’t heard about Juno by now, chances are you’ve been under a rock for a while. This lovable comedy, called the female response to Knocked Up but also much more than that, is the definition of cute. Ellen Page, who with this performance has suddenly and deservedly become superfamous, stars as Juno, a high-schooler impregnated by nerdy friend Paulie (Michael Cera). Despite the unwanted pregnancy, Juno delivers a consistently hilarious brand of flippant, no-nonsense humor throughout the film. Also, fantastic music mostly from the anti-folk band the Moldy Peaches. 35mm.

Macedonian Director Milcho Manchevski Visits Doc Films