FALL 2009
September 11
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September 25
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October 9
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October 23
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Waltz with Bashir (Introduced by Gary "Mr. Movie" Wolcott)
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November 6
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November 20
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December 4
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Still Walking (Introduced by Gary "Mr. Movie" Wolcott)
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December 18
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January 15
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January 29
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Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, master French director Laurent Cantet's The Class is an absorbing journey into a multicultural high school in Paris over the course of a school year. François Begaudeau--an actual teacher and the author upon whose work the film was based--is utterly convincing as François, an openminded teacher in charge of a classroom of youngsters from a wide variety of backgrounds. Of course, the mere fact that he's older and in a position of authority causes his students to challenge him on many occasions. François is stuck in the middle. In the teacher conferences, he butts heads with the harsher adults who don't appear to have any sympathy for their students. In class, his attempts to be lenient and understanding are somehow misinterpreted and he finds himself arguing with the kids that he so clearly wants to help. As the school year progresses, tensions rise, until François finds himself in a position he never imagined he'd be in.
Unlike his more formally written early films like Human Resources and Time Out, Cantet proves that he has an ability to work in a more improvisational manner. Shooting on HD and working with a cast of young non-actors, he allows The Class to breathe, resulting in a fictional drama that has the spirit and energy of a documentary. His startlingly assured ensemble brings the new, culturally diverse France of the early 21st century to striking life.
--Rotten Tomatoes
Awards: Wins include the Palme d'Or (Cannes, 2009) and Independent Spirit Award. Nominations include Academy Award (Best Foreign Language Film) and European Film Awards (Best Film, Best Director).
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While not too well-regarded on its initial release, Barry Lyndon, like most of Stanley Kubrick's work, has stood the test of time as a dramatically compelling and visually stunning motion picture. Kubrick's retelling of William Makepeace Thackeray's novel has often been accused of moving too slowly for its own good, but if you allow yourself to slip into its admittedly deliberate rhythm, you'll discover an absorbing, complex, and dryly witty tale packed with sex, violence, gambling, war, family feuds, romantic betrayals, love, death, and all the other things that make historical dramas so much fun. Though no one has ever accused Ryan O'Neal or Marisa Berenson of being expressive actors, their limited emotional palettes work in their favor here; Kubrick structures the film so that the audience reads triumph and tragedy in the subtle emotional variations of his cast, allowing many of them to register onscreen as they never would otherwise. (And, in fairness to O'Neal, Barry Lyndon is doubtless this actor's strongest and most expertly modulated performance.) And no one has ever contested Barry Lyndon's visual splendor. Attempting to recreate both the aesthetic style of 18th century paintings and the physical look of the period, Kubrick, cinematographer John Alcott, and production designer Ken Adam used authentic antique props and costumes to brilliant effect, and they lit their scenes with only natural sunlight or candles, for a look that no other movie has ever touched. The result is a film of singular visual style and beauty, and one of the richest and most evocative period pieces ever made. --Allmovie.com review
Awards include these wins and nominations: 4 Academy Awards, National Board of Review, BAFTA, LA Film Critics Assoc. with 3 other Academy Award nominations, Director's Guild of America Award, 2 Golden Globes, and Writers Guild of America.
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In honor of Paul Newman we are showing a film that ranks among his best. Hud is a contemporary western about the conflict between generations, directed by Martin Ritt from a Larry McMurtry novel. Paul Newman plays ranch hand Hud Bannon, amoral, drunk, and womanizing, at odds with his father (Melvyn Douglas), idolized by his nephew (Brandon de Wilde), and hot for the housekeeper (Patricia Neal), while dealing with the moral and financial problems arising from a dying way of life. Raw and uncompromising, with brilliant performances and searing drama, Hud earned multiple Oscar nominations, most notably Best Actor for Newman, with wins going to Neal as supporting actress, Douglas as supporting actor, and James Wong-Howe for his stunning black-and-white photography.
Awards: A total of 12 wins and 14 nominations, including 3 Academy Awards (Best Supporting Actress, Best Suppporting Actor and Best Black & White Cinematography) and 5 Golden Globe Award nominations.
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In reflecting upon his time spent in the Israeli army, filmmaker Ari Folman has produced Waltz with Bashir, a profoundly moving antiwar meditation that is equal parts personal memoir, history. In reflecting upon his time spent in the Israeli army, filmmaker Ari Folman has produced Waltz with Bashir, a profoundly moving antiwar meditation that is equal parts personal memoir, history lesson, and animated fever dream. In 1982, Folman was a soldier during Israel's first invasion of Lebanon. This was a painful moment in history, when the newly elected president of Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel, was killed in an explosion. Furious, his party, the Christian Phalangists, retaliated by storming into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and massacring thousands of innocent victims. Over 20 years later, Folman is disturbed to realize that he has no memory of this incident even though he was there at the time. In order to remember, he tracks down several of his friends and soldiers who were there with him to find out what really happened. Waltz with Bashir is as difficult to categorize as it is to forget. It is a truly startling achievement, a film that can be classified as animation and documentary and history and fiction. It is all of those things at once, and it is also much more than that. Folman uses a combination of Flash animation, 3D, and classic animation to bring his film to visual life, but it is the beautifully haunting score by acclaimed German composer Max Richter that provides the film with its heart and soul. As Waltz with Bashir unfolds in dreamlike waves, Folman understands that guilt is a dangerous thing, and war is even worse.
Awards: A total of 23 wins and 23 nominations, including nominations for an Academy Award, the Palme d'Or at Cannes (2008), and winner of a Golden Globe (Best Foreign Language Film), National Society of Film Critics, Writers Guild of America, and 6 Israeli Academy Awards..
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The Burmese Harp ("Biruma no tategoto")
Shôji Yasui stars in director Kon Ichikawa's adaptation of Michio Takeyama's antiwar novel. Set in Burma during the waning days of WWII, a unit of Japanese soldiers hangs on, inspired by the virtuoso Burmese harp playing of Private Mizushima. When the war finally ends, the unit is taken to an internment camp at Mudon to prepare for repatriation. The British plan on cleaning out a pocket of die-hard Japanese mountain fighters, but Mizushima volunteers to try to persuade the men to surrender. When they refuse, the mountain garrison is wiped out, and Mizushima himself is badly wounded. A Buddhist monk nurses the soldier back to health, and when Mizushima leaves for the camp at Mudon, he dons the garb of a monk. As he makes his way slowly across the Burmese countryside, observing the endless miles of torn and broken corpses, the impact of the war's waste begins to weigh on the harp player. Mizushima begins to either burn or bury as many as he is able to, increasingly overtaken by the idée fixe of burying all the Japanese dead in the country. An oblique yet moving film, The Burmese Harp achieves much of its power and poignancy through the juxtaposition of the detritus and horror of war with the beauty and tranquillity of nature. As is often the case in Japanese films, humanity is accorded a humble role in a vast universe. --Rotten Tomatoes
Awards: 4 wins and 2 nominations including a nomination for Academy Award (Best Foreign Language Film).
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Man on Wire
James Marsh's dazzling, invigorating documentary Man on Wire tells the story of a truly inspiring figure. In the early 1970s, a fiery young Frenchman named Philippe Petit wanted to shake up the world. When he saw the World Trade Center being built in New York City, he found his mission. Petit was a trained high wire walker, and his goal was to set up a wire between the two towers and give the world a show it could never have expected. As is often the case with these endeavors, the actual high-wire walking was the easiest part of the plan. For nearly seven years, Petit worked on the project, recruiting associates who supported him every step of the way. Finally, after eight months in New York, the day came when Petit and his cronies jumped into action. This wasn't easy. They had to find a way to sneak past security and make their way to the top of the towers with heavy equipment, at which point they had to battle the elements to install the wire. After many close scares, the time came for Petit to realize his dream--and the rest, as they say, is history. Marsh crafts Man on Wire like a heist film, presenting rare and fascinating footage of the actual event alongside flawless reenactments and modern-day interviews with the participants. The result is an immersive, emotionally gratifying motion picture, made all the more stimulating by Michael Nyman's electrifying score. --Rotten Tomatoes
There is no way that a review can convey its complicated resonance or its subtle blend of
Awards: 28 wins, 7 nominations, including Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Film, Audience Award (Sundance Film Festival) and Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary.
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Still Walking ("Aruitemo aruitemo")
Still Walking is a family drama that gets the family dynamic exactly right, a film that understands the ways in which unspoken resentments tend to accumulate and unresolved conflicts later harden into regrets. Unfolding over the course of a single day, the picture brings together three generations of a middle-class Japanese family under the grandparents' roof to pay tribute to their long deceased eldest son on the anniversary of his death. As in any domestic drama, everyone's got his issues and in the hothouse environment of the patriarchal household in which nearly the entire movie takes place, most of them come to light. The grandfather, a doctor forced to give up his practice when his eyesight started to fail, locks himself in his study, refusing to speak with his surviving son and emerging only at mealtimes. That son, an out-of-work art restorer, shows up with his new wife, a widow, and her young child, a domestic arrangement that, along with his perceived inability to live up to the example of his dead brother, puts him at some odds with his parents, even as he points out that his family situation is hardly anomalous in contemporary Japan. Meanwhile, his sister is planning on moving her own family into the house, an arrangement with which her mother is having some difficulty coming to terms.
But while these familial resentments and anxieties may come to the surface, they're never brought to a point of crisis. Directing his own brilliantly measured screenplay, Hirokazu Koreeda frames his characters in long, fixed takes, turning a coolly observational eye on the assembled party as they deflect rather than confront potential sources of conflict or submerge their accumulated regrets in the performance of domestic ritual: cooking, eating, bathing. But if the film's restrained aesthetic and refusal of expected closure leads to a certain dryness in the presentation, then Koreeda smartly portions out a few generous flourishes,like a perfectly lovely sequence in which an orange butterfly, taken by the grandmother to be the embodiment of her dead son, flutters around before landing on the picture of the deceased, and the film's epilogue, signaled by an ellipsis of shattering abruptness, which is unusually wise about the ways in which, for all our deepest regrets, life continues heedlessly on. --Andrew Schenker in Slant Magazine
Awards: 9 wins and 3 nominations, including Asian Film Awards (Best Director won by Hirokazu Koreeda; Kirin Kiki nominated for Best Supporting Actress); nominated for Japanese Acacdemy Award (Best Supporting Actress).
Hirokazu Koreeda's film Nobody Knows was shown by the Battelle Film Club in 2006.
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Everlasting Moments ("Maria Larssons eviga ögonblick") Jan Troell's Everlasting Moments is about a turn-of-the-century Swedish woman, Maria Larsson (the magnificent Maria Heiskanen), who tries to escape the indignities of her life by taking photographs. Her fate, glorious and maddening, is to see with the utmost clarity both the miseries and joys of her existence.
Maria emerges as a heroine of the most inexplicable and resolute sort. Married to the abusive alcoholic Sigfrid and mother of seven children, Maria does not often meekly acquiesce to Sigfrid's demands, and when he attacks her, she puts him in prision for attempted murder. With Sigfrid gone, the family is even more penurious, but it is as if a cloud has lifted. Maria's transformation evolves through her photography. Beginning as a lark under the guidance of the camera store owner, it expands into a self-defining preoccupation, a passion.
Awards: Nominated for a Golden Globe and for an Academy Award (Best Foreign Language Film).
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Bob Le Flambeur
Before the New Wave, before Godard and Truffaut and Chabrol, before Belmondo flicked the cigarette into his mouth in one smooth motion and walked the streets of Paris like a Hollywood gangster, there was Bob. "Bob le Flambeur," Bob the high-roller, Bob the Montmartre legend whose style was so cool, whose honor was so strong, whose gambling was so hopeless, that even the cops liked him. Bob with his white hair slicked back, with his black suit and tie, his trenchcoat and his Packard convertible and his penthouse apartment with the slot machine in the closet. Bob, who on the first day of this movie wins big at the races and then loses it all at roulette, and is cleaned out. Broke again.
Jean-Pierre Melville's "Bob le Flambeur" (1956) has a good claim to be the first film of the French New Wave.
It is 1955. Bob has gone straight for 20 years. Before that, we understand, there was a bank job that led to some time in prison. "Bob le Flambeur" opens by establishing the milieu. We see water trucks washing the streets at dawn. We follow Bob to the track, to the casino, and finally back to the neighborhood to lose his final 200 francs. He hears an amazing thing: The safe of the casino at Deauville sometimes contains 800 million francs. He determines to assemble a gang of friends and experts and crack it.
Melville (1917-1973) was born Grumberg. He changed his name in admiration for the author of Moby Dick. He was a lover of all things American. He went endlessly to American movies, he visited America, he shot a film in New York ("Two Men in Manhattan"), and (actor Daniel) Cauchy remembers, "He drove an American car and wore an American hat and Ray-Bans, and he always had the Armed Forces Network on his car radio, listening to Glenn Miller." He inhaled American gangster films, but when he made his own, they were not copies of Hollywood but were infused by understatement, a sense of cool; his characters need few words because so much goes without saying, especially when it comes to what must be done, and how it must be done, and why it must be done that way.
The climax of "Bob le Flambeur" involves surprising developments that approach cosmic irony. How strange, that a man's incorrigible nature would lead him both into and through temptation. The twist is so inspired that many other directors have borrowed it, including Paul Thomas Anderson in "Hard Eight," Neil Jordan in "The Good Thief," and Lewis Milestone and Steven Soderbergh, the directors of the "Ocean's Eleven" movies. But "Bob" is not about the twist. It is about Bob being true to his essential nature. He is a gambler. --Excerpted from a review by Roger Ebert
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Rue du Retrait One day in a pharmacy, proud, ornery Mado (Dominique Marcas, superb) accosts self-sufficient divorcee Isabelle (Marion Held). Accompanying the crotchety old woman to her home, Isabelle discovers she's living in a decrepit cold-water studio without a tub, toilet or phone. Isabelle finds herself both repulsed by and drawn to what she's seen. Little favors turn into regular visits, during which Mado is as likely to be gruff as appreciative. The composite result is quietly magnificent. When traditional funding proved elusive, vet producer-director Rene Feret opted for self-financed DV. Intimate lensing captures the raw, convincing interplay between the leads, and video origins are fully apparent only in certain exteriors. Title is the name of a street in eastern Paris, where pic was shot. Deceptively simple yet extremely rich in its themes and insights, ultra-low-budget two-hander is a compelling portrait of old age and a deft exploration of how neighbors can seemingly dwell in different eras. --Variety
This film was suggested by a member of the Film Club audience.
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