A dashing, successful writer of lurid romance novels named Robert Harmon (John Cassavetes) arrives home in the middle of the day - still stylishly dressed in formal evening attire - to find an odd assortment of vivacious, attractive young women engaged in frivolous activities as they bide time awaiting his return.
Meanwhile, in another town, Sarah Lawson (Gena Rowlands) enters an empty conference room with her adolescent daughter Debbie (Risa Blewitt) and immediately begins to lavish the girl with presents, her myopic doting only briefly interrupted by the entrance of other people into the room, including her estranged husband Jack (Seymour Cassel). Sarah and Jack have assembled for a meeting with their legal counsel and the presiding judge (Joan Foley) in order to finalize the terms of an increasingly acrimonious divorce.

Based on a play by Ted Allan, Love Streams is a haunting, provocative, and brutally honest examination of love, emotional need, loneliness, and longing. In contrast to the active and confrontational camerawork of his earlier films (most notably in Faces), John Cassavetes creates a spare, muted, and objective portrait, capturing with underlying compassion the empty lives of emotionally adrift characters who act out the ache of their unarticulated despair through incomprehensible, cruel, and often self-destructive acts.

Robert Altman's M*A*S*H is the first major American movie openly to ridicule belief in God—not phony belief; real belief. It is also one of the few (though by no means the first) American screen comedies openly to admit the cruelty of its humor. And it is at pains to blend that humor with more operating room gore than I have ever seen in any movie from any place.
All of which may promote a certain air of good feeling in the audience, an attitude of self-congratulation that they have the guts to take the gore, the inhumanity to appreciate the humor, and the sanity to admire the impiety—directed against a major who prays for himself, his Army buddies, and even "our Commander in Chief."
Based upon a barely passable novel of the same name (the title stands for Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, but "MASH," of course, stands for a few other things as well). M*A*S*H takes place mostly in Korea during the war. However, aside from the steady processing of bloody meat through the operating room, the film is not so much concerned with the war as with life inside the Army hospital unit and especially with the quality of life created by the three hot-shot young surgeons (Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, and Tom Skerritt) who make most things happen.
Robert Altman's method has been to fill the frame to a great depth with overlapping bits of action and strands of dialogue. The tracking camera serves as an agent of discovery. To a very great degree, M*A*S*H substitutes field of view for point of view, and although this substitution has a lot to do with the movie's ultimate weakness, the choice is not without its intelligent rewards.

In The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman attempts the impossible and pulls it off.
Using a screenplay by Leigh Brackett, freely adapted from Raymond Chandler's 1953 novel, he has successfully transported Philip Marlowe, Chandler's private eye whose roots are in the depressed, black-and-white 1930's, to the overprivileged, full-color seventies in the person of Elliott Gould.
Gould's Marlowe is entirely different from Humphrey Bogart's (The Big Sleep) and Dick Powell's (Farewell, My Lovely and the 1954 TV adaptation of The Long Goodbye). Gould's Marlowe is not especially tough. He's a bright, conscientious but rather solemn nut, a guy who hopes for the best but expects the worst, having experienced the social upheavals, the assassinations, and the undeclared war of the sixties.
 There are lots of eloquent references to Chandler in Altman's method, which is to pack the screen with more bizarre visual and aural detail than can be easily taken in at one sitting. There are also references in the appreciation of California decor, luxurious as well as tacky, and in the throwaway lines and uniformly excellent characterizations, including two by actors who will surprise you, Nina van Pallandt and Jim Bouton.
The Long Goodbye is not a put-on. It's great fun and it's funny, but it's a serious, unique work.

It's a film that a lot of other directors will wish they'd had the brilliance to make and that dozens of other performers will wish they'd had the great good fortune to be in.
There are so many story lines in Nashville that one is more or less coerced into dealing in abstractions. Nashville is about the quality of a segment of Middle American life. It's about ambition, sentimentality, politics, emotional confusion, empty goals, and very big business in a society whose citizens are firmly convinced that the use of deodorants is next to godliness.
Nashville comes across as a film of enormous feeling. It's compounded of moments that tingle the spine.

Life of Brian tells the tall tale of a peasant boy born the same night as the Christ child -- in an adjoining stable. Laughs mount as their lives increasingly intersect.
Part of the reason the Pythons are so funny is their fearlessness. The only notion they find sacrilegious is the idea that anything might be too sacred to take jabs at. So their preeminently clever humor has fun at the expense of propriety as well as Jewish and Christian concerns, leaving everyone dazzled by their effrontery.
The more things change, the more we have to laugh if we are to have a prayer of remaining sane, and the Pythons are the best possible step in that direction.

In almost every film Federico Fellini has ever made, the sea has occupied a very special place, sometimes as the ultimate barrier between confusion and understanding, sometimes as a kind of vast, implacable presence that dimly recalls protozoan origins. La Strada, La Dolce Vita, and his Satyricon, all end by the edge of the sea.

The film, which uses the director's name in the title to differentiate it from another Italian film based on the same source, is Fellini's adaptation of the satiric novel by Petronius Arbiter, written in the first century a.d. Satyricon has survived in such fragmentary form that all scholars do not necessarily agree whether it is a moral essay or simply a catalogue of the sexual achievements, most of them perverse, of its student-hero, Encolpius, his boy-lover, Giton, who has the constancy of a cloud, and his best friend.

Fellini Satyricon has the form of theater, of ritual, to such a degree that there is no difference between the reality of the film and the reality of a play-within-the-film or of the dryly comic legend of the Widow of Ephesus, which is pictured as it is being told by a storyteller at a sulphurous banquet.

The most spectacular aspect of the film, which is essentially descriptive rather than narrative, is the decor, the color, for everything has been manufactured by Fellini. Like El Greco, Fellini scorns natural sunlight. Even exterior landscapes have been photographed in such a way as to suggest the exotic fraud of the steamy, hermetic interiors. When Encolpius goes to retrieve his beloved Giton, who has been purchased by an actor, you aren't sure for a moment whether he has wandered into life, or into a play, although everyone seems to be speaking Latin and not Italian.

This one's for the mothers and the militants and the ones in between.

Dancers: Kathryn Bosley, Heidi Green, Lizzy Greene, Jordan Marinov, Amanda McCroskery, Candice Thompson

Musicians: Frank Bevan, Bobby Drake, Mia Greene

This one's for the mothers and the militants and the ones in between.

Dancers: Kathryn Bosley, Heidi Green, Lizzy Greene, Jordan Marinov, Amanda McCroskery, Candice Thompson

Musicians: Frank Bevan, Bobby Drake, Mia Greene

A film that screams "product of its time," The Holy Mountain was Alejandro Jodorowsky's dizzying elegy to the sex, drugs and spiritual awakening of the late 1960s and early 1970s -- a suitably bizarre follow-up to his El Topo (1971). Fascinating although it only fitfully makes sense, The Holy Mountain is beautifully shot and designed, and it suggests what might have resulted if Luis Buñuel, Michelangelo Antonioni, and George Romero had all dropped acid and made a movie together. A Christ-like vagrant and thief wanders through a perverse and unfriendly land until he encounters an enlightened one, who gathers the thief and six of the world's most powerful individuals for a spiritual pilgrimage. If that description sounds a bit sketchy, well, narrative isn't this film's strongest suit. But if you want to see the conquest of Mexico re-enacted by reptiles, soldiers shoot innocent people as birds fly from their wounds, and a wizard turn feces into gold, this is the movie for you.

The film is based on Jan Potocki's early 19th-century novel; he wrote to amuse his ailing wife after having finished reading "A Thousand and One Nights" to her. It is very, very 19th-century Polish. It's full of allusions to other languages, other climates, other cultures, other lands and other times, specifically to the Spain of the Inquisition when the Prince of Darkness was as often as not a Moorish maiden without a proper bra or a most convincing, fast-talking Cabalist.

The frame of the film is the journey undertaken by an innocent, Alfons van Worden (the late Zbigniew Cybulski), to join his regiment in Madrid, a trip that takes him through his own dreams and enchantments into the dreams and enchantments of the characters in his fantasies. There are mysterious hermits, two houris who claim to be his first cousins and want to share him as husband, unfaithful wives, wandering lovers, gypsies, a one-eyed man possessed by devils and, as my program notes report with a certain air of exhaustion, "others."

When enough people reach the consensus that laws are unjust, and the government/corporate system doesn’t allow for change, history shows us that the laws will be broken. Every effective social movement, from the civil rights movement, to student uprisings in China, to women’s liberation, has used civil disobedience as a tool.  Is this a permissible tactic, or is this terrorism? Recent federal legislation classifies animal activism as terrorism.

Behind the Mask is a controversial documentary that focuses on the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), direct action, and the current repressive governments to which activists are subject. Director Shannon Keith, an animal rights lawyer, is now under surveillance by the FBI.

Using undercover and underground video shot by the participants, "Behind the Mask" reveals the world of those who choose to break the law in the struggle for the liberation and freedom of animals.

Activists take us through their undercover actions, incarcerations, sacrifice and determination, while exclusive underground footage shows midnight attacks on facilities that torture and kill animals in the name of science and profit. You will see people in white coats with electrical devices doing horrific things to dogs and monkeys that can only be described as torture. You will see people with ski masks and sledgehammers breaking into facilities and freeing those animals.  You will hear from scientists and activists and you will decide who’s right.

Not everyone will agree with what these activists are doing.  While it’s true that some are serving jail terms for “acts of terrorism” such as organizing protests outside fur farms, others are taking it much further.  At once horrifying and uplifting, exhilarating and challenging, this is the story of regular people who risk everything for a cause they believe is just.

Along with Tarkovsky and Dovzhenko, Sergei Paradjanov is one of the most important Soviet directors of last century. Paradjanov, who was periodically jailed and exiled because of his work, stunned world audiences in 1964 with his Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, popularly known as the Romeo and Juliet of the Carpathians. The film is set among the Hutsul people of the Western Ukraine, an isolated ethnic group who live in the upper reaches of the mountain range. Their lives take place within a harsh environment and an ornate cultural system little changed since the 18th century. The film opens with the deaths of Ivanko's brother, Olexa, crushed by a tree, and father, Pyotr Pavlichuk, killed outside of church by his rich neighbor Guteniuk. During the funeral procession for his father, Ivanko meets Guteniuk's daughter, Marichka, and the stage is set for the star-crossed lovers. Structured episodically, the film checks in with Ivanko and Marichka as they fall in love and age towards adulthood. Finally of an age to marry, Ivanko finds himself unable, having been reduced to poverty by his father's death. Forced to work as a hired hand, he must leave his village and his beloved Marichka. Tragedy ensues and the remainder of the film concerns Ivanko's private and subtle dissolution as a result of this tragedy.

A neurotic housewife, Peggy Gravel (skinny Mink Stole), believes that everyone is out to kill her—especially those kids playing ball outside. Her paranoia knows no bounds. She'd surely have killed her nebbishy and ineffectual husband if her private nurse, a gigantically huge black woman named Grizelda (Jean Hill) didn't sit on him first, smothering him to death.
The law chases them to Mortville, of course. This city looks like Shantytown in Pink Frou-Frous, a Champagne Breakfast with Tod Browning's Freaks. The inhabitants are a motley crew of drag queens, slimy hustlers, old bearded men who stare off into infinity, and trailer trash. God bless 'em, every one.
Say what you will about the content. It's brazenly offensive, offering a thrill every minute. Mole and Muffy offer gross-out flashbacks of their past, which involve wrestling matches and babysitter slayings. We're treated to a sex scene in which skinny little Mink Stole and gargantuan fat-lady Jean Hill, totally nude, roll around in bed. John Waters layers on the raunch, the sick, and the venal with broad strokes.
Again, one must emphasize that the approach is pure camp. It may be gross to some, but John Waters finds an odd, gut-laughing beauty to the entire proceedings. It's imaginative, like a triple-X Flash Gordon show on the planet Mars, complete with operatic costumes in gaudy colors and gigantic papier-mache sets, including a royal palace and a nudist recreation camp. It's a dirty-bird version of The Wizard of Oz.
Desperate living doesn't go as far with breaking taboos as his earlier films and was the last project he did before breaking into some fun mainstream movies, but John Waters has created as vivid a world as ever before or since in Desperate Living. It's his self-proclaimed fairy tale complete with disgusting fairybook villains.
Desperate Living, by contrast, is his most elaborately filthy film, featuring an entire town full of perverts, misfits and psychopaths. Despite Vincent Peranio’s deviously clever production design, Waters’ Mortville is still a concept too grand for the film’s budget, but it’s hard not to love a movie that climaxes with a crazed drag king getting a hideous sex change, severing the offending member and throwing it outside for a passing dog to eat.

At the time it was written, Oscar Wilde’s  Salome was considered so licentious the performance of it was banned, but now it is a rather tame work compared to his more narratively complex comedies, though it does have some lovely poetry. Ken Russell, in a brilliant move, chose to imagine the play being staged for Wilde himself in the 1987 feature. It is depicted as a private performance put on by a wealthy friend of Wilde’s (in a brothel), thus incorporating just enough extraneous detail, decadence and distraction to sustain the work’s power--in essence, while you already know what is going to happen to the characters within the play, you don’t know what will happen to the players themselves. Russell is very faithful to the play’s text (he trimmed just one overlong speech) and while he takes more liberties with Wilde’s biography, he not only conveys the play accurately, he evokes a full sense of Wilde’s life and times, and, by implication, how Wilde’s experiences led to the play’s creation.

"Bad Lieutenant" tells the story of a man who is not comfortable inside his body or soul. He walks around filled with need and dread.
He is in the last stages of cocaine addiction, gulping booze to level off the drug high. His life is such a loveless hell that he buys sex just for the sensation of someone touching him, and his attention drifts even then, because there are so many demons pursuing him.
Harvey Keitel plays this man with such uncompromised honesty that the performance can only be called courageous; not many actors would want to be seen in this light.
The lieutenant has no illusions about himself. He is bad and knows he is bad, and he abuses the power of his position in every way he can.
"Bad Lieutenant" was directed by Abel Ferrara, a gritty New Yorker who has come up through the exploitation ranks ("Ms. 45," "Fear City") to low budget but ambitious films like "China Girl," and "Cat Chaser." This film lacks the polish of a more sophisticated director, but would have suffered from it. The film and the character live close to the streets. The screenplay is by Ferrara and Zoe Lund, who can be seen onscreen as a hooker. They are not interested in plot in the usual sense. There is no case to solve, no crime to stop, no bad guys except for the hero.
"Bad Lieutenant" uses a long string of vivid New York locations without often retracing its steps, and presents a brutal, knowing look at the city's seamy side. A take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward mainstream audiences also gives the film a distinct independent streak. Even its frequent excesses can have a certain panache when viewed with suitable open-mindedness, though such tolerance is not always easily achieved.

Had Pier Paolo Pasolini not died the way he did on Nov. 1, 1975, murdered (the Rome court found) by a 17-year-old boy who repeatedly ran Mr. Pasolini's silver Alfa Romeo over the body in a scrubby vacant lot, I'm not at all sure we'd take the film that became his last work as solemnly as we must.
The young murderer's defense was that he'd become enraged after Mr. Pasolini, who had picked him up several hours earlier near Rome's Termini Station, made homosexual advances. The boy was convicted and sentenced to prison for nine years, seven months and 10 days. Mr. Pasolini, said Michelangelo Antonioni, "was the victim of his own characters."
If Mr. Pasolini really was the victim of his own characters, then his most significant film must be his last, "Salo, 120 Days of Sodom," Mr. Pasolini's transposition of the Marquis de Sade's 18th-century novel to Italy (1944), and the puppet government set up at Salo in northern Italy when Mussolini was briefly free after his rescue by the Nazis from Italian partisans.
Mr. Pasolini, a poet and novelist as well as a film maker, an ardent Marxist who early on had been thrown out of the Communist Party for his homosexuality, made controversial films throughout his career, but none to equal "Salo," which was completed shortly before his death.
De Sade saw his work, about the epic 120-day debauch of four pillars of French society, as a revolutionary act, designed to bring down the old order so that a new one might be established. As he described the debauch, though, he also indulged his own fantasies that passed through more or less commonplace sexual perversions to coprophilia, necrophilia and explicit torture of the young women and young men who had been kidnapped to share the hosts' pleasures.
Mr. Pasolini has made a very significant change in updating this work, however. The four hosts—the duke, the president, the magistrate and the bishop—are now Fascists, expressing their ultimate desires as the world is crumbling around them in the last days of the fascist regime. They are no longer rebelling against God. They are demonstrating the evil of the human spirit.
Throughout his career as a film maker, Mr. Pasolini was very good at intellectualizing. after the fact, what he was doing on the screen. His best films—"The Gospel According to St. Matthew" and "Accatone"—can stand alone. His later films, even the rambunctious "fable films" ("Decameron" and "A Thousand and One Nights") require a certain amount of rationalizing to be acceptable.
As Mr. Pasolini's vision of the world became increasingly bleak, his films became more arid. "Salo" is the bitter, empty end.

  A free-swinging attack on commercialism, materialism, and their corrupting influence on spirituality and organized religion. The film strikes the right note of satire and compassion in dealing with an avant-garde troupe's modern passion play. Looking for a break from 35 years of staid tradition, a priest (Gilles Pelletier) gets more than he bargained for when he hires little-known actor Lothaire Bluteau to direct and star as Jesus in a play staged on the church lawn. Integrating facts about the historical Jesus into a bold production, the cast earns raves from the city's cultural elite, but the Catholic institution comes down hard on them, threatening to pull the plug if they don't make radical changes.

In a daring conceit, Arcand allows the play itself to take up much of the middle section, giving full breadth to its religious concepts, and, most importantly, the genuine inspiration the cast takes from Jesus' story. Where they seemed like godless artisans before—one starred in sexy perfume commercials, another only comes on board when he's allowed to incorporate a Shakespeare soliloquy—the actors make a connection with the material that belies Arcand's cynical instincts. When the question "What would Jesus do?" starts to affect Bluteau in a manner that goes beyond Method acting, Arcand pushes too far in matching real-life events with their Biblical correlative. But for a director inclined to see the worst in people and society, this temporary bout of compassion counts as a minor step forward.

 This film won 12 Genies (Canadian Academy Awards), including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. It also won the Jury Prize in Cannes in 1989.

A chilling portrait of a serial killer, Hilditch (Bob Hoskins), who befriends innocent young women, only to turn them into his victims. When he meets Felicia (Elaine Cassidy) -- a pregnant Irish girl who's come to England in search of her boyfriend, with whom she's lost touch -- Hilditch offers his help, drawing her in with his kindly manner and deceptive charm. Little does she realize the grave danger she's in.

The lone special effects shot in ''The Sweet Hereafter'' is beautifully executed and terrible to see. A school bus skids off an icy road and sinks into a frozen lake, taking with it the children of a tiny, once neighborly Adirondack town. Presented midway through this latest, biggest and most wrenching film by the brilliantly analytical Atom Egoyan, this image becomes the basis for a many-faceted moral inquiry. In the aftermath of such calamity, how does life go on?

Mitchell's is one of four voices that narrate ''The Sweet Hereafter,'' a book by Russell Banks, whose vivid and deeply felt moral tales are long overdue in reaching the screen. In a season of expertly adapted contemporary fiction (like ''L.A. Confidential'' and ''The Ice Storm''), this fusion of Mr. Banks's and Mr. Egoyan's sensibilities stands as a particularly inspired mix. Both film and book are carefully fragmented, and both move indirectly toward the enlightenment they seek. But the book's built-in narrative strength helps to make this Mr. Egoyan's most accessible film.

Making this material very much his own, the filmmaker creates schematic, intuitive images that hauntingly crystallize the characters' situations. When first seen, for instance, Mitchell Stephens is trapped in a car wash, receiving a cellular phone call from his own lost child, a vituperative drug addict named Zoe. Stuck in a car being deluged with water, is he being washed clean or washed away? The film's perfect exactitude often provides such resonant images, as the town's life moves from the gaiety of a Ferris wheel to the wheel on a bus to the wheel on a chair. Mr. Egoyan also often invokes Robert Browning's poem ''The Pied Piper of Hamelin,'' with its mercenary piper and its children who disappear.

Mr. Egoyan's keen compositional eye is well served by the film's wide-screen format, which works as handsomely in indoor scenes as in broad, lonely vistas. At one point, for instance, he sustains a marital spat in the background, a telephone call in the left foreground and a calendar on the right, indicating that this is December 1995, though the film's next scene is set in 1997 on an airplane. Transitions are utterly seamless, fluidly carrying the audience back and forth through memory. Mr. Egoyan's earlier films, among them ''Exotica'' and ''The Adjuster,'' depended heavily on the power of such contrasts, but ''The Sweet Hereafter'' works more straightforwardly. For all the suffering it describes, this eloquent film also carries the exhilaration of crystal-clear artistic vision.

Hailed as one of the 50 greatest cartoons of all time, this beautiful animated short tells the story of a single shepherd who takes it upon himself to reseed an entire barren valley. Undeterred by the ravages of the passing years, he continues his project, determined to see a forest grow out of desolate nothingness. The inspiring The Man Who Planted Trees illuminates a message of hope for all humankind. The story was written by Jean Giono.

The sequel to Denys Arcand's Decline of the American Empire (1986). Both films can be viewed separately.

''My son is an ambitious and puritanical capitalist, while I have always been a sensual socialist.''

This is Rémy (Rémy Girard), a Montreal history professor, explaining the relation between his bald, fleshy, libertine self and the slim, impeccably coifed and tailored young man who stands by his hospital bed. The contrast between Rémy and his son, Sébastien (Stéphane Rousseau), who is some kind of international financier, reflects a pop-cultural aperçu available at least since Michael J. Fox starred in ''Family Ties.'' The children of the 1960's, who rebelled so dramatically against their own parents, receive their comeuppance when their children turn out to be materialistic, politically conservative and sexually restrained. Ironic, no?

Yes, of course. But what makes ''The Barbarian Invasions'' much more than a facile exercise in generational conflict is that Denys Arcand, who wrote and directed it, has a sense of history that is as acute as it is playful.

Mr. Arcand is at heart a populist filmmaker, but his brains are at least as well developed as his heart. ''The Barbarian Invasions'' has had enormous success at the Canadian box office, in both English and French-speaking areas, and it is easy to see why. Its humor is broad and its emotions large and accessible. But it is also, at the same time, a sophisticated and rigorous analysis of recent history, in Quebec and beyond. It is an elegy, a seminar and a long, sloppy party, full of food, wine, maudlin moments and endless conversation. Civilization may be declining gradually all around them, but they don't mind. They're in no hurry.

In this roaringly comic and powerfully affecting road movie, Terence Stamp gives a magnificent performance. The British actor plays Bernadette, an aging transsexual traveling through Australia's red desert with two younger drag queens, Mitzi (Hugo Weaving) and Felicia (Guy Pearce), on a streetcar named desire. It's actually a bus named Priscilla, though Blanche in the Tennessee Williams play would recognize Bernadette's dependence on illusion and the kindness of strangers. Those are hard needs to fill in a place where most blokes don't thrill to a close encounter with men who lip-sync to disco hits in heels, glitter frocks and padded bras.

Once the toast of several continents, Bernadette is joining her friends on a grinding two-week bus trek to Alice Springs for a come-down gig. Writer and director Stephan Elliott doesn't ignore the bitchy fun inherent in the material. But he digs deeper, too. Mitzi has a wife and son stashed in Alice Springs, and Felicia knows just how to needle him about it. Weaving and Pearce are both splendid, but the film belongs to Stamp. In the rough towns, when the others wisely dress butch to avoid being insulted or beaten, Bernadette won't surrender her femininity. Stamp gives her a caustic wit and a touchingly beleaguered grace. There's not an ounce of flaming camp in the romance between Bernadette and Bob, the gentleman caller superbly played by Bill Hunter. It's the unspoken connections that give the wild and raunchy Priscilla a direct line to the heart.

Based on the infamous 1954 matricide in New Zealand involving two ninth-grade schoolgirls, Peter Jackson's stunning "Heavenly Creatures" tells the story of an uncommonly powerful love. When Pauline and Juliet are together, the wind is filled with butterflies and the trumpet call of Mario Lanza, "the greatest tenor in the whole world!!" Their universe is an exclusive realm of two, existing half in reality where they are ostracized as peculiar, half in fantasy, where they escape to a highly evolved system of dream lovers and romantic alter egos.

The film begins with Pauline (Melanie Lynskey), a miserable child whose mother runs a boardinghouse. In the photo for her class at her proper girls' school in Christchurch, New Zealand, she sticks out amid all the blond hair and proud smiles like a tarantula on a slice of angel

food cake (with apologies to Raymond Chandler). She's the fat one in the back, the disaster, the smudge with the ugly scowl and unruly black curls.

Because of a bone disease that left her with brittle legs, Pauline is unable to share in the sunny, athletic life of her classmates. Then one day her life is changed forever, when a new student named Juliet (Kate Winslet) joins her in her private war against the bores and commoners of Christchurch.

Like Pauline, Juliet thumbs her nose with proud disdain at parochial Christchurch society. But, unlike her new friend, Juliet is not an ugly duckling, but a kind of fairy princess who plucks Pauline from her lily pad, kisses her, and transforms her.

Because she suffers from tuberculosis, Juliet has had to spend almost as much time in the hospital as Pauline, and the girls' common status as invalids sparks a friendship that grows into a murderous passion.

Jackson, who directed and wrote the screenplay, moves through each of these phases with daring and imagination. His camera follows his lovers as they run breathless through the woods before collapsing into each other's arms at the end of the day, spent from the exertions of their special bond.

To his credit, Jackson doesn't patronize this romance as a girlish crush gone ballistic, or pigeonhole it merely as "lesbian." These girls are in love and, clearly, he envies them their abandon and their complete, unguarded commitment to each other. In Jackson's view, theirs is a great romance that, unfortunately, others were not equipped to deal with.

Perhaps, if the world were more enlightened, more flexible, things might not turn out as gruesomely as they do. The problems begin when Juliet's parents begin to see the girls' relationship as "unwholesome." Because of marital problems, her parents are returning to England and plan to send Juliet to South Africa. Rather than be separated, the girls devise an elaborate plan to, as Pauline says it, "moider mother" and escape to Hollywood.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of movies have been made about girlfriends and their unique bond, but I can't think of another one where the topic is addressed more frankly or openly. Though the film's subject is sensationalistic in the extreme, Jackson's style is poetic. He presents Pauline and Juliet, who eventually returns to England, where she becomes an author of mystery novels, as singularly blessed. And he raises the question of whether there is any love purer or more gratifying than this same-sex soul-mating. Because their love ends in murder, it's at least implied that the romance is tainted somehow. Does the fault lie with the girls, or with the cramped morality of the time? Thankfully, this powerful, evocative movie leaves the question wide open.

Here's another Australian gem. But this one's an anomaly: an art-house crowd pleaser. Tyro director Baz Luhrmann whips up an entrancing entertainment by lifting clichés out of every musical from 42nd Street to Dirty Dancing. Will maverick dancer Scott Hastings (Paul Mercurio) introduce new steps into a contest even though it's against the rules of old-fart judge Barry Fife (Bill Hunter)? You bet. Will Scott choose an experienced dance partner or go for Fran (Tara Morice) -- a clumsy, mousy, four-eyed unknown -- in the hope of turning her into Cinderella before the big championships? Stupid question. And will Scott and the transformed Fran win the top prize by doing the pasa doble, taught to them by Fran's Spanish father and grandmother? You'd have to be a movie illiterate to doubt it.

So if Strictly Ballroom offers nothing new, why bother? Because Luhrmann is a director with the style and snap to have these tired routines on their feet and kicking like a line of Rockettes. Because Mercurio and Morice are marvels of sensuality in motion and pretty hot even when they kick off their dancing shoes. And mostly because the whole movie brings back the exuberant fizz Hollywood musicals like Newsies have lost. Funny thing about Strictly Ballroom, you see every trick up its sleeve, and you still keep smiling.

The stoic mysticism of Niki Caro's cool-handed charmer ''Whale Rider'' -- in which the young Pai must overcome resistance as she tries to assume her destiny as the leader of a tribe on the New Zealand coast -- is wickedly absorbing. Much of the film's power comes from the delicate charisma of Keisha Castle-Hughes, making her acting debut as Pai.

Ms. Castle-Hughes lacks the traditional resources of an actress, and instead communicates her feelings through a wary hesitation. It doesn't matter that her voice makes her sound a little lost, still trying to find her way into a world that disdains her. Her intelligent, dark eyes are so expressive that she has the piquant confidence of a silent-film heroine.

Her instinctive underplaying gives ''Whale Rider'' an added gravity, with the lush remoteness of the landscape serving as an entrancing contrast to the sugar-rush, you-go-girl empowerment of programmed pandering like ''The Lizzie McGuire Movie,'' whose tweener heroine flails her arms and bats her eyes as if she were sending distress signals. The director demonstrates a class and tact that brand ''Whale Rider,'' which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, as more than a time-filler for young moviegoers or an ironman competition for adults accompanying them.

Pai's natural rectitude -- the way she plays both pride and hurt -- is even used by Ms. Caro as a hereditary trait. Pai's prickly grandfather Koro (Rawiri Paratene) displays a contempt for her that is like a deadpan force of nature itself. Koro, the tribal chief, wanted a grandson to take on his mantle. But Pai's twin brother died in a difficult birth, which also took her mother's life, and her father, Porourangi (Cliff Curtis), has deserted the family for a career as an artist. Koro treats his granddaughter as the living embodiment of a curse. When he bothers to pay attention to her at all, it's through a sharp cutting of his eyes in her direction.

Tradition dictates that the first-born grandson step into the role of chief, but Pai -- named Paikea by her father, after the tribe's ancient ancestor, who legend says arrived in the village on the back of a whale -- is all the family has.

Her patient grandmother Nanny Flowers (Vicky Haughton) encourages Pai to give things time; Nanny Flowers also refuses to crumple under the galling chauvinism of her husband. But Pai has endured the suffering for all of her 12 years. And though she has a plucky physical assurance -- the firm hand of her grandmother has helped keep her demeanor strong -- she still wants the nurturing she feels is her due.

Ms. Caro treats the material with the calm of a silent film and exploits the extravagant beauty of the location for its majesty. Each shot of the vistas in the breathtakingly lovely village is presented with an even clarity; Ms. Caro and her cinematographer, Leon Narbey, let the audience be seduced by the daunting power, rather than overwhelming viewers with it.

With a deft hand, the director bridges the disconnect between the modern touches in the village -- like the hilarious, cranky chatter over card games -- and the determination to cling to traditions. It is evident that tradition is the way the Whangara tribe maintains its spirituality, which defines it.

Ms. Caro's attempt to fight the mawkishness inherent in the film's opening by setting a tone of emotional tidiness makes the rest of ''Whale Rider'' distinctively efficient; this gamble makes the first section seem distended and a little drab. Still, there aren't many filmmakers who would have fought that initial heightening of heartbreak. Too flamboyant an opening would have left the movie with no place to go and embarrassed us with so early a claim on our sentiments. Bear with ''Whale Rider'': once the picture kicks into gear, it has the inspiring resonance of found art.

A "restavèk" is a Haitian child who is turned over by his or her parents to a household that exploits the child’s labor and vulnerability to handle house chores. A restavèk is a house slave.

Parents who engage in such barter do so in theory to provide their child schooling, food, shelter, and clothing in exchange for domestic labor. That is the exception however. The rule is that they throw their child into a nightmarish hell, isolated from parental love and care, the restavèk spends his or her formative years, deprived of schooling, and subjected to long days of work with no pay and living conditions inferior to those of the overseer’s family. These children, who are routinely abused sexually, physically and verbally by members of the household, perform whatever services the overseer requires of them. The restavèk system is unique to Haiti in that the trafficking of such children is done within the country, even within communities.

For additional information and to sign a petition to end child slavery in Haiti please visit  http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/end-child-slavery-in-haiti.html

Thank you for your support!

Few words should strike fear into the hearts of American moviegoers like the phrase "feel-good Australian comedy," but now that The Full Monty has sparked an insatiable desire to see more of the world's quirky underclass, 1997's painfully strident The Castle has been dusted off and released to theaters. A sort of benign Pink Flamingos ladled with a thin broth of Capra-esque uplift, the film champions a tacky, stupidly optimistic family which fights to save its home from government eviction. As the patriarch of his cluttered "castle," Michael Caton has a knack for putting a positive spin on every hardship: The roaring planes at an adjacent airport are outweighed by the convenience of living so close to it, the giant power lines overhead are a testament to man's ability to generate electricity, and his wife's sponge cake is nothing short of a revelation. It wouldn't be such a bad joke, really, were it not stretched so far beyond the limits of patience and credibility. Director Rob Sitch wants to poke gentle fun at Caton and his family while extolling their simple virtues, but he's unwilling to grant them the simple dignity of common sense. When his two-bit lawyer (Tiriel Mora) makes a fool of himself in federal court, Caton is so oblivious to his plainly incompetent performance that he can hardly fathom the resulting verdict. The Castle is brimming with such absurdly contrived moments, tempered only by the most condescending shows of affection. Sitch perches himself too comfortably above his characters to pass for an Aussie answer to John Waters, a director who understands better than anyone that you can't laugh at white trash without getting dirty.

Camera Buff is a comedy about the transformation of a nice happily married young man, who asks for nothing more from life than a little peace and quiet, into a raging, obsessed movie maker.
It's about Filip (Jerzy Stuhr), a purchasing agent for a small factory in provincial Poland, who buys an 8-millimeter movie camera to film his new baby daughter but gets sidetracked into making a film about his factory's 25th anniversary celebration.

From there, it's only a matter of months, and several more movie shorts, before Filip has been abandoned by his neglected wife, is arguing film esthetics at Lodz and having doubts about the the extent to which he should pursue ''truth'' in his documentaries. One of Filip's films, which exposes management sloppiness, results in the wrong people being dismissed.

''Camera Buff'' is exuberantly acted by a good cast headed by Mr. Stuhr, who was seen here this year in another Polish film, ''Top Dog.''

Like many movies about movie nuts who are as committed as Filip, ''Camera Buff'' manifests a strong sense of self-importance. It seems to share Filip's conviction that there is something magical about the camera itself, sometimes confusing the importance of the object photographed with the camera that does the photographing. Much of the film means to be uproariously emotional, but the events we see seldom justify all the overwrought reactions.

Mr. Kieslowski also appears to suggest that art - in this case movie making - must be a process by which the artist consumes the raw materials of his experience and then spits them out as finished art, leaving the people around him in the state of gnawed beef bones. This is a vast oversimplification of the creative process and is probably only applicable, really, to the second-rater.

The director is on much firmer ground when he is satirizing the jargon of criticism and the cliches of film making. The film is fuunniest when it shows us Filip escaping from the various personal crises in his life by stepping outside himself and seeing it all as something to be caught in a viewfinder.

Videoart from the Czech Republic
FRIENDLY FILM – PRATELSKY FILM

A special presentation in coordination with the Czech Center New York .
The films have been selected by Martin Mazanec and Michal Pechoucek in collaboration with Irena Kovarova.

In alphabetical order the artists and the work featured:

Ondrej Brody (Miss Krimi, Lovestory, Ther)

Ivos Hos (3 Bits/3 kousky)

Michal Pechoucek (Pram Room/Kocarkarna, Collector/Sberatel, Honor Guard/Cestna straz)

Matej Smetana (It’s Only a Movie/Je to jenom film)

Ivan Svoboda (Eva Zollner)

Mark Ther (Pick a Wedgie, Burger and Ther, CH.D., Ther)

 Viktor Vokjan (Swan/Labut)

Blind Chance, finished in 1981 but withheld from release for six years, goes off something of a metaphysical deep end, though its structure was innovative enough to provide inspiration (if that's the word) for Sliding Doors and Run Lola Run. In the film's three-part tale, an unassuming medical student's life is transformed by minor variations on the same event: He catches a train, or does not catch it, is arrested for knocking over a policeman in the rush or reconnects with an old love. Whether he becomes a party functionary or an anti-government activist or simply an obedient family man, he's always consumed with the idea of leaving Poland. But when he finally gets his wish in life number three, the results are not what anyone would expect, though they do explain the otherwise cryptic images that open the film. There's no room in Blind Chance's deterministic universe for character or personal choice, which may be why the film feels less fleshed-out, more schematic than some of Kieslowski's others.
Blind Chance focuses on some of the same profound questions that characterize Kieslowski work: faith, politics, love and his lifelong obsession, the role of chance. In "Blind Chance," everything hinges on whether or not his protagonist can outrun a moving train and hoist himself aboard -- and in classic Kieslowskian style, we are shown three possible outcomes.... You'll need to stay awake and alert for this film, so plan accordingly. It's worth the effort, and, if your goal is to know the Kieslowski oeuvre, it's an integral piece.

A 10-hour Polish television serial based on The Ten Commandments, Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Decalogue was branded a masterpiece when it first appeared on the festival circuit in 1988. It's been talked about in hushed tones ever since, yet its reputation is deceptive: not because the film doesn't deserve to be confettied with superlatives, but because the word "masterpiece" can sound as impenetrable and monolithic as the Commandments themselves. On the contrary, The Decalogue finds Kieslowski and co-scenarist Krzysztof Piesiewicz turning a delicate cycle of intimate, funny, heartbreaking, and compassionate works into a symphony of human fallibility. After a decade of bootlegs, imports, and repertory showings, The Decalogue has finally received a proper release on home video, the ideal format for watching this epic in miniature. The late director had specific ideas about cinema and television audiences that factored into his conception of the film, and, as he succinctly puts it in the book Kieslowski On Kieslowski, "Television means solitude while cinema means community." To his mind, colorless Warsaw high-rises like the one where he photographed the episodes fostered no sense of community; the effect for Polish viewers at the time was to have their loneliness and alienation reflected back at them. American moviegoers who know Kieslowski from his luxuriant trilogy, Three Colors: Blue, White, Red, may be surprised by the simple, pared-down visuals and emotional accessibility of the series, but both can be approached in much the same way. Like the trilogy, which took its central themes from the French flag (Blue for liberty, White for equality, Red for fraternity), The Decalogue is profoundly interconnected, but can be watched piecemeal without confusion. Some of the episodes deal with their respective Commandments directly, others indirectly, and a few require interpretive acrobatics to make the connection. More important than any specific Commandment is how these old laws figure into the way people choose to live their lives, and what they pay for their transgressions. Although the episodes have been broken up at various festivals and screenings, with two expanded and released as full-length features (A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love), the tapes are best seen in order. Decalogue 1 ("I am the Lord thy God; Thou shalt have no other Gods before me"), the devastating tale of a father who relies on his computer to determine whether it's safe for his boy to go ice skating, is a primer for things to come. The boy's precocious questions—why do people die? what is death? is there a God? who is He?—cannot be dodged by his father's rational explanations, which is why they're fundamental to religion (and to these films). Other major issues follow, but waiting at the end of Kieslowski's difficult journey is the brisk and hilarious Decalogue 10 ("Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods"), which wipes the palette clean. The plot concerns two mismatched brothers—one the lead singer in a death-metal band, the other a suited businessman—who inherit the most valuable stamp collection in Poland but have an awful time trying to sell it. Their greed comes at a steep price: a hundred million zlotys and a spare kidney. Between the bookends, The Decalogue reflects on the Commandments through an extraordinary range of subject matter, including abortion, incest, capital punishment, sexual obsession, parenthood, the Holocaust, and adultery. More a pragmatist than a moralist, Kieslowski finds original ways to muddy issues that would appear to be clear. The blunt Decalogue 5 ("Thou shalt not kill") measures the strangling death of a cab driver against the strangling death of the killer by the state. What's the difference? Under such a sharp moral law, how is one form of killing more justifiable than another? Another plainly stated Commandment is called into question in Decalogue 7 ("Thou shalt not steal"), a wrenching tale of a vulnerable young woman forced by her mother to pretend that she's a sister to her six-year-old daughter. With no money and no destination in mind, she kidnaps the girl and runs away from home. Is this stealing? If so, is it stealing for the mother and the child to be robbed of the truth? Such ambiguities and contradictions inform every relationship in Kieslowski's world, and each individual is left to his or her own devices to sort them out. The films are all set around what the director considered Warsaw's most beautiful housing estate ("It looks pretty awful, so you can imagine what the others are like"), but its inhabitants are all strangers to one another. Characters who play a major role in one story often make a cameo appearance in another later on—bumping into somebody at the entrance, selling postage stamps from behind a counter, and so on—but there's no connection between them. And, barring some random intrusion of fate (a Kieslowski trademark, as it happens), there never will be. Like no film since Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, The Decalogue uses the camera to peer across a courtyard and into people's private lives, where a new story unfolds from one apartment to the next. It's a tribute to Kieslowski's mastery that he not only survives the comparison, but takes Hitchcock's idea further than anyone could have imagined. One of the great legacies of The Decalogue is that its vision of humanity is infinite: Behind every door, there are desires, secrets, and feelings worth exploring on film. Kieslowski pays homage to Hitchcock directly in Decalogue 6 ("Thou shalt not commit adultery"), perhaps the richest and most affecting episode in the series (a tight race with 4, 5, and 9). In the Jimmy Stewart role, a lonely teenage boy spies on a promiscuous woman through a telescope, but his obsession leads him into trouble. When he eventually declares his love for her, their relationship is altered in ways he's too inexperienced to handle. With astonishing economy, Kieslowski covers more territory in an hour—from the erotic charge of voyeurism and exhibitionism to the promise of real tenderness and love—than most directors could accomplish in twice the time. If there's one especially optimistic image in the mostly bleak cycle, it's the woman looking through the telescope, startled and moved by imagining what she looks like in the boy's eyes. The Decalogue presents a perfect synthesis of ideas and emotions, nourishment for the heart and mind. Kieslowski, who was only 54 when he died in 1996, had a grim view of Poland as it approached the end of Communist rule. This extended to himself and the rest of its citizens, too, who had "become too egotistic, too much in love with ourselves and our needs, as if everybody else [had] disappeared into the background." His feelings are echoed throughout the series, yet a deep empathy and warmth illuminates every scene. The Decalogue is a masterpiece, all right, but on an achingly human scale.

After completing 1994's Red, the third and final installment of his celebrated Three Colors trilogy, director Krzysztof Kieslowski announced an early retirement at 53, much to the dismay of his admirers around the world. Though he died shortly afterward, leaving traces of another high-concept trilogy behind him–the first, Heaven, was faithfully adapted last year by Tom Tykwer–the final shots in Red now seem like the logical endpoint of a career that circled obsessively around capital-letter themes of Fate, Morality, and cosmic Coincidence. Few directors have been so controlled (or controlling) in their effects as Kieslowski was, both in the internal signs, symbols, and color schemes that recur in his work, and in the impossible connections that bind unrelated characters and events, bringing a magical order to a seemingly random universe. Once a director becomes God, what could he possibly do for an encore? Nothing happens by accident in a Kieslowski film, especially in the ornate Colors trilogy, which acts like a sealed (and, at times, airless) passageway into one man's singular vision, inviting the viewer to puzzle out meanings that have already been programmed into the work. Fortunately, Kieslowski had a mind well worth accessing, a prismatic and visually sophisticated sensibility consumed with the mysteries and poignant truths of human behavior. Much like 1988's The Decalogue, Kieslowski's astounding 10-part meditation on the Ten Commandments, Three Colors takes broad concepts into a more intimate and personal realm, demonstrating their relevance to ordinary individuals. Inspired by the colors and concepts of the French flag (Blue for "liberty," White for "equality," Red for "fraternity"), the films each start with a character who withdraws from life after losing everything that was once important, only to be pulled back into society by unexpected forces, mostly from within. Though Kieslowski and longtime screenwriting partner Krzysztof Piesiewicz designed the three films to work well enough on their own, Red wrangles them together in a richly harmonious whole, creating an intersection where all of the trilogy's characters collide. A memorably crusty Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Kieslowski's surrogate, a retired judge who taps his neighbors' phone conversations, presiding over their lives and manipulating them to his own sad end. When model Irène Jacob accidentally hits his dog with her car, Trintignant responds with indifference, but after discovering his secret hobby, Jacob overcomes her initial revulsion and the two embark on a warm friendship that links his past with her future. With daunting scope and ambition, Red opens up several lines of communication–between past and present, unrelated people and events, and one film in the trilogy and another–under the banner of "fraternity," closing with a gesture that affirms Kieslowski's passion for his creations and his command as a storyteller.

Yasujiro Ozu was still largely unknown to Western audiences when his delicate family drama Early Summer was released in 1951. Since that time, new prints of the film have no doubt been made; still, I imagine that most Americans will never have seen an Early Summer in any format as radiant as the new Criterion DVD release of the film. It matters; Ozu’s studied composition and luminous black-and-white cinematography invite adjectives such as “luscious,” even as his content refutes the extravagance and sensuality of the term. Criterion’s Early Summer is a marvel of contrast, restoring to the screen a full palette of blacks, whites, and grays; a scene such as that near the end in which two women walk the dunes by the sea reveals a visual artist working at the peak of his form. You could lose yourself in such images indefinitely, even if the proceedings offered nothing to hold your mind.

But they do. Early Summer, like many of Ozu’s “home dramas,” is the story of a family – three generations of it – that struggles to find serenity within the cycle of life that the state of being human embodies. The central figure is 28-year-old Noriko, an attractive young single woman who lives with her brother Koichi, his wife Fumiko, their two young boys, and her elderly parents. We also meet her neighbors (a widower her age and his mother), her three girlfriends, a great-uncle who comes for a visit, her employer, and her brother’s co-worker. Present in the thoughts of the family, though never pictured, is Noriko’s brother Shoji, a soldier who remains unaccounted for from the war.

In Early Summer Ozu foretells the kind of ensemble drama, propelled by the interactions and encounters common to any community of people, that contemporary audiences find in Amores Perros, Traffic, and almost any film of Robert Altman’s. The various plot threads are gathered loosely into a rich depth of narrative, so that an event affecting one character – the widowed neighbor is transferred to a distant town, for instance – reverberates throughout the film.

At the film’s core are the efforts of Noriko’s family to find her a husband. Noriko herself, infallibly good-natured, seems oblivious to the undertaking and indifferent to its outcome. When, ultimately, this proves not to be true, the decision she suddenly makes changes the life of her family forever. Part of the brilliance of Early Summer is the extent to which this decision affects the viewer as well; the film moves along with the seeming ease of a Leave it to Beaver episode, and it’s astonishing to suddenly find yourself at the brink of these unforeseen emotional depths.

This illusory ease is what’s greatest about Ozu in general. The film’s style, as serene as a sand garden, is the perfect vehicle for chronicling the small pleasures and disappointments that comprise the bigger enterprise of life. Ozu’s genius was to capture these moments in a way no other filmmaker has.

Who would have thought that august Sweden would be sending us a film comedy as witty and cheerfully candid about the complexities of love as any recent French essay on l'amour? Yet that is what Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night is—a delightfully droll contemplation of amorous ardors. It opened at the Sutton yesterday.

In a style of writing and direction more characteristic of the French or perhaps the prewar Hungarians than the usually solemn Swedes, Mr. Bergman skips us gaily through a mix-up of youthful and adult love affairs, which, while timed around the turn of the century, are as spicy as any such today.

Spicy, indeed, is the label to put on this charming film which logically ran away with comedy honors at the 1956 festival in Cannes. Its amorous incidents are spicy, in a thoroughly tasteful and elegant way, and its philosophical conclusions are made attractive with the most redolent of intellectual herbs. What is more, its involved situations are invariably comical and deft.

Mr. Bergman is treating one of the conflicts between young and mature, experienced love. In his exquisite cast of characters are a polished Stockholm lawyer who is wed to a second wife many years his junior, this same man's serious and virginal son, his former mistress (a handsome, clever actress), her present lover (a pert dragoon), and the latter's wife. There is also a naughty little housemaid who knows her way around and an aged courtesan, the actress's mother, who has the pleasure of dropping wise epigrams.

The series of personal complications that makes up the content of the film begins when the lawyer seeks the counsel of his former mistress as to how to treat his young wife. This leads to surprising discoveries and developments of crisscrossed love. The young wife, while faithful to her husband, is drawn to his agonized son. The mistress still fancies the lawyer, while entertaining her jealous dragoon. The latter's wife wants her husband, yet is ready to seduce the lawyer to prove it can be done. All very complicated, sophisticated, and droll.

Mr. Bergman, whose previous pictures seen here have been on the deeply serious side, keeps this one light and intriguing with a fine blend of stylized high comedy and farce. His gentlemen are sternly pompous figures while his ladies are sweetly pliable. The matter most pointedly satirized is masculine dignity.

As the lawyer, Gunnar Bjšrnstrand is elegantly stiff yet slyly droll and Jari Kulle is amusingly formal and arrogant as the dragoon. Ulla Jacobsson is delightfully nubile and naive as the young wife. Eva Dahlbeck is full-blown as the mistress and Margit Carlquist is brittle as the wife of the dragoon. Harriet Andersson is disarmingly breezy and lusty as the buxom maid. Bjorn Bjelvenstam is comical as the sad son and Naima Wifstrand is tart as the old courtesan. Ake Fridell is also good as a coachman who explains what the title means—there are three kinds of love that, according to legend, are possible on a summer night.

Check Keith's website for additional information about his work.

www.keithjacoby.com

The Italians dominated world cinema from the late '40s through the early '70s because they boasted an army of masters working high and low, pioneering genres like neo-realism, giallo, spaghetti Westerns, and a peculiarly Italian brand of existential pageantry. With so many canonical films and internationally famous filmmakers, it's no wonder a director as great as Valerio Zurlini could fall through the cracks. The eight feature films he made over a 20-year career were beholden to no particular style, but were highly individualized history plays, featuring idealists dwelling on the fringe of monumental moments.

Zurlini lets the melodrama get a little overheated in Violent Summer, but he peppers the film with unforgettable images, from kinetic footage of kids eating spaghetti and drinking wine to a hair-raising shot of happy beachgoers getting buzzed by a low-flying fighter plane. The film stars Jean-Louis Trintignant as an idle rich kid wooing war-widow Eleonora Rossi Drago in the summer of '43, just prior to the civil war between fascists and anti-fascists.

This one's for the mothers and the militants and the ones in between.

Dancers: Kathryn Bosley, Heidi Green, Lizzy Greene, Jordan Marinov, Amanda McCroskery, Candice Thompson

Musicians: Frank Bevan, Bobby Drake, Mia Greene

In the midst of a heat wave in 1977, New York City became the hunting grounds of the serial killer known as the Son Of Sam. Son Of Sam would turn out to be David Berkowitz, the original disgruntled postal worker, but for a time, thanks in part to constant media coverage, an air of near-paranoia settled over the city, one which found women staying home or cutting their hair and wearing wigs so as not to fit the pattern of Berkowitz's victims. Spike Lee uses this unease as the backdrop for Summer Of Sam, which focuses, for the most part, on the impact Berkowitz's killing spree has on one Italian-American neighborhood. Inadvertently caught up in the furor is John Leguizamo, a Bronx hairdresser who, though he clearly loves his wife (Mira Sorvino), can't seem to stop his philandering ways or integrate his taste for sexual adventure into his marriage. Leguizamo's escalating marital crisis coincides with the return to his neighborhood of old friend Adrien Brody, an obsessive fan of The Who involved in the burgeoning New York punk scene. Brody's spiky hair and decidedly un-Italian affectations (and rumors of other activities) attract the disdain of his neighbors, their suspicions eventually coinciding with their fears of the killer. Some judicious trimming might have improved it, but Summer Of Sam is Lee at his best, a virtuoso piece of filmmaking that's stylish, substantial, and rich in detail. Lee, as in Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights and Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, steeps his film in the knowledge that the past really is another country, with its own laws and now-lost possibilities. Strengthening it further is Summer Of Sam's willingness to incorporate elements of black comedy (as in a bizarre, frightening cameo by John Turturro that captures the insanity of the situation more than a more literal approach to filmmaking could) and believable performances by the entire cast, especially Leguizamo, Sorvino, and Brody. After the near-self-parody of He Got Game, Lee seemed to have drifted away from what made him an interesting filmmaker to begin with. The thrillingly mature and complex Summer Of Sam pretty decisively reverses the trend.

By day Electra-Elf is Jennifer Swallows, a
 mild-mannered reporter for Art Star Scene Magazine
 (A.S.S.) and Fluffer is Boobie, a chihuahua-clothes
 model, but when danger calls, the two put on stylish
 leotards and kick butt, taking down corrupt senators,
 sleazy frat-boys, satanic cults, landlords,
 zombie-tourists and others in each heart-stopping
 episode.
 A hit on Manhattan Neighborhood Network, Electra Elf
 features local artstars and comedians from the Open
 Mike scene.

 "Utterly intoxicating. The closest thing we've got to,
 say, The Ridiculous Theatrical Co... Costumes alone
 scream with genius. Ditto special effects!" - Mark
 Kramer, Blacklisted Journalist

 To be screened:
 FILTHY RICH starring Neon Music
 NO PLAGUE LIKE HOME starring the voice of Vox, Rev Jen
 VILE BUDDIES starring Rev Jen, Alison Gordy, Brenda
 Bergman
 OF LICE & MEN starring Chuck Funk, Rev Jen, FaceBoy,
 Michelle Carlos
 HELLBOUND HEIRESSES starring Rev Jen, Neal Medlyn
 OLD MAN & THE SEA MONKEY starring Rev Jen, Big Mike,
 O'Debra Twins
 I, NAUSEUS starring Rev Jen Giorgio Handman

This rarely-seen treasure will be run at true silent speed for correct movement! The first film to match stop-motion (tabletop miniature) animation with live action, the public was amazed to see dinosaurs come to life.   Wallace Beery is half-mad Professor Challenger, leading an expedition to a Jurassic plateau in Brazil.  Based on Conan Doyle’s thrilling story, with special effects by Willis O’Brien.  We’ll also see Creation, O’Brien’s test reel for  his next feature, King Kong!  And the first chapter of a vintage serial to be continued next month.

Key Fitz - Host of show/Comedian
Danny  LoFaro - Co-Host/Comedian
El Juglar - Juggler
April Brucker - Ventriloquist
Ril Oji - Dancer
Bob James - Elvis
Jared - Sideshow performer
 
Sarah Blakemore
Reigning Queen of Everything
 
"Why everything? Oh, Darling, because a girl should never limit herself, ever."

1. THE BOX by Seth Fragomen ( 3 min, 2007)
2. THE BOLERIUM by Nathan & Keary Kenzinger ( 23 min, 2006)
3. ANIMATION BRUNCH by Steve Schmitz and Inju Keum (10 min, 2007)
4. DIG ALL JIVE by William Palminteri ( 6 min, 2006)
5. LOVE IS A GAME WE PLAY by Robert Flanagan & Suzan Al-Doghachi ( 3min, 2007)
6. THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA by Nick Zedd (18 min, 1998)
7. THE TOMORROW GODS: THE FIGHT FOR PLANET TERRA by Michael Park with music by Martin Rev (39 min, 2007)

Stephen Sondheim once said that melodrama and farce were his two favorite forms of theater because “they are obverse sides of the same coin.” The Korean writer and director of “Three-Iron,” has minted a cinematic example of that coin with Time a tale of big-city 20-somethings and the masks they wear. Throughout, Mr. Kim flips between soapy melodrama and dry, self-aware comedy. The effect is thrilling and disorienting, like walking on a trampoline.

The film starts and ends with the same scene: a woman clad in a long coat, sunglasses and a surgical mask (an echo of “Dressed to Kill”) leaving a plastic-surgery clinic and colliding with our heroine, See-hee (Seong Hyeon-ah). The impact causes the patient to drop and break a framed photograph. See-hee promises to repair it and takes it along to a coffee shop, where she’s meeting her boyfriend, Ji-woo (Ha Jung-woo).

Clearly, their relationship is doomed. See-hee accuses Ji-woo of growing bored with her and having a wandering eye, paranoid accusations that she thinks are confirmed when Ji-woo checks out a waitress, then interrupts their conversation to exchange insurance information with a young woman who dinged his parked car. When the lovers’ quarrel reaches a Jerry Springer pitch and See-hee stomps out of the coffee shop, the driver tells Ji-woo, “She must love you very much; I envy you.”

See-hee, a self-loathing basket case who once said, “I’m sorry for having the same boring face every day,” goes to the clinic glimpsed in the opening and signs up for a new face. Then “Time” switches its focus to poor Ji-woo, who knows only that his girlfriend suddenly moved away without saying goodbye. He doesn’t realize that the cute new coffee-shop waitress with the suspiciously similar name Seh-hee (Park Ji-yun) seems familiar for a reason.

As “Time” follows Ji-woo through familiar big-city mating rituals — karaoke, speed dating, thwarted one-night stands — en route to an uneasy relationship with his new/old love, it becomes clear that Mr. Kim has more on his mind than the ethics of nose jobs.

“Time” has been described as a comedy about the hollowness of relationships in a global consumerist culture, and it certainly is. The film’s three lead performances, by Mr. Ha as Ji-woo and by Ms. Seong and Ms. Park as the two incarnations of his lover, are fearlessly honest, so attuned to contemporary anxieties about sex, love and social status that the characters’ unhappiness is as squirm-inducing as the movie’s close-ups of sliced flesh.

But while the film’s cultural context is of the moment, its depiction of romantic desperation is timeless. Many scenes end on the same uneasy note, a mix of cynical dissatisfaction and desperate, almost childlike neediness. This, too, is reminiscent of Sondheim, specifically the title “Sorry-Grateful,” a song from “Company.” Like Sondheim’s Nixon-era swingers, Mr. Kim’s clueless, self-absorbed 21st-century materialists are miserable in love, and they can’t get enough of it.

Mr. Kim repeats ideas, situations and shots with musical precision. He puts certain sentiments in the mouths of different characters at different times. He lets pivotal moments play out through scrims or partitions, or as reflections in mirrors or windowpanes, depriving them of emotional solidity. He shows characters donning actual or metaphoric masks (getting new faces, moving to new places, starting new relationships) and then becoming depressed when these alterations alter little. As Sondheim’s married men sing in “Sorry-Grateful,” “Everything’s different, nothing’s changed/Only maybe slightly rearranged.”

The flyspeck insignificance of the characters’ narcissism is expressed through a recurring setting: a sculpture garden that includes a pair of giant hands topped by a connected series of increasingly small iron squares that seem to vanish against the sky. The film’s oft-repeated image of lovers photographing themselves in those palms, naïvely trying to immortalize their affection, is the closest the director comes to a moral: Don’t obsess over surfaces, because your life is not really in your hands.

Nick Zedd presents

Llik Your Idols, a film by Angelique Bosio (2007/France/69 min)

Discover! The New York underground scene of the 80's!

Throw yourself
Into an exciting, anarchic and repulsive world that you won't forget!

Featuring:

Exclusive interviews with Lydia Lunch, Nick Zedd, Richard Kern, Joe Coleman, Thurston Moore...

Never before seen footage & archives

PLUS a rare screening of Thrust In Me by Nick Zedd/R. Kern (1984)

In the South American jungle supplies of nitroglycerin are needed at a remote oil field.
The oil company pays four men to deliver the supplies in two trucks.
A tense rivalry develops between the two sets of drivers on the rough remote roads where the slightest jolt can result in death.

The acting is superb: handsome young Yves Montand's Mario, a Parisian gangster on the run from who-knows-what, maintains is Gallic savoir-faire.
His compatriot , Charles Vanel, is Jo, an older, more burnt-out wiseguy, but still full of macho moxie.

Director Clouzot squeezes unbearable tension out of nearly every scene.
The stripped-down existentialism of the characters, the starkness of their shared dilemma, the grim and grimy scenery, and the superb black-and-white cinematography cannot fail to hold your attention.

This month theme: Home for the holidays.
Cast to be announced.

THE PRISONER REMIX by Power Themes 90.

THE VOLUPTUOUS HORROR OF HOLISTIC BIRTHING by Ned Ambler.

CRASH 'N' BURN by Ross McLaren.

SHE DREAMS THE WORLD by Lili White.

HITCHHIKER: JAZZ HEAVEN by Tony White.

ONE FM by Paul Grant

THE PURSUIT OF SELF by Myles David Jewell.

DISCOTECH by Michael Park.

LOVE AND DEATH AT THE ROMP by Robert Flanagan.

Scopitones (pronounced Scope-a-tones) are one of the great lost gems of modern pop music and culture. They are a treasure trove of fantastic songs and wild imagery. Early 1960s precursors to today's music videos, they were distributed on color 16mm film with a magnetic soundtrack, and made to be shown only on a Scopitone film jukebox.

The first Scopitones were made in France around 1960, and the Scopitone craze spread throughout Europe (particularly in West Germany and England) before crossing the Atlantic to the United States in mid-1964. A few years later, Scopitones fell victim to bad luck, poor business decisions and alleged Mafia connections. Most of the machines were destroyed but the films became highly prized by collectors. Bursting with bright colors, sexy babes, and hunky guys, Scopitones are an amazing time capsule of 1960s pop culture with a special focus on classic French ye-ye and Vegas lounge music.

Bobby Vee, Joi Lansing, Françoise Hardy, Johnny Halliday, Frank Sinatra Jr., Buddy Greco, Billy Lee Riley, Donna Theodore, Sylvie Vartan, Les Chats Sauvages, Colette Magny, Sonny King, and Jody Miller, are just some of the wild performers featured on these rare original Scopitones.

Tom Thumb (1998) by Nick Zedd

The Wild World of Lydia Lunch (1983) by Nick Zedd

The Right Side of My Brain (1985) by R. Kern starring Lydia Lunch, Henry Rollins, Jim Foetus and others.

Not the latest documentary on the Bush administration but  the tale of clever vagabong Abu, the boy from India, in a top-notch color adventure with excellent special effects.  He gets turned into a dog by evil magician Conrad Veidt, uncorks the genie bottle, flies to the end of the earth to battle the giant spider, steals the idol's ruby eye, rides the flying carpet.  Rex Ingram is the genie, John Justin and June Duprez are the lovers.  An all-time family favorite, good entertainment for young and old.

This installment features:

1. UFO REMIX (THE ARRIVAL) by Power Themes 90.
2. DOC SOLARIS: MAN OF THE FUTURE by Michael Park.
3. COINCIDO CONTICO ENCOOTRO (I COINCIDE WITH YOU IN THE OTHER) by  Itziar Barrio.
4. WORDS ON PEACE PEACE by Lili White.
5. WHEREVER SEPTEMBER/ ROSALIND by Nisi Jacobs.
6. DON'T STOP by Ned Ambler.
7. THE BLOND LEADING THE BLOND by Jack Waters (featuring Philly).
8. CANDY-COATED EVIL by Mike Kuchar (featuring Samoa and Kembra Pfahler).
9. TURNTABLE TRAUMA by Kevin Jarvis.
10. WHOLEY MOSES by Todd Heyman ( with a guest appearance by Linda      Hamilton)

A Christmas Spectacular!!!
Cast to be announced.

Ernest Hemmingway once remarked that the best thing a writer could do, as far as the movies were concerned, was drive to California, toss a script over the border, grab the cash, and split as quickly as possible. In the bad old days, the studio system did not assume that the Book Reading and Movie Going Worlds had any sort of Venn intersection, and treated the novels they purchased accordingly.

Case in point: Nelson Algren, a once celebrated author whose books did not fare well on the silver screen. He was kicked off the set of the film adaptation of his 1950 novel, The Man With the Golden Arm, after butting heads with director Otto Preminger, a man with a reputation for crushing souls (for example, Dorothy Dandridge). The resulting movie, while a classic in its own right, bore little resemblance to the novel that inspired it. Algren swore he would never deal with "Hollywood" again.

He was happy, however, to take the money and run, as evidenced by the 1962 adaptation of his novel, Walk on the Wild Side, just released on DVD for the first time. There are worse adaptations, to be sure, and the book's digressive, symbolic prose style is highly resistant to dramatization. Still, the film does little to evoke his skills.

The book takes place during the 1930s, following Dove Linkhorn, a small-town Texas boy, in his Candide-like journey from the Dust Bowl to the seedy underworld of New Orleans. Like all of Algren's work, it focuses on the lowest of the low, but resists "poor but clean" clichés. A product of the Depression, Algren echoes Steinbeck's class-conscious anger, though far less didactically.

The script by John Fante and Edwin Morris (assisted by an uncredited Ben Hecht) whittles the novel's rambling, nearly plot-free narrative down to a fine point: Dove (Laurence Harvey) is transformed into a man on a mission, traveling to New Orleans to be reunited with his one true love, an artist named Hallie(Capucine). On the way, he meets scheming teenage vagabond Kitty Twist (Jane Fonda), who helps him hitch a ride to the Big Easy. Meanwhile, Hallie languishes in a classy bordello called the Doll House, run by the iron-willed, steel-jawed madame Jo (Barbara Stanwyck).

The lovers are eventually reunited, though Hallie breaks Dove's heart when he learns what she does for her money. He vows to take her away from this life, but the vengeful Doll House management is loath to let Hallie go, and employs Kitty in a plot to blackmail Dove into leaving her forever. The film ends on a dour note, atypical for its era, but it also reassures the viewer that all the guilty were appropriately punished.

Edward Dmytryk makes fine use of the French Quarter's Byzantine ironwork, its shadowy foyers, and the Escher-like twists of its courtyards and balconies. This is unfortunately marred on the DVD by a sloppy digital transfer full of static and sound dropouts (there are few extras, beyond foreign language subtitles). However, the film itself has more salient problems. Little of Algren's grit and grime is evident in the finished product. The opulent Doll House features a full jazz band and well-appointed bar to cater to its customers, and its well-dressed employees' biggest problem seems to be fighting off boredom. Contrast that with the cathouses in Algren's novel, dives with savage pimps, shamed fetishists, and sad girls who dream of better lives more out of habit than earnest desire.

Similarly troubling is what Fante and Morris's script do to the novel's moral outlook. Algren does not condemn his whores and hustlers -- he saves his contempt for the city fathers who urged poor folks to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, while at the same time profiting from their misery. The film, on the other hand, is replete with the muddled double standards of Eisenhower-era sexual mores. No longer an innocent, Dove is here a crusader who eventually decides to "forgive" his woman for what she's done. He spouts Biblical platitudes about faithfulness and love, despite an implied romance with Terasina (Ann Baxter), a Mexican café owner who lets Dove stay with her while he searches for Hallie. Baxter's performance teeters on the brink of stereotype, typical of those from a time when it was "acceptable" for white actors to portray characters of other races.

In the hands of Capucine (now best remembered as Mrs. Clouseau in the first Pink Panther movie, but once considered an exotic beauty of the Sophia Loren sort), Hallie has an air of Gallic cool about her, and looks she couldn't care less whether she ever escapes her "life of sin". There isn't the slightest bit of chemistry between her and Harvey, who displays little of the feverish intensity he brought to The Manchurian Candidate. For spark, you have to turn to the strangely homoerotic battle of wits between Capucine and Stanwyck, who displays the calculating drive common to that trope from the Celluloid Closet of old: the Implied Lesbian Villainess.

Few of the performances register at all, save that of Jane Fonda, seen here in only her third film role. In a film ostensibly about the "wild side", Kitty is the only character who displays the slightest trace of animal lust. The way Kitty tries to get into Dove's pants, then betrays him when she can't, is the closest that Wild Side comes to approximating Algren's vision, a world where people bite and claw their way not to the top, but simply to keep from being on the bottom.

Faithfully translating Wild Side for the screen would have been a tall order in 1962, when the restrictive Production Code was still in full effect. However, it is less the book's explicit depictions of poverty and whorehouses that is missed, and more its view of the people who inhabit this world. It changes a novel that studiously avoids moralizing into a trite screed against "fallen women". This wouldn't be so galling if the film didn't clearly want it both ways: to entice the viewer with promises of a glimpse into the brothel life, while at the same time wagging its finger at something it never even dares to show.

And so, in its own perverse fashion, the film of Wild Side illustrates Algren's description of Depression-era New Orleans, one that could just as easily apply to the Hollywood that cheated and embittered him: "They were all trying to make an honest buck, in a crooked sort of way."

 Jimmy Buffet Christmas Special

The Spirit of Christmas has been lost thanks to Jimmy Buffet and his super Santa Robot. Is Christmas now just a store bought video game programed by Jimmy Buffet's brain?  Special guests include Dame Darcy, Electra Elf, Mitch Magee, and musical guest Marianne Nowattny

This is not a Screening,... this is a Live Performance of a TV show!!

If you like Doctor Who, Andy Kaufman, and Mr Rogers Don't Miss this Bizarre
Event!  Quantum Theory, Puppets, and Magic!

WHO IS JARED WHITHAM?  

Check out other featured episodes at http//www.jaredwhitham.com and find out!

A beautiful film, a perfect comedy, and a gentle triumph of silliness over pomposity, self-importance, and intolerance - "Life of Brian" could be the best British comedy ever.

In Judea, a mother tends her newborn child. Lo, from the east three wise men appear to pay tribute to the infant - but they want the stable next door: this is Brian Cohen not Jesus Christ! Rolling forward 33 years, Brian joins the People's Front of Judea, a wannabe terrorist cell out to undermine the occupying Romans. Brian gets roped into their plot to kidnap Pontius Pilate's wife but they run into another terrorist gang on the same mission and everyone is captured while squabbling among themselves.

From the opening scene and the belting Shirley Bassey-esque score, this is Python par excellence. This is the "Catch 22" of cinema, and in its politics, like Joseph Heller, the Python crew refuse to spare anyone. Always threading in and around biblical stories, the plot never contradicts or denies the Bible, it just pokes fun at the hangers-on, charlatans, and pompous officials that organised religion often attracts. This playful subversion is hilariously shown in the scene where Brian escapes from the Romans by posing as a preacher. At first he is mocked by a crowd of jaded messiah seekers, then they seize on a bizarre interpretation of his words and proclaim him their Messiah. Brian denies it, only to be told "I say you are Lord, and I should know. I've followed a few."

 

Electra Elf: The Beginning starring Rev Jen, Annie
Sprinkle, Taylor Mead, Ann Carr, Ivan the Horrible

 Hellzapoppin by Gray Miller

 Good Lovin Guitar Man by Direct Art Productions
 starring The Jickets

 Nymphomania by Tessa Hughes Freeland/ Holly Adams
starring Holly Adams

The Operation by Jacob Pander

Here’s exciting pulp fiction, shot on the familiar Kong Island set, with the same King Kong director, Ernest Schoedsack, and some of the same stars. Robert Armstrong, Fay Wray and Joel McCrae are  pursued through the jungle by Leslie Banks. A cabin cruiser is shipwrecked off the coast of a remote island and the three passengers survive. The island is owned by Mad Count Zaroff, who invites them to stay. But he’s a psycho sadist who enjoys hunting, and he only hunts The Most Dangerous Game -- Man!
 
Leslie Banks hams it up in a very archaic  stage-actor's style, the sort of mugging that was later adopted by Vincent Price in his villainous roles. A very early sound movie, where the actors must stay close to the hidden mics and shout. But action scenes, lacking dialog, are nice and fluid, like the best of late silent cinema. Here is the transition from silent to sound usage. The pre-code Freudian subtext is nice, too, as Zaroff shows the link between passion and murder. Based on Richard Connell’s classic short story.
 

This installment features:

1. THUNDERBIRDS REMIX by Power Themes 90
2. 2 FRAMES by Paul Grant
3. DWARFSTAR by Mike Kuchar
4. BULB IN THE HEAD by Melika Bass
5. STICKERS by Daniel Maldonado
6. LEN by Joey Huertas
7. WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK by Ryan Claypool and Austin Smythe
8. SILO by Joel Schlemowitz
9. MEANTIME by Deborah Magocsi

Mark Kermode Sunday June 25, 2006 The Observer An unfortunate side-effect of Ken Loach's reputation as a polemicist is the fact that his films are judged primarily as political tracts rather than as works of art. Allow me to start, therefore, by stating that The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a tale of brother-against-brother rebellion in 1920s Ireland, is beautifully shot by Loach's longtime cinematographer Barry Ackroyd. The green fields, earth-brown interiors and darkening grey skies provide a striking counterpoint to the black and blue horrors of the war-torn narrative. Favouring natural light, and drawing our eye constantly toward the environment from which this tortured conflict is drawn, the visual imagery reminds us that, like Loach's terrific investigation of the Spanish Civil War, this is a tale of both land and freedom. To the subject, then, which, according to Loach, should always dictate the style. On one level, The Wind That Shakes the Barley presents the flipside of Neil Jordan's more mainstream Michael Collins, viewing the creation of the Irish Free State through the eyes of an idealist socialist rather than a mystical romanticist. While Jordan gave centre stage to the 'big men' (Collins, de Valera), Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty effectively turn their attention toward the support ing players, in particular two republican brothers who experience first hand the divide-and-conquer power of imperialist rule. The mercurial Cillian Murphy is blue-eyed young doctor Damien, who trades gurneys for guns after his kith are assaulted by the Black and Tans. Padraic Delaney is his brother, Teddy, the diehard freedom fighter who faces tacit submission to the Empire as a soldier for the shackled Free State. Despite newspaper claims that The Wind That Shakes the Barley demonises Brits while caricaturing Celts as caring comrades, the conflict the film portrays is ugly, brutal and, crucially, internecine. Many of the British soldiers in Ireland were hardened veterans of the Great War, and Loach's early depiction of their untrammelled violence evokes more a sense of desperation than sadism. A nail-pulling (and wince-inducing) scene of British torture may establish a partisan moral division, but the ambushing of British soldiers by republicans also leaves a sickening, inglorious aftermath from which the rebels are forced to turn their faces away. Most pointedly, the cold-blooded executions punctuating the drama are carried out by the brothers themselves, each one dwelling upon the brutalising tragedy of a conflict that turns heroes into killers, oppressors into victims. It's clear where Loach and Laverty point the political finger of blame, their focus being the abandonment of a socialist ideal in favour of a colonialist compromise that carries the seeds of its own destruction. There are parallels to be made with the British and American presence in the Middle East, suggesting that the illusion of 'freedom' which attends the Black and Tans' departure from Ireland has prophetic significance for the future independence of Iraq. Ironically, the most pointed line of dialogue in the movie is delivered by a belligerent British aristocrat who taunts Damien that the success of his cause will turn his country into a 'priest-infested backwater'. Sir John Hamilton (Roger Allam) is referring to the principle of Irish rule in any form. But in the wake of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed in 1921, which Damien insists will change only 'the accents of the powerful', the Ireland of The Wind That Shakes the Barley shows every sign of fulfilling his arrogant prophecy. If there is a fault in Loach's film, it lies in the disjunct between the ultra-naturalist style, which allows characters to engage in authentically ragged political rows, and the schematic melodrama of the narrative which too neatly confronts both Damien and Teddy with mirroring moral dilemmas. The dialogue may be vintage Loach, and the politics earnest James Connolly, but the feuding family storyline veers occasionally toward Willy Russell. Perhaps this is why the film packs such an uncertain emotional punch. The historical perspective may be robust, but its authentic messy complexities cast a shadow of contrivance over the highly orchestrated ructions between these blood brothers. Judged within the canon of Loach's work, The Wind That Shakes the Barley may lack the invigorating involvement of Land and Freedom (my favourite Loach film), but it is infinitely superior to the tiresome Hidden Agenda , which incurred a similar barracking. Like the folk song from which it draws its title (and which laments 'the foreign chains that bind us'), the tone is more melancholic than defiant, with a twang of bitterness underlying its themes of discord and discontent. One can and, indeed, should argue about the politics, but only the most petty-minded could claim that Loach doesn't deserve his overdue Palme d'Or victory. For all its alleged anti-Britishness, The Wind That Shakes the Barley stands as a testament to a home-grown tradition of thought-provoking cinema, with an international audience, of which we should all be proud.

The Apartment
Billy Wilder 1960
USA 125 minutes

Made the year after Some Like it Hot, The Apartment again sees Billy Wilder teaming up with Jack Lemmon, this time for a truly bitter-sweet film which glides smoothly from comedy to pathos. Lemmon is an insurance clerk who, in the hope of promotion, lends out his apartment to senior executives lookmg for somewhere to take their girlfriends - the trouble starts when the girl whom Lemmon has fallen for (Shirley MacLaine), is taken there by his boss. A razor-sharp satire on the morals and ethics of the Real World, The Apartment is a superb film and Lemmon and MacLaine both act extremely well.

OR

De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté
"The Beat My Heart Skip"
Jacques Audiartd 2005
France 107 minutes

American pulp novels by the likes of Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Cornell Woolrich have frequently been adapted by French filmmakers. But French remakes of Hollywood films are rare enough to border on the unique. Such a film is The Beat That My Heart Skipped (aka De Battre Mon Coeur S'est Arrete), Jacques Audiard's excellent version of Fingers, James Toback's 1978 debut as writer-director. A young man struggles to free himself from his father's criminal world, and pursue his dream of becoming a concert pianist.

Seven independent literary publishers of emerging prominence have united to host Steal This Reading, a night of readings by 15 poets spanning immanent figures of innovative poetry such as MacArthur Fellowship winner C.D. Wright (Copper Canyon) and Eleni Sikelianos (Coffee House) to new stars such as Graham Foust (Flood) and Joyelle McSweeney (Fence).

Coinciding with the annual Associated Writing Programs conference, held this year in midtown Manhattan, this off-site and unaffiliated event draws national attention Brooklyn as a central hub for various thriving communities of poets and independent publishers across the country. East Coast Aliens provides an intimate & artistic atmosphere on the edge of Greenpoint’s developing waterfront, a stark contrast to the groomed Midtown hotel conference confines.

The night’s hosts represent the thrilling future of poetry and include print publishers (Black Ocean, Free Verse Editions & Tarpaulin Sky Press), online magazines (Typo & Octopus) & grassroots presses (Kitchen Press & Cannibal Books).  While all of the host organizations have been founded in the last eight years, each has secured a reputation among the best publishers defining and expanding the forefront of new poetry.

Event coordinator Matthew Henriksen (Typo, Cannibal Books) is also curator of the NYC & Brooklyn-based Burning Chair Readings, a series that has hosted over 150 poets in three years. A mission of the Burning Chair Readings is to seek out a broader audience beyond the often closed corridors of poetry, whether academic or avant garde, to promote emerging poetry teeming with exhilaration and vitality. The poets represented at Steal This Reading will offer performances of serious poetry that poets and non-poets alike will enjoy.

To learn more about the publishers visit these websites:

Black Ocean:                blackocean.org
Cannibal Books:         flesheatingpoems.blogspot.com
Free Verse Editions:   parlorpress.com/freeverse
Kitchen Press:             kitchen-press-book-store.blogspot.com
Octopus:                       octopusmagazine.com
Tarpaulin Sky Press: tarpaulinsky.com/Press/index.html
Typo:                             typomag.com


Author Bios (in alphabetical order):

Lily Brown is from the east coast but currently lives on the west coast.  She is the author of the chapbook, The Renaissance Sheet, published by Octopus Books in 2007.  Her second chapbook, Old with You, is forthcoming from Kitchen Press.  Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Typo, Octopus, Fence, Tarpaulin Sky, Cannibal, Handsome and 26.

Julie Doxsee was born in London, Ontario. Her poems have appeared in over thirty-five national and international journals, including Aufgabe, Fourteen Hills, and Tarpaulin Sky. Forthcoming publications include two books: Objects for a Fog Death (Black Ocean, 2008/2009) and Undersleep (Octopus Books 2008), and two chapbooks: You Will Build a City Out of Rags (Whole Coconut 2007) and New Body a Seafloor Body (Seeing Eye Books 2008). The Knife-Grasses (Octopus Books), and Fog Quartets (horse less press) are now available.  She is full-time faculty at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey.

Graham Foust lives in Oakland, California with his wife Amy and his son Merle.  He teaches writing and literature at Saint Mary's College of California, and his most recent book is Necessary Stranger (Flood Editions, 2007).

Rauan Klassnik was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. In his early teens he moved to Dallas, Texas with his family. Much of his time is now spent in Mexico. His poems have appeared in Caesura, Hunger Mountain, Pilot Poetry, No Tell Motel, The Kennesaw Review, Front Porch, The Mississippi Review, The North American Review, MiPoesias, Handsome, and many other journals. His chapbook, "Stitches" was published by Firewheel Editions in 2002 and his first full-length collection, Holy Land, will be released by Black Ocean in the spring of 2008.

Melanie Hubbard lives in Ruskin, FL, with her family.  Recently the recipient of an NEH fellowship, she has spent the past year completing a scholarly book on Emily Dickinson's poems in relation to developments in philosophy and linguistic theory, the invention of photography and the discovery of electricity, and changes in rhetoric, editorial theory, and popular manuscript activity. She also writes personal essays, commentaries, book reviews, and features for the St. Petersburg Times. Poems can be found in Typo, Swink, Fence, Cab/Net, horse less review, and Cannibal.

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of Nylund, The Sarcographer (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007). She is also the author of three titles from Fence Books: Flet, The Red Bird, and The Commandrine and Other Poems. She is a co-founder and co-editor of Action Books and Action, Yes, a press and web quarterly for international writing and hybrid forms. She writes regular reviews for Rain Taxi, The Constant Critic, and other venues and teaches in the MFA Program at Notre Dame.

Cindy Savett teaches poetry workshops at psychiatric institutions in the Philadelphia area to both acute short-term and residential patients.  Her first book, Child in the Road, has recently been released.  In addition, she is published in numerous print and on-line journals, including Margie, Heliotrope, LIT, The Marlboro Review, 26 Magazine, Cutbank, and Free Verse.  She is also at work on a memoir on the death of her daughter.  Cindy has served on several school Boards and other non-profit agencies, and spent fifteen years in the retail business, traveling extensively overseas.  Born and raised in the Philadelphia area, she currently lives in Merion, Pennsylvania with her husband and children.  

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books, including The California Poem and The Book of Jon. Du Soleil, de l’histoire, de la vision, a selected poems translated into French appeared this fall.  Forthcoming are Body Clock and her translation of Jacques Roubaud’s Exchanges de la lumière.

Zachary Schomburg was born in Omaha, Nebraska, spent his childhood in Iowa, and received his BA from College of the Ozarks. Currently, he's pursuing a doctorate in creative writing from the University of Nebraska. Schomburg edits Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books, and co-curates the Clean Part Reading Series in Lincoln, NE. His poems have appeared in the Canary, CutBank, Diagram, Ducky, Fence, Forklift, Ohio, Good Foot, the Hat, La Petite Zine, Lamination Colony, LIT, Mid-American Review, Mipoesias, No Tell Motel, Northwest Review, Parakeet, Pettycoat Relaxer, Spork, Swink, Tarpaulin Sky, Unpleasant Event Schedule, and Washington Square Review. His debut collection, The Man Suit, was published Black Ocean in 2007.

Morgan Lucas Schuldt is the author of Verge (Free Verse Editions, 2007) and Otherhow (Kitchen Press, 2007), a chapbook.  He lives in Tucson where he edits the literary journal CUE and the chapbook series CUE Editions.

Jon Thompson teaches at North Carolina State University where he edits Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics and the new poetry series, Free Verse Editions. His first collection was The Book of the Floating World, which was reissued in a new expanded edition in 2007. His current poetry manuscript is titled Strange Country.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson is the co-author, with Noah Eli Gordon, of Figures for a Darkroom Voice (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007).  He is also the author of Suspension of a Secret in Abandoned Rooms (Pinball, 2005), Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk (U of Iowa, 2006), and The Book of Whispering in the Projection Booth (forthcoming from Tupelo Press).  He holds a PhD from University of Denver and lives in Chicago where he teaches at Loyola University.  His first film, Made a Machine by Describing the Landscape, is due out in 2008.

Max Winter is the author of The Pictures (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007).  He is also the winner of the Fifth Annual Boston Review Poetry Contest, and has published poems in Free Verse, New American Writing, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Colorado Review, The Canary, Denver Quarterly, and Typo. He has published reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday, and BOMB, and is a Poetry Editor of Fence.

C.D. Wright was born and raised in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. She is the author of a dozen books. Her most recent titles are One Big Self: An Investigation (Copper Canyon, 2007), Like Something Flying Backwards, New and Selected (Bloodaxe Editions, 2007), Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (Copper Canyon, 2005). Rising, Falling, Hovering will be out in 2008, also from Copper Canyon Press. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, and awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Lannan Foundation. Steal Away: Selected and New Poems was a finalist for the 2003 Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2004 she was named a MacArthur Fellow. In 2005 she was given the Robert Creeley Award and elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Wright is the Israel J. Kapstein Professor of English at Brown University. She lives outside of Providence with her husband, poet Forrest Gander.

this is a post-cd-release party for GIVING THE TABLE A NAME, which will be making its live debut performing as a quartet, with drums and alternating basses and acoustic guitars.  seven songs will be played from the cd, tines, as well as two from the cd, goby: stuck between the nodal points.
 
GIVING THE TABLE A NAME is something of a dreamlike extension of rock music, falling roughly into the softcore genre, and putting an emphasis on vocal harmonies, sometimes dissonant, sometimes soothing, and intertwining instrument melodies.
 
the performance will take place amidst a somewhat minimal installation.  wine and non-alcoholic beverages available at the bar, as well as sweets provided by sweet talullah, a local independent caterer located in greenpoint.
 
the entire show has been conceived to work as a whole, and a large portion of the profits will be going to city harvest.  visit  GIVING THE TABLE A NAME for additional information.

With New York in the SuperBowl, we decided we couldn't compete.

So come see the game on the big screen and experience the games off it.

The Stitch Project is an art exhibition showcasing a variety of work made, designed and performed by artists in various stages of their careers.  The Stitch Project creates a collaborative home for art of all kinds.  It includes painters, fashion designers, graphic designers, photographers, and architects. It allows them to showcase their work alongside each other in a setting surrounded by performances from live bands, aerial acrobats, dancers and street artists.  The Stitch Project is a party fueled by an enthusiasm that only comes from artists who are free to do as they like Art.

This year the show features:

Andrew Poneros 

Leon Ried

Steph Goralnick   

Blake E. Marquis 

Ralf Milan, a hitman, arrives in Montpellier to kill an important witness. He checks in a hotel without knowing that his neighbour has become neurotic after his wife left him.

"L'Emmerdeur" (1973) is the French movie which originated a US remake directed by Billy Wilder -"Buddy Buddy" (1981), starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. It was the last Wilder movie, not bad, but this original one is far better.

French star Lino Ventura and Belgian singer Jacques Brel were friends, they shot their first film together with Claude Lelouch "L'aventure c'est l'aventure". They wanted to team again and chose established comedy director Edouard Molinaro for adapting this movie, written by Francis Veber -who later became another master of French comedy.

The comedy is excellent, with two actors at their peak. Brel and Ventura characters are so different and have nothing in common. Taken individually there are not funny -one is serious and cold, the other is sad and a loser. BUT their combination is absolutely comical. (The way Brel calls Ventura -"Monsieur Milan!"- is irresistible!)

Edouard Molinaro directed other great comedies -among them two films with Louis De Funès and "La Cage aux folles", the gay comedy starring Michel Serrault and Ugo Tognazzi. Molinaro is at ease in making "L'Emmerdeur", many scenes are also shot by himself carrying a camera on his shoulder.

But the other leading person behind the film is Francis Veber. His lines and situations are typical of the comedies he'll direct later -among which "La chèvre" with Depardieu and Pierre Richard, "Le diner de cons" and "Le placard". He enjoys creating strange situations by using completely different actors ensuring comical situations.

One last thing: Jacques Brel's character is called François Pignon.  Veber has used the same name in other films for one of the two leading roles -the name itself has become a synonym of an awkward, unlucky, naive and a little stupid person.

I Heart Medicinefilms Super Vlogging Party

Bring your Camera, Bring your Laptop we will be Vlogging into the night!

Performances by:

Jared Whitham

Chalko Taco

Maigin Blank

Johnny From Eclectic Method

Plus apperances by many other notorious medicinefilms members!

for more info visit civic-duties

This installment features:

1.    STINGRAY REMIX by Power Themes 90
2.    A BIRTHDAY STORY by Galen Carter- Jeffrey
3.    TO THE EVENT OF A THREAD by David Baker and Joanna Lipton
4.    KITTYPIE by Jennifer MacMillan and Alex Zhort
5    DUELLESS MORNING by George Gross
6.    SHADOW AND SPACE by Jacob Burckhardt and Ken Sackheim
7.    NOS RODEAN (THEY SURROUND US) by Jose Goicuria
8.    MISSING GREEN by Joey Huertas
9.    THE GLOWING WOMAN by Joel Schlemowitz
10.  MOTHER'S BLOOD by Myra Sito Velasquez
11.  PERROS SIN AMOR (LOVELESS DOGS) by Christina Soto
12.  FLAVOR OF THE MONTH by Rob Santana

Unless there's a big surprise this year big prize should go to to No Country For Old Men or There Will Be Blood.
So tonight we are giving you the choice between the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou  or Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Night.

Here's a little bit about each film:

Boogie Night
1997 155 minutes

Reviewed by Keith Phipps
Director Paul Thomas Anderson's second film and second triumph (this year's overlooked Hard Eight was the first), is a sprawling, energetic, audacious look at the porn industry of the late '70s and early '80s. Mark Wahlberg, in a performance that allows even "Wildside" to be forgiven, plays a young stud, with a talent clearly outlined by his tight jeans, who rises to the top of the industry only to let success go to his head. A large and universally excellent cast (Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Don Cheadle, Heather Graham, William H. Macy) plays the extended family he joins. Though it's incredibly stylish, Anderson and his cast never let Boogie Nights stray from its human center. For example, as a porn producer with artistic aspirations, Reynolds plays a character that could easily have been a caricature, but he conveys sleaze with heart so well that the threat never comes close to materializing. By taking on the porn industry, Anderson has chosen a subject that could easily be mined for cheap laughs. But while it's very funny, Boogie Nights taps into something much deeper with its on-target depiction of the shifting political and social tides of the '70s and '80s and thoughtful relationships between characters. It's a deeply satisfying movie.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?
2000 106 minutes

Reviewed by Scott Tobias
In Joel and Ethan Coen's joyous musical comedy O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the endless parlor game of "Name That Allusion" starts with the title, a reference to Preston Sturges' 1942 classic Sullivan's Travels. In that film, a popular director of escapist Hollywood fare announces his plans to make an earnest American epic, "a true canvas of the suffering of humanity." To research the project, he dresses up like a hobo and tries to blend in with the great unwashed, finding about as much success as yuppie Albert Brooks does "touching Indians" in Lost In America. Sturges' potent satire mocks the folly of artists who pretend to understand how the other half lives but can't truly know their experience, a lesson the Coens have clearly taken to heart. Had the Coens attempted any kind of verisimilitude in their depiction of the Depression-era South, O Brother would have been as authentic and meaningful as Barton Fink's crying fishmongers. Instead, they've crafted something far richer and more entertaining: a loving homage to '30s Americana assembled from popular icons and artifacts, and told with the intoxicating energy of a Warner Brothers cartoon. Swimming with references to literature, movies, and especially the evocative bluegrass and country music of the period—superbly arranged by T-Bone Burnett—the film cross-pollinates Clark Gable, Robert Johnson, Busby Berkeley, The Wizard Of Oz, and the KKK. And that's just in one bravura sequence. To add another layer to the mix, the story is based in part on Homer's The Odyssey, casting George Clooney as an escaped Mississippi convict whose long journey home to his wife (Holly Hunter) includes run-ins with a blind soothsayer, a trio of sirens, and a Cyclops (John Goodman). Joining him in chains are fellow escapees John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson, who are drawn by the promise of splitting Clooney's buried treasure. Meanwhile, the state is in the midst of a heated gubernatorial race between listless incumbent Charles Durning and a candidate (Wayne Duvall) who claims to be a sweeping reformer and "a friend to the little people," meaning he travels with a midget and a broom. O Brother moves along the same loose, ramshackle narrative lines the Coens mastered with The Big Lebowski, which risk falling into flat and disjointed episodes but instead hold boundless possibilities. Pleasure can be gleaned from every aspect of the production—the Soggy Bottom Boys' performance of "I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow" is a particular highlight—but the Coens are serious about their hero's salvation and sincere in their affection for the period. Coming from filmmakers many dismiss as condescending smart-alecks, O Brother's warmth is a disarming surprise.

Triumph of the Ill featuring Rev Jen &Vox, directed by Nick Zedd.

9/11 Mysteries 2006 directed by Sofia Shafquat

Rois et reine
"Kings and Queen"
Arnaud Desplechin 2004
France 150 minutes

Peter Bradshaw
The Guardian

Desplechin has a resounding success with this rich, complex and deeply pleasing movie: a serio-comic diptych showing a pair of ex-lovers' parallel lives.
Kings and Queen errs occasionally on the side of garrulity and whimsy, but its imaginative licence is often superb and it is outstandingly acted by Emmanuelle Devos as Nora, the beautiful art gallery director whose father (Maurice Garrel) is dying, and Mathieu Amalric as her turbulent former partner Ismaël, a manic depressive musician who begins the movie being carted off to an institution, where his fractious mental state is assessed by a droll psychiatrist, played in cameo by Catherine Deneuve.

This is a film about secrets: when she was 20 and pregnant, Nora's boyfriend died, and his violent death is shrouded in a mystery which she has maintained for decades, a deception in which her father has made himself complicit, and he too nurses a festering secret in his heart. Desplechin's great coup de cinéma comes in a strange and beautiful scene in which this dead lover appears to the middle-aged Nora in a dream-vision, in his early 20s, just as when she knew him. It is a poignant confrontation with a miraculously forgiving past. Ismaël's story is more the stuff of knockabout comedy: banged up in his hospital, he gets to flirt and have sex, and is allowed visits from his disreputable and drug-addicted lawyer.

This tangled, painful story is unpicked with easy calm by Desplechin, whose triumph lies in making us care for these difficult characters with their porcupine-quills of personal hurt. I think anyone who loved Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections will love this - and also anyone who loves intelligent French cinema.

OR

De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté
"The Beat My Heart Skip"
Jacques Audiard 2005
France 107 minutes

Reviewed by Scott Tobias

In the current political climate, between the war in Iraq and the looming election, topical documentaries and fiction features have flooded the marketplace. But none are more relevant to the times than Gillo Pontecorvo's masterpiece The Battle Of Algiers, which was made nearly four decades ago. Throughout the years, the film has been tagged as a terrorist textbook, an inspiration for the Black Panthers and other radical organizations, yet its startling verity has recently proved useful for Pentagon officials eager to understand how networks like al-Qaeda operate. Still smarting from their moral and tactical failures in colonial Algeria, the French banned the 1965 film for several years, and some countries excised scenes revealing the systemic torture of National Liberation Front (FLN) operatives. But even though The Battle Of Algiers ranks among the great works of revolutionary cinema, Pontecorvo depicts insurgent warfare with a stark, evenhanded realism that feels like history painted on the screen. In fact, many prints actually come with the disclaimer that the film doesn't include a single frame of documentary or newsreel footage. And that's not a boast: It really does seem that real.

The phrase "lost the battle but won the war" applies to the violence in mid-'50s Algiers, where the FLN sounded the first shot in what would later build into a successful struggle for Algerian independence from the French. Pontecorvo fashions his narrative around an illiterate petty crook (Brahim Haggiag) who ascends to a key position in the FLN, but he spends less time on characterization than on the precise detailing of tactics and counter-tactics. On the Algerian side, the film presents a how-to manual on terrorist organizations, from the pyramid cell structures that protect against infiltration to the methods for sneaking weapons and homemade bombs across enemy blockades. When police shootings and attacks on European civilians escalate, the French respond by sending in a brilliant colonel (Jean Martin) to mount an aggressive military campaign, which includes the use of torture to get information.

The torture issue sparked a crisis of conscience in France, but Pontecorvo boldly refuses to make any moral distinctions between torture and terrorism, because both are necessary to achieve certain ends: The Algerians use terrorism to spark a larger insurgency ("Give us our bombs, sir, and you can have our baskets," one FLN leader tells a French journalist), and the French rely on torture to get solid information on enemy networks. Though Pontecorvo's sympathies ultimately lie with the Algerians, he powerfully registers the loss of innocent life on both sides, refusing to trivialize war's casualties for the sake of a radical polemic. Truth transcends all other values in The Battle Of Algiers, and it's a testament to Pontecorvo's talent that the controversy that has always swirled around the film rarely has anything to do with its accuracy.

This installment features:

1.   CAPTAIN SCARLET AND THE MYSTERONS REMIX by Power Themes 90

2.   SALUTING THE SUN by Rhoopinder Bhullar

3.   FOUR OF A KIND by Galen Carter-Jeffrey

4.   STROKE OF LIFE by D. Devero

5    YOSHIKO by Nisi Jacobs

6.   CELESTIAL SUBWAY LINES/ SALVAGING NOISE, PART 6 by Ken Jacobs and 
     John Zorn

7.   THE AFFECTION IMAGE by Paul Grant

8.   FRANKIE TEARDROP by Escape Video/ Bernard Filipetti, featuring Suicide
     (Martin Rev & Alan Vega)

9.   DANCE OF THE SACRED FOUNDATION GRANT APPLICATION by Ross
     McLaren

10. INTRODUCING MR. DIANA by Jack Waters and Peter Cramer

In a very special brothel known as “The Balcony,” the customers live out their wildest dreams, oblivious to a revolution going on outside. Directed by the award-winning Joseph Strick and based on acclaimed French avant-garde dramatist Jean Genet's play, this star-packed film features Shelley Winters as the brothel’s madam and Peter Falk as her police-chief lover, who enlists her help in halting the revolution. A young Leonard Nimoy heads the rebels, and Lee Grant is the madam’s executive assistant who longs to return to her former role as just “one of the girls.”

This month theme: The New York Subway

El Juglar - Juggler
Jared - Sideshow performer
and others...

Sarah Blakemore
Reigning Queen of Everything
 
"Why everything? Oh, Darling, because a girl should never limit herself, ever."

This month theme: The New York Subway

El Juglar - Juggler
Jared - Sideshow performer
and others...

Sarah Blakemore
Reigning Queen of Everything
 
"Why everything? Oh, Darling, because a girl should never limit herself, ever."

Mystery train. The two most evocative words in the language, suggesting streamliners into the night and strangers whose eyes meet in the club car as the train's rhythm creates an erotic reverie. But trains are no longer quite like that in America, and the opening shots of Jim Jarmusch's new film show two young Japanese tourists in a faded Amtrak coach, listening to their Walkmans as the train pulls through the outskirts of Memphis.

The girl is an Elvis fan. Her boyfriend believes Carl Perkins was the true father of rock 'n' roll. They have come to visit the shrines of Memphis: the Sun recording studios, for example, where rock 'n' roll was born.

In the hands of another director, this setup would lead directly into social satire, into a comic putdown of rock tourism, with a sarcastic visit to Graceland as the kicker. But Jarmusch is not a satirist. He is a romantic, who sees America as a foreigner might - as a strange, haunting country where the urban landscapes are painted by Edward Hopper and the all-night blues stations provide a soundtrack for a life.

The tourists arrive in Memphis and drag their luggage through the cavernous train station, and walk to the Sun studios, where a guide rattles off her spiel about Elvis and Carl faster than an auctioneer could. Then they check into the Arcade Hotel, one of those fleabags that has grown exhausted waiting for the traveling salesmen who no longer come. This is a hotel out of a 1940s film noir, with neon signs and a linoleum lobby, and a night clerk who has seen it all and a bellboy whose eyes are so wide, he might be seeing everything for the first time.

Other people will check into this hotel during the movie's long night of mystery. There is a woman who needs to spend the night somewhere before she flies to Rome with the ashes of her husband.

Pursued by men with lust in their eyes, she runs into a woman who has just broken up with her boyfriend, and they decide to share a room for a night. Meanwhile, on the other side of town, some men are drinking too much and get into a disagreement, and drive off into the night in a pickup truck, and stick up a liquor store, and then they also head for the Arcade Hotel.

The soundtrack is from a local radio station, and Presley's version of "Blue Moon" is heard at one time or another during all three of these stories, providing a common link. An offscreen gunshot provides another link. And so does the ghost of Elvis, who seems to haunt the movie with his voice and his legend - and who appears to the woman whose husband has just died.

There is a strange appropriateness there. It is not her own husband who appears in the night, spectral and mysterious, but Elvis, and his legend seems to inspire the film. But this is not the Elvis of the supermarket tabloids, just as "Mystery Train" is not about dusty Amtrak coaches. The movie is about legends, and people who believe in them, and in fact it is the movie that believes most of all.

Jarmusch believes in an American landscape that existed before urban sprawl, before the sanitary sterility of the fast-food strips on the highways leading into town. His movies show us saloons where everybody knows each other, diners where the short-order cook is in charge, and vistas across railroad tracks to a hotel where transients are not only welcome, they are understood.

"Mystery Train" is Jarmusch's third film, after "Stranger than Paradise" and "Down by Law." In all three there is the belief that America cannot be neatly packaged into safe and convenient marketing units, that there must be a life of the night for the drifters and the dropouts, the heroes of no fixed abode and no apparent place of employment. These are the people that songs like "Mystery Train" are about, and although in fact their lives may be flat and empty, in Jarmusch's imagination they are the real inhabitants of the city, especially after midnight.

"Mystery Train" is not a conventional narrative, and it is not how the story ends that is important, but how it continues. It is populated by dozens of small, well-observed moments of human behavior, such as the relationship between the night clerk (Screamin' Jay Hawkins) and the bellboy (Cinque Lee), or between the two teenage Japanese tourists (Masatoshi Nagase and Youki Kudoh), whose entire image of American reality is formed out of popular culture.

The best thing about "Mystery Train" is that it takes you to an America you feel you ought to be able to find for yourself, if you only knew where to look. A place of people who are allowed to be characters, to be individuals, who do not have to graduate from Hamburger University to stand over a grill. The train is the perfect metaphor in this movie. It's not where it's been that's important, or even where it's going. It's the sound of that whistle as it finds its way through the night.

Reviewed by Roger Ebert

w/ music from Walter Baker & an after-party featuring the dreams of the congregation of details
myspace.com/thedreamsensemble

Andrea Baker is the author of like wind loves a window (Slope Editions, 2005) and the chapbooks gilda (Poetry Society of America, 2004) and true poems about the river go like this (Cannibal Books, 2008).

Jim Behrle is the author of She’s My Best Friend (Pressed Wafer), City Point (Pressed Wafer) and The (Purple) Notebook of the Lake (Braincase).  He sleeps on a floor in Greenpoint. 

Brenda Iijima is the author of Animate, Inanimate Aims (Litmus Press, 2007). and Around Sea (O Books, 2004).  Some of her work can be viewed on-line at The Philly Sound Blog and can be downloaded from Wickedness. She lives in Brooklyn, New York where she runs Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs.

Dorothea Lasky was born in St. Louis in 1978.  Her first book of poems, AWE, was published in the fall of 2007 from Wave Books.  Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Phoebe, 6x6, Crowd, Coconut, jubilat, Lungfull!, Knock, Carve, Foursquare, and Skein, among other places. She has been educated at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Harvard University, and Washington University.  Currently, she lives in Philadelphia, where she studies education at the University of Pennsylvania.

Tim Peterson is the author of Since I Moved In, which received the Gil Ott Award from Chax Press. He edits EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts and curates a portion of the Segue Reading Series.

Thibault Raoult was a Dolin Scholar at the University of Chicago, and, for two years, OFF(icial) poet-in-residence at Brown University. I’ll Say I’m Only Visiting emerged from Cannibal Books (Brooklyn) in Nov/07; a second run is expected in coming-season. A new volume, El p.e. [physical education of the elevated train, emerges from Projective Industries in the coming months. Born in Pithiviers, France, raised in Rochester, NY, Thibault generates the dreams [of the congregation of details—a most real e-(s)tat(e) near 3Coasts.

Craig Morgan Teicher's first book is Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems.  His second, Cradle Book, a collection of fables, will be out from BOA Editions in 2010.  He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

Dara Wier's books include Remnants of Hannah (Wave Books 2006); Reverse Rapture (Verse Press 2005); Hat on a Pond (Verse Press, 2002) and Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon U. Press, 2001).  A limited edition, (X in Fix), a selection of 5 longer poems, including a section from Reverse Rapture, is printed in RainTaxi’s Brainstorm series.  She works as a member of the poetry faculty and director of the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her book, Reverse Rapture has been recently awarded The Poetry Center & American Poetry Archives 2006 book of the year prize.

Late night TV show generated by an experimental machine is missing it's host Jared Whitham.
Willam Maier brakes into the government lab to find Jared. But the machine is more powerful than anyone could have imagined. Can Will resist the power of hosting his own show. . Join us as a test audience member and become part of a this TV episode forever.

This very amusing and philosophically rich animated film from Australia is based on John Gardner's book Grendel in which he attempted to bring the Beowulf saga to life for contemporary audiences. Writer and director Alexander Stitt believes that over the course of history, monsters have served as vital incarnations of human fears and fantasies.

Grendel is a 12-foot high, green and spotty beast who lives in an underground Scandinavian cave, circa 515 A.D. He's a philosophical giant given to random journeys in the kingdom of King Hrothgar. Although Grendel eats a few people from time to time, he's really obsessed with ideas such as destiny, guilt, and love. When neither of the King's two right-hand men can rid the woods of "the Great Boogy," Hrothgar summons Beowulf from England to slay the beast.

Alexander Stitt has dome a marvelous job bringing this epic to the screen. Peter Ustinov (Grendel), Keith Mitchell (Beowulf), and Arthur Dignam (King Hrothgar) provide the voices for the main characters. The animation is clever and sophisticated. Grendel Grendel Grendel is lively entertainment for those looking for something special in their monthly film going jaunts.

Review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat

Le Samouraï
Jean-Pierre Melville
1967 95 minutes

``Le Samourai'' was released shortly after its writer-director, Jean-Pierre Melville, made two other gangster films, ``Le Doulos'' and ``Le Deuxieme Souffle,'' and a dozen years after his classic noir thriller ``Bob le Flambeur.'' It's now available for the first time in its uncut original 35mm version.
A brief description of ``Le Samourai'' reveals its roots in the Warner Bros. gangster flicks of the '30s and '40s, but instead of saluting that genre and its gritty mythology, Melville spins them through a sleek, intensely formal lens -- and delivers a film that resembles Japanese Noh drama as much as it does the American pulp of ``Scarface'' or ``White Heat.''
Shot in cool grays, ice blues and murky greens, ``Le Samourai'' opens with a shot of Delon in his sparely furnished apartment. A steady rain falls outside his window, a caged bullfinch chirps. As Delon rises to face another day he's clearly a lone wolf -- removed from the path of human society.
There's romance in that kind of passionless, self-sustained life, and one of the intrigues of ``Le Samourai'' is the way Melville draws us to Delon, provides almost no information about him and then alternately challenges and intensifies our attraction to him.
Early in the film, Delon tells a group of older men at a card game, ``I never lose, not ever.'' It's an Eastwood/Dirty Harry kind of line, but when he's brought in for questioning by police, and remains a prime suspect even after he's released, romance evaporates and ``Le Samourai'' takes on a pitiless fatalism.
``Le Samourai'' is beautifully assured and has a strong consistency of visual style and tone, but I can't say I had a great time watching it. Melville's stark, minimalist style is pretentious after a time, and even though Delon's lack of warmth is appropriate to the character, it's easy to tire of his android-with-batteries, model-on-the-runway acting style.
To each his own. Filmmakers as diverse as Quentin Tarantino and Paul Schrader were influenced by Melville, and Hong Kong action director John Woo calls the film ``the closest to a perfect movie that I have ever seen.''

OR

Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows)
Louis Malle
1958 92 minutes

As French crime thrillers go, this is about as good as it gets. It's also an important film historically, and to top it off, the jazz score, by Miles Davis, is famous in its own right.
Made in 1958, "Elevator to the Gallows" was the first feature in Louis Malle's long directorial career and probably his best. The story is pure pulp fiction, about a murder plan that goes bad, but what really counts is the fatalistic atmosphere.
A disaffected veteran (Maurice Ronet) sets out to kill his boss, an arms dealer, and winds up missing a rendezvous with his girlfriend (Jeanne Moreau), who thinks she's been betrayed. Meanwhile, a juvenile delinquent (Georges Poujouly) and his girlfriend (Yori Bertin) steal the veteran's car and wind up in a bloody scrape with two foreign tourists.
The heart of the picture is the Moreau character's odyssey, much of it at night and accompanied by poetic internal monologues, as she visits bars and cafes in search of her missing lover. The film is also about the passing of the older generation in France and young people's ill-fated hopes for escape.
The black-and-white cinematography of Henri Decae, who went on to work with Jean-Pierre Melville and Francois Truffaut, gives the movie the clarity of a dream and offers a vision of the City of Light as melancholy and haunted.
Because of the film's mood and style, its low budget and use of location shooting, and because it offered a turn on what was considered an American genre, some historians cite it as one of the first examples of the French New Wave. (In the grand academic tradition of hairsplitting, others consider it a predecessor to that movement.)

Takashi Miike is best known for chaotic films of extreme violence and hyper kinetic camera work such as “Ichi the Killer” and “Dead or Alive”. However, given that he regularly churns out several films a year, and that Western audiences are generally exposed only to his more sensationalistic efforts, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that there is more to the man and his talents than many may be aware.

Based on a novel by Makoto Shiina, “The Bird People in China” is a very different film from Miike. There is little violence, no fast editing, and no incoherent plot involving the nominal hero mutating into some kind of giant penis monster. Instead, the film is thoughtful, measured, and at times achingly beautiful, standing out as one of the director’s greatest works. It may disappoint some looking for another dose of the crazed excess they have come to demand from Miike, or conversely those viewers who are put off by the mere mention of his name, because “Bird People” is a delightful and inspiring film that deserves to be watched and enjoyed on its own merits.

The film follows Wada (Masahiro Motoki, “Gonin”), a Japanese businessman on a trip for his company to investigate a possible seam of valuable jade near a village on a remote mountain in China. Accompanying him is Ujiie (Renji Ishibashi, of “Gozu” and a variety of other Miike films), an aging yakuza who has been charged with making sure that his gang gets their share of the find. They make their journey using a variety of decaying vehicles, led by a rather odd Chinese guide named Shen (Mako).

But after an incident involving hallucinogenic toadstools, the trio find themselves lost and with no idea how to get to their destination. As they travel further into the mist-shrouded mountains, they encounter a strange local legend about ‘bird people’ who are taught to fly, and who appears to have links to ancient Japanese culture. After they finally reach the village they find themselves stranded in this beautiful, mysterious region, and begin to investigate the myth, forgetting more and more about the outside world as they discover more about themselves.

“The Bird People in China” is a thoughtful film that focuses mainly on the characters’ relationships not only with each other, but also more importantly with nature and traditional culture. Miike raises many interesting questions about the advances of modern civilization and the effects it can have on small, untouched outposts such as the film’s village. What is most interesting is that this is not mishandled with simple eco-ranting or pontifications about the awful modern world. Instead, Miike asks some far reaching questions, analyzing the affect of the village and mountains on the two visitors.

The development of the characters’ relationships with each other and their surroundings is subtle and believable, and recalls Miike’s “Dead or Alive 2″, perhaps unsurprisingly, as both films were written by Masa Nakamura. Even more so than in that film, this gentle exploration is quite at odds with what would be expected from the director, and results in something that is thought-provoking, touching and ultimately life-affirming in a way that most films are not.

Miike’s direction is excellent. Far removed from his trademark gimmickry, he makes the best possible use of the stunning Chinese mountain scenery, with its lush green forests, rain swept valleys, and mist covered mountains providing one of the most beautiful film backdrops of recent memory. The film is rich with symbolism and shows a mature composition and style that cements Miike’s reputation as one of the best Japanese directors, albeit one of the most unpredictable.

Although the film is slowly paced and contains no action, there are some flashes of Miike’s style, generally in the form of some oddball humor and odd imagery. These scenes are nicely woven into the rest of the film, and thankfully never detract from its overall feel. The ending of the film, in particular the final shot, is one of the most memorable I have ever seen, and packs a punch that fills the viewer with awe and longing.

“The Bird People in China” is definitely not what the director’s fans, or indeed his detractors, would expect. It explores the relationships of man not only with nature, but also with himself, and does so in an evenhanded and mature fashion that fascinates and leaves the viewer with a strong desire to experience the mysteries of our vast world.

Annie Hall
1977 94 minutes

Now over thirty years old , Annie Hall brought happiness to a number of people. The two small British exhibitors, who took the movie on when United Artists showed no interest in releasing it, made a fortune and were each able to lease another couple of cinemas. Popular audiences, who had never much cared for Allen (despite his earlier pictures' indebtedness to Bob Hope), took him to their hearts more warmly than before or since. As for Woody himself, the picture picked up four major Oscars (best film, direction, screenplay and actress) though it didn't exactly make him happy. His working title for the movie was Anhedonia (a clinical term for the inability to experience happiness) and he spent Oscar night playing his clarinet at Michael's Pub in New York.
The movie gave a fresh confidence to Woody and a generation of solipsistic stand-up comics and it created a new genre, what we might call 'the relationship picture', that dispensed with formal narrative. Annie Hall is openly autobiographical, Allen (as comedian Alvy Singer), his one-time lover Diane Keaton (as Annie Hall) and his best friend Tony Roberts (as Rob) playing versions of themselves, though the actual production was a chaotic affair and the picture only came into focus when its editor Ralph Rosenblum reduced the first cut of 140 minutes to a tight 95 in which the real and the surreal co-exist. If the movie has a message, it's the same as most later Allen movies - that love inevitably fades and only Louis Armstrong and the Marx Brothers abide.

or

Small Time Crooks
2000 95 minutes

Artistic ingenuousness is something that's difficult, if not impossible, to fake. That's one reason why Woody Allen's silly new comedy, "Small Time Crooks," is such a pleasantly surprising little treat. In this sweet, funny wisp of a movie, Mr. Allen shucks off his fabled angst and returns in spirit to those wide-eyed days of yesteryear, before Chekhov, Kafka and Ingmar Bergman invaded his creative imagination. As willfully goofy and freshly scrubbed as Mr. Allen's 1969 directorial debut, "Take the Money and Run," it suggests that that once a naïf always a naïf, that at the core of Mr. Allen's sensibility persists an inviolable strain of innocence.

The plot of this flighty caper comedy that begins as a spoof of "Big Deal on Madonna Street," then morphs into something resembling a child's-eye "Bonfire of the Vanities," often feels as if it were being plucked out of thin air while the movie was being shot. Put a bunch of children in an attic with a trunk full of costumes and have them improvise a play, and what they come up with might well have the same short-term memory as "Small Time Crooks," in which some seemingly major characters all but disappear once the movie shifts gears.

"Small Time Crooks" suggests that despite the excoriating bitterness of such 90's films as "Husbands and Wives," "Deconstructing Harry" and "Celebrity," Mr. Allen is in many ways still a wistful, wisecracking boy from Coney Island laughing at the fancily dressed grown-ups and their pretensions as he munches cotton candy, his nose pressed to the glass separating him from the Manhattan dream world. Look, Ma! What are those weird little things on the dining room table? They're finger bowls, dear.

Although it's set in modern New York, the mood of "Crooks" feels like every movie decade (but especially the 1930's) compacted into an eternal comic present.

Like his "Manhattan Murder Mystery," the new film owes as much to 1930's screwball tradition as it does to the present. Not the least of its accomplishments is its portrayal of a bunch of colossally stupid people with trashy tastes as adorable bumblers who emerge as much more human than the rich and snooty sharks with whom they amusingly rub elbows.

Instead of objects of ridicule, the movie treats its "little people" as true-blue common folk whose vulgar tastes reflect a groundedness and even decency, notwithstanding their lust for larceny. For a self-conscious intellectual like Mr. Allen to convincingly express such generosity toward the unlettered is disarming. When one character confuses Henry James with Harry James, we sympathize with her humiliation instead of sneering with the snob whose highbrow name-dropping sails over his companion's head.

What sets the story whirring is a preposterous scheme for a bank heist proposed by Ray Winkler (Mr. Allen), a meek, addle-brained ex-convict whose socially ambitious wife, Frenchy (Tracey Ullman), a former New Jersey stripper, harbors dreams of becoming a Manhattan hostess of wealth and culture. Ray's solution to their dire financial plight is to rent a vacant store next to a bank and set up a phony storefront business while he and his accomplices -- Denny (Michael Rapaport), Tommy (Tony Darrow) and Benny (Jon Lovitz) -- try to tunnel from the basement into the bank.

Some of the movie's funniest moments observe the incompetence of these inept fools who drill into a wall only to rupture a water main. Meanwhile, upstairs, the cookie shop that Frenchy has opened unexpectedly takes off and quickly makes the Winklers wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. At this point, the movie abruptly drops its caper plot to concentrate on the Winklers' embattled ascent up the social ladder.

In this middle chapter of a three-part story, Frenchy, who speaks in the same nasal cadences as Ms. Ullman's television character Fern Rosenthal, more or less takes over the movie. Pursuing her quest for higher things, this good-hearted, credulous arriviste places her dreams in the lap of David (Hugh Grant), a charming, unscrupulous art dealer whom she employs as her Park Avenue Pygmalion.

Ray soon decides he wants none of this high culture business. He'd much rather stay at home in their tchotchke-stuffed apartment (hideous souvenir dolls line the bookcases and table surface and the living room is adorned with a huge gold harp), drink beer and play poker. As David pitches snooty high-cultural woo to Frenchy, Mr. Grant deftly imbues his character with exactly a perfect blend of charm and nasty calculation.

The story takes another U-turn, and suddenly Ray and Frenchy collaborate on another robbery scheme. This time it's the theft of a priceless necklace from Chi Chi Potter (Elaine Stritch), a wealthy art patron. This final turn of the story is the most problematic part of the movie because it relies more on sitcom-ready plot twists than social satire for its humor. Mr. Allen often seems careless in the way he ends his comedies. And even for a movie as scatterbrained as this one, the outcome of "Small Time Crooks" feels rushed and pat.

The fleeting delights have to do with its tone, its light and lovely throwaway humor, and its deftly easygoing performances. In softening his standard schlemiel to make Ray more of a stumblebum than a whiner, Mr. Allen has come up with a new, likable variation on a familiar character. Ms. Ullman's Frenchy is such a twinkling, upbeat vulgarian that you wish her discontinued HBO series, "Tracey Takes On . . . ," would be revived immediately.

The movie is nearly stolen by Elaine May, as Frenchy's dimwitted cousin May, who goes to work at the cookie shop and unwittingly spills the beans about the heist every time she opens her mouth. May is the kind of stubbornly eager dullard who sends guests running at a swank Manhattan party by enthusiastically burbling out the day's weather to anyone who will listen.

How light is "Small Time Crooks"? So light it makes Mr. Allen's last film, "Sweet and Lowdown," seem almost Dostoyevskian by comparison. But it is also funny enough to leave you smiling.

Stephen Holden for NY Times

Hosted by Cannibal, Saltgrass, Harp & Altar, & Tight

Ana Božičević
John Coletti
Kate Greenstreet
Sarah Gridley
Katy Henriksen
Shannon Jonas
Jennifer Kronovet
Mark Lamoureux
Timothy Liu
Chris Martin
Jess Mynes
Cate Peebles
Christopher Rizzo
Matthew Rohrer
Frank Sherlock
Joanna Sondheim
Shanxing Wang
Rebecca Wolfe

typomag
flesh eating poems
harp and altar
salt grass contents
tight journal

Ana Božičević moved to NYC from Croatia in 1997. She’s the author of chapbooks Document (Octopus Books, 2007) and Morning News (Kitchen Press, 2006). Look for her recent work in Denver Quarterly, Saltgrass, Hotel Amerika, absent, The New York Quarterly, Bat City Review, MiPOesias, Octopus Magazine and The Portable Boog Reader 2: An Anthology of NYC Poetry. Ana co-edits RealPoetik.

John Coletti is the author of The New Normalcy (BoogLit 2002), Physical Kind (Yo-Yo-Labs 2005), and Street Debris (Fell Swoop 2005), a collaboration with poet Greg Fuchs with whom he also co-edits Open 24 Hours Press. He currently is the editor of The Poetry Project Newsletter.

Kate Greenstreet is the author of case sensitive (Ahsahta Press, 2006) and three chapbooks, Learning the Language (Etherdome Press, 2005), Rushes (above/ground press, 2007), and This is why I hurt you (Lame House Press, April 2008). Her second book, The Last 4 Things, will be out from Ahsahta in 2009. Her poems can be found in journals like Cannibal, Fascicle, and Handsome. New work is forthcoming in Filling Station, Practice, and The Columbia Review.

Sarah Gridley is Poet in Residence and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Case Western Reserve University. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana in 2000, where she was a Richard Hugo scholar and won the 1999 Merriam Frontier Award for excellence in creative writing. The University of California Press published her book Weather Eye Open in 2005. She has recently completed a new poetry manuscript, whose poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Fourteen Hills, NEO, Harp & Altar, Crazy Horse, jubilat, Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, and Chicago Review.

Katy Henriksen was born and raised in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the design editor of the poetry journal Cannibal, which she creates with her husband Matt Henriksen in their tiny railroad apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. She also helps run the Burning Chair Readings. Her music and culture writing may be found in Venus Zine, The Brooklyn Rail, Paste, Publishers Weekly,  Pure Music, Rust Buckle, and elsewhere. Four of her poems are forthcoming in Tight.

Shannon Jonas is the author of Compathy (Cannibal Books, 2007) and lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
 
Jennifer Kronovet is the author of Awayward (BOA Editions, 2009), selected by Jean Valentine as the winner of the Poulin Prize. Kronovet is the co-founder and co-editor of CIRCUMFERENCE, a journal of poetry in translation. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Harp & Altar, Ploughshares, A Public Space, and other journals. She was born and raised in New York City, and has lived in Chicago, St. Louis, and Beijing.

Mark Lamoureux is a poet, critic and translator who lives in Astoria, NY. His work has appeared in numerous publications, both in print and online. He is an associate editor for Fulcrum Annual. He is the author of three chapbooks: City/Temple (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003), 29 Cheeseburgers (Pressed Wafer, 2004) and Film Poems (Katalanche Press, 2005).

Timothy Liu is the author of six books of poems, most recently For Dust Thou Art. Two new books are forthcoming, Bending the Mind Around the Dream's Blown Fuse (Talisman House, 2008) and Polytheogamy (Saturnalia Press, 2009). His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.  Liu is currently an Associate Professor at William Paterson University and on the Core Faculty at Bennington College’s Writing Seminars; he lives in Manhattan.

Chris Martin is the author of American Music.  His new book, Becoming Weather, is trying to become published.  His newer book, On Song, is an ongoing investigation of song’s ontological use from the Caveman Days until Tonight.  He is the editor of Puppy Flowers, an online magazine of the arts, and resides near the Prospect Park Zoo with a beautiful lady and her cat.

Jess Mynes is the author of Birds for Example, Coltsfoot Insularity (a collaboration with Aaron Tieger), In(ex)teriors, andFull on Jabber (a collaboration with Christopher Rizzo). He is the editor of Fewer & Further Press. In 2008, his If and When (Katalanche Press), Sky Brightly Picked (Skysill Press), Recently Clouds, and a second edition of In(ex)teriors(Anchorite Press) will be published. He lives in Wendell, MA where he co curates a reading series, All Small Caps. His poems have appeared in numerous publications.

Cate Peebles lives in Brooklyn and works at the literary agency, Sobel Weber Associates, in Manhattan.  Her poems have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, Tin House, Octopus, La Petite Zine, MiPOesias, Capgun, and others.  She co-edits the on-line poetry magazine, Fou.

Christopher Rizzo is a writer and publisher who lives in New York. Over the years, his work has appeared in Art New England, The Cultural Society, Cannibal, Dusie, H_NGM_N, and Spell among other magazines. Christopher has also authored several chapbooks, such as Claire Obscure (Katalanche Press, 2005), Zing (Carve Editions, 2006), and The Breaks (Fewer & Further Press, 2006). Full on Jabber, a collaborative work written with poet Jess Mynes, was released by Martian Press in 2007. Christopher also edits Anchorite Press, an independent poetry publisher of innovative work. He is a doctoral candidate in English at the University at Albany.

Matthew Rohrer is the author of five books of poetry, most recently RISE UP, published by Wave Books. He teaches in the creative writing program at NYU and lives in Brooklyn.

Frank Sherlock is the co-author of the newly released Ready-to-Eat Individual with Brett Evans.

Joanna Sondheim’s chapbooks, The Fit and Thaumatrope, were published by Sona Books in 2004 and 2007, respectively. Recent work appears in Unsaid magazine.

Shanxing Wang was born in Jinzhong, Shanxi province, China, in 1965. He moved to the U.S. in 1991 to pursue a PhD in mechanical engineering at University of California at Berkeley. While an assistant professor of engineering at Rutgers University, he began taking writing courses at Rutgers and later the Poetry Project, and subsequently received a Zora Neale Hurston Scholarship to attend the summer writing program at Naropa University in Colorado in 2003. His first book Mad Science in Imperial City (Futurepoem Books, 2005) won the 2006 Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. His current thinking and struggling focuses on intersections of poetry/poetics with physics/mathematics, history, visual arts, and continental philosophy. He is also a competitive table tennis player and a table tennis coach. He lives and writes in Queens and he has a blog.

Rebecca Wolfe is the author of Manderley, Figment, and The King (forthcoming 2009). She is the publisher and editor of Fence, Fence Books, and The Constant Critic, and is a fellow of the New York State Writers Institute, with which Fence is affiliated. She lives in Athens, New York.

Among other distinctions, Fritz Lang's 1931 classic M is credited with giving birth to the modern psychological thriller, specifically the dreaded serial-killer movie, but that doesn't do justice to its real achievement. While it's true that Peter Lorre's performance as a child murderer who terrorizes the Berlin streets brought unprecedented depth, even hard-won sympathy, to what might have been a stock monster, Lang's grip on societal evils remains most persuasive. Without underplaying the horrific nature of Lorre's crimes, Lang examines another kind of sickness that seizes the city, both in the mass hysteria that affects the tenor of everyday life, and in a criminal underworld consumed by self-serving moral outrage. It takes guts to humanize a serial killer, but Lang goes further than that by making Lorre into a tragic hero, victimized by overwhelming forces from within and without.

Making his first foray into sound, a transition that many actors and directors never mastered, Lang (Metropolis) takes pointed advantage of the new technology without losing the bold visual expressiveness that had always distinguished his work. Lorre first appears in profile, looming over his next young victim, but before anybody ever sees him, they hear him, whistling a telltale refrain from Edvard Grieg's "In The Hall Of The Mountain King." In just a few chillingly suggestive shots—a long shadow, a dropped ball, an unleashed balloon caught up in power lines—Lang covers a little girl's abduction and murder, the latest in an eight-month rampage. As desperate authorities adopt increasingly heavy-handed tactics in an effort to track the killer down, the local criminals find it difficult to go about their business, so they launch their own investigation. Using a guild of street beggars to collect information, the self-serving thugs want to capture Lorre before the police and courts can administer the ineffectual rule of law.

With a keen satirical eye, Lang notes the hypocrisy of thieves and murderers administering justice: In one brilliant sequence, he cuts between two smoke-filled meeting rooms, making it seem like the top detectives and crooks discussing plans to catch Lorre are all engaged in the same dialogue. When the street syndicate finally corners Lorre in the attic of an office building, it also dispatches safecrackers to loot the bank vault downstairs. With his sad eyes and a face rounded with baby fat, Lorre was cast in M because he looked like a man whom no one could believe was a murderer; in the end, he seems more pitiable than frightening, and the truly diabolical villains—the ones who can choose their wicked destiny—are serving as judge, jury, and executioner.

Scott Tobias The Onion

Locked in a magnificent battle

Julian Schnabel's superb film recreates the courageous, unsentimental example of a visionary human being.

Jean-Dominique Bauby was a successful, highly regarded author, a major figure in Parisian journalistic and fashion circles, editor-in-chief of Elle, a father with a little son and daughter, and a mistress, when suddenly he suffered a cerebro-vascular attack while driving in the countryside in his smart new BMW convertible. Waking from a lengthy coma, he found he was in a hospital at Berck-Plage near Calais, totally paralysed and capable of communicating only by blinking his left eye, one blink for 'yes', two for 'no'. Using this device, devised by a speech therapist, he dictated his reflective memoir, the 139-page The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly (aka Le Scaphandre et le papillon). It was published here a matter of weeks after his death in March 1997 at the age of 44, and is one of the most moving and thoughtful books I have ever read.

Bauby was a dedicated cinephile and called the hospital's balcony of his hospital - it over looked the town's shabby suburbs and the English Channel - his 'Cinecittà', where he would sit for hours thinking about movies. 'There, I am the greatest director of all time,' he writes. 'On the town side, I reshoot the close-ups for Touch of Evil. Down at the beach I rework the dolly shots for Stagecoach, and offshore I recreate the storm rocking the smugglers of Moonfleet.' There has been talk of a film since shortly after the book appeared (Bauby expressed to his wife an interest in one being made), and the picture that the American painter Julian Schnabel has directed is a triumph, a major advance on his earlier pictures (Basquiat, a portrait of the doomed New York painter, and Before Night Falls, about the struggles of the gay Cuban dissident author, Reinaldo Arenas). It's made in French from a screenplay by the British playwright Ronald Harwood, and exquisitely photographed by Janusz Kaminski, the Polish cinematographer who has lit all Steven Spielberg's movies since Schindler's List, and stars Mathieu Amalric, who has made a corner for himself as the cinema's favourite quizzical, witty, womanising Gallic intellectual, and who is wholly convincing as the man his friends called Jean-Do.
Ever since the cinema was invented, film-makers have been experimenting with different points of view, ways of getting inside people's heads, conveying unusual states of mind by visual and aural means. The world of the deaf, the dumb, the blind, the schizophrenic have been explored in pictures as different as Pabst's Secret of a Soul, Duvivier's Carnet de Bal, and Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, and numerous films have tried to present a narrative through a single pair of eyes. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly uses a variety of ways to convey the feeling and texture of the book. It begins with Jean-Do coming out of his coma and being told by a neurologist that he's suffering from 'locked-in syndrome' (the English term is used by the French medical profession), and the audience shares his isolation. Only we, the spectators, have an unmediated access to his mind and we understand his frustration at the world going into and out of focus and his inability to frame for himself the picture he sees. Later on, after we've experienced along with him the process of learning a new way of communicating, the film-makers are freed to follow his memories and his imagination as he starts assembling the materials that will make up his book. There are also occasional views of Jean-Do as he appears to others and the way he envisages his present self after seeing his image in a mirror. One consequence of making the movie in French is that we become very aware of the English subtitles because they frequently bear little relationship to the words Bauby is painfully spelling out letter by letter.

Initially he must come to terms with his condition and get over death-wish despair. Then he's faced with assessing what makes human existence not merely endurable but worthy of celebration, and what is the irreducible minimum of such things that can keep us alive. Fortunately Jean-Do has the enviable literary gifts, the well-equipped mind and the ironic wit to consider these matters in a philosophical yet concrete manner, and the final result is a joyful, unsentimental, unself-pitying affirmation of life. It's rather as if an exuberant, sociable extrovert has suddenly found himself cast as the isolated loner in a Samuel Beckett play.

A visiting friend compares his experience being held for four years as a hostage by terrorists in Beirut to Jean-Do's locked-in syndrome. There are two wonderful sequences with his 92-year-old father (Max von Sydow). One is a memory of shaving his dad and thinking about the rewards and duties of parenthood, the other a phone call that makes him realise how like his own position is that of his crippled father, living alone and waiting for death. Jean-Do's experience is what eventually we'll all come to in the end - spectators in our personal galleries of memories, the dreams, crossroads, transgressions, regrets, joys, disappointments of a lifetime. The film ends, as does the book, with that fateful drive accompanied by his son.

Philip French The Guardian

Music Video:

- TOUGH BOY by le margot

- UPTOWN LINE by escape video / bernard filipetti, featuring suicide

Feature Film:

AROUND... by david spaltro

BiFF was established in 1998 as the first international competitive film festival in New York. BiFF’s primary goal is to connect filmmakers to distribution companies and expose them to the media. Many films that have premiered at BiFF in past years went on to be released theatrically and/or are available at video stores near you.

Below are short synopses of the films that will be presented.
Additional information on each film is available here.

LAST LETTER 
Dir: Ted Ciesielski, United States, 5 min, Experimental
A stark urban landscape of rooftops, billboards, and highways provide the backdrop for an open love letter that never reaches its recipient: a young soldier in Iraq.

THE REPLICANTS: USER 
Dir: Edouard Salier, France, 4 min, Experimental
Fingers control a flip book that reveals a series of pictures. With each flashing image, spectator access is denied. People, signals of the digital age, and constructions of civilization are edited together to form a rapid firing of information. The film is reminiscent of media images injected into everyday onlookers. Short thrills are exemplified, making the flip book a series of ‘cinematic attractions' -- a kind of peep show for viewers.

DAYS WILL NEVER BE THE SAME 
Dir: Jan Zajicek, Czech Republic, 4 min, Experimental
A wild love affair that culminates in a tragic end is captured entirely in one shot by a motion-controlled camera. Time is frozen when the angel of death opens his eyes as velvety black cats encircle a dead body.

ROASTBEEF 
Dir: Francois Begin & Miryam Bouchard, Canada, 6 min, Experimental
A woman becomes inspired to perform an enticing dance for a butcher who cuts roast beef.

A LETTER TO COLLEEN 
Dir: Carolyn & Andy London, United States, 9 min, Animation
Head smack into the purgatory of modern teenage life. Using fittingly raw and economical animation, this film is a harsh and to find absolution for having lived too much, too young, and too fast.

WITH DELICATE RISK 
Dir: Dane Webster, United States, 3 min, Animation
The film explores ideas of creation myth and evolution through the use of various systems of motion applied to a human arm. This animation uses procedural and systematic approaches to animated motion to explore the viewer's notions of gesture and the perceived emotions that are related to those gestures.

THE VERY FIRST DESIRE NOW AND FOREVER 
Dir: Signe Baumane, United States, 1 min, Animation
A character's first desire is explored....

HERZOG AND THE MONSTERS 
Dir: Lesley barnes, Scotland, 4 min, Animation
In a digital cut-out animated film, a graphic fairytale is depicts little Herzog's journey through a forest. The woods are full of monsters that are actually letters. The film explores how language has the ability to embody wealth.

POPOL VUH 
Dir: Ana Maria Pavez, Chile, 10 min, Animation
A tale of creation based on "Popul Vuh: the Ancient Stories of the Quiché," written by the indigenous Maya Quiché people after the Spanish Conquest. The vibrant illustrations are taken from Mayan codices, paintings found on vessels, and stones carved with scenes from the "Popul Vuh" between the years 300-900 A.D. Accompanying the narrator is original music performed with pre-Columbian and other ethnographic instruments from the Americas. The text relates solely to the creation of the world and humankind, and gives the viewer a unique look into Mayan culture and history. The story is told in its native Spanish language, with English subtitles.

AFTER YOU LEAVE... 
Dir: Molly Schwartz, United States, 4 min, Animation
We thought the conflict of the neighborhood existed in the realm of construction, rent increases and population explosion, but there is another offensive underway...the mute struggle of the linden, ash, gingko and plane tree. This project documents a silent war, the War of the Trees. Here we see the trees’ stoic refusal to submit to the dominating infrastructure–aggressive constriction and unremitting subjugation by the sidewalks, fences, buildings and decorative borders in this arboreal battle-zone.

Maybe It's The Weather was filmed in late January at the Greenpoint Coffee House.
The screenplay, written by Miles Harvey, is an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's short story "A Clean Well Lighted Place."
It centers around closing time at a cafe. two waiters discuss the last customer, an old drunk, as they prepare to leave for the night.

There is more grace and courage in the famous image of Giulietta Masina smiling through her tears in Federico Fellini's 1957 "Nights of Cabiria," than there is in all the fire-breathing blockbusters Hollywood has to offer.

The star's prize-winning, heartbreaking performance, the story's allegorical resonance and Fellini's sweeping, soulful vision of a Roman prostitute's resilient humanity mark "Nights of Cabiria" as a cinematic masterpiece. Not coincidentally, "Nights of Cabiria" has been refurbished and revived by the same team (Bruce Goldstein of Film Forum and Mike Thomas) who brought back Godard's "Contempt" last year, and who display the same acumen in reissuing a film of special prescience. Though it was shot in black and white amid the stark poverty of postwar Italy, neither the style nor the searching of "Cabiria" has grown dated at all.

As an outgrowth of characters played by Miss Masina in her husband's earlier films, "The White Sheik," "Il Bidone" and "La Strada," the unforgettable Cabiria is a tiny, scrappy survivor who drifts almost magically among the film's varied realms. In three astonishing long sequences here, she is taken under the wing of a movie star, disillusioned by a religious pilgrimage with carnival overtones and cruelly tricked by a hypnotist who exposes her once-secret dreams.

The new print, which yellows at a few points but retains a beautiful depth and clarity, also includes an episode that has not been seen in the film since its original showing 41 years ago at the Cannes Film Festival.

In this section of the movie, a character who became known as "the man with the sack" takes Cabiria with him as he distributes food to people so poor that they live in underground caves. Beyond affording Cabiria a premonition of her own possible future, this fluid and mysterious episode drew the censure of Roman Catholic authorities, who saw the good Samaritan as a reproach to organized religion (there are many in the film) and asked that it be excised.

In the course of her eventful travels, Cabiria undergoes the profound spiritual evolution that gives the film its lingering grandeur. Anyone dismayed by the hyperkinetic emptiness of so much current film spectacle will find the antidote -- a deep, wrenching and eloquent filmgoing experience -- right here.

Janet Maslin

AAAA Locksmiths (featuring members of Flaming Fire and Marianne Nowottny) bring together the outlaw country stylings and attitude of Johnny Paycheck, George Jones and Jeannie C. Riley with the fried punk-rock electro sounds of Cobra Killer, Big Black and Rammstein. Featuring a manic square-dance caller, a crazed square-dance troupe and the best honky-tonk guitarist in Florida, AAAA Locksmiths are the best band for an unhinged, wild barn-stomp, bar none!

Ambergris is a musical experiment in storytelling and synesthesia.  The band consists of Matthew Thurber, often Hiroshi Kimura and Rebecca Bird, and usually masks, scrolls and other props.  Ambergris has performed in locations such as the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Issue Project Room in New York, and the 215 Festival in Philadelphia.
 
DJ Liz Armstrong
Liz Armstrong has performed with To Live and Shave in L.A., and written long-running arts columns detailing the arts scenes of different cities for the Chicago Reader and the Las Vegas Weekly, and is a big star. She is currently writing about fragrances and Norwegian fashion, and djs at Heathers Bar.

Sweeney Todd
Tim Burton
116 minutes 2007

The story of Sweeney Todd, the London barber who cuts his customers' throats and has their bodies baked into pies by his Fleet Street neighbour, Mrs Lovett, is one of those gruesome stories we first hear as children. I have no recollection where I first came across this urban legend, though I do remember passing fleapit cinemas in the 1940s that were showing a British B-movie on the subject starring a great barnstorming exponent of Grand Guignol with the splendid name Tod Slaughter. The tale touches on all sorts of fears, including the vulnerability you feel in a barber's chair and, especially, cannibalism.

For his musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Stephen Sondheim drew on a little-known British play of 1973 by Christopher Bond that refined and embellished its Victorian sources. He worked once more with the British writer Hugh Wheeler, who before turning to the theatre had been a prolific author of detective novels under the pseudonym Patrick Quentin. Sondheim is also fascinated with crime and wrote an ingenious movie thriller The Last of Sheila with Anthony Perkins.

The musical was not a great success initially, and in the short-lived 1990 London production that marvellous actor Denis Quilley was too jovial as Sweeney. But it's now rightly regarded as a classic. More or less sung through with the minimum of dialogue, its lyrics are harsh, witty, ironic, its music influenced in part by Kurt Weill and Bernard Herrmann's scores for Hitchcock.

Tim Burton, who dropped the upbeat songs from the 1971 film of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when he came to make a more sinister version three years ago, has found a perfect subject in Sweeney Todd, and he's working for the fifth time with Johnny Depp, an actor put on earth to play the part. His presence is powerful, his singing clear, dramatic, unembarrassed. The animated opening titles drip with blood, and when the gore starts to flow in Victorian London about half an hour later, it spurts and cascades until the final scene.

The film begins as Sweeney comes up the Thames in a sailing ship, he and his young companion Frank singing 'No place like London', a celebratory song for Frank but for Sweeney a hymn of hatred for the city's squalor and vice. Once ashore, Sweeney tells him the story of Benjamin Barker, a kindly man whose beautiful wife and small daughter are coveted by the evil Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), and how the wife is destroyed when Barker is framed and transported to Australia.

Now Barker is back, disguised as Sweeney, with vengeance on his mind in a wonderful looking studio-created London, the work of production designer Dante Ferretti and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski. The sets are as splendid as those created by Martin Childs and photographed by Peter Deming in From Hell, the Hughes Brothers' film starring Johnny Depp as a Scotland Yard inspector investigating the Jack the Ripper murders, and they too appear to be influenced by Victorian paintings, especially the school of William Frith and the nocturnes of Atkinson Grimshaw and Whistler.

Depp has a ghoulish appearance, his unnatural pallor recalling his first appearance in a Burton film as the eponymous Edward Scissorhands, who has knives and scissors instead of fingers, which under stress turn from delicate instruments of refinement to weapons of bloody destruction. When Sweeney returns to his old shop, kept for him by the devoted Mrs Lovett (Helen Bonham Carter), he hymns his box of razors with a song that begins, 'These are my friends/ See how they glisten'. Mrs Lovett, a distraught pale-faced beauty with black rings around her bright eyes, wishes to restore him to normal life. But when he kills a blackmailer and she disposes of the body by putting it into the pie, the moral and political dice are cast. His obsessions with avenging the destruction of his family is all-consuming and becomes directed at a whole society. He constructs a special barber's chair to despatch his victims down a chute to the cellar, and it soon becomes an industrial process.

A major consequence is that Mrs Lovett's pies, once unpleasantly tasteless, become the toast of London, selling like hot cakes. The killing and the cannibalism become a metaphor for cut-throat capitalism and the transformation of our fellow human beings into a disposable consumer commodity.

In an extended dream sequence Mrs Lovett creates a light, bright idyllic world where she and Sweeney picnic in the countryside, bathe by the sea, get married and adopt the street orphan Toby as a son. This dream is shattered by the barber's obsession and by the depths to which they have sunk. Bloody retribution, melodramatic but tinged with tragedy, inevitably ensues. Before then there has been a deal of incidental humour and two considerable comic performances of a positively Dickensian kind by Timothy Spall as the creepy Beadle Bamford, sly toady to Judge Turpin (also Dickensian in style), and Sacha Baron Cohen as Pirelli, the phoney Italian barber and peddler of elixirs.

The film is jaunty, beautifully rhythmic in its camera movements and editing, extraordinarily rapid without being obtrusively hasty. Two hours were suddenly over and there I was in the foyer eating a warm meat pie, smiling at what I'd been lured into doing. This is a shocking film, the first musical, I believe, to get an 18 certificate (unless you consider Max Ophüls's La Ronde, which was awarded an 'X' back in 1950). But it's ultimately an exhilarating one.

Philip French

or

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Andrew Dominik
159 minutes 2007

It happened with regularity in the '70s, but every once in a while, a major studio accidentally produces a work of art like The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford—a dark, iconoclastic Western that lacks clear heroes and villains, tucks its only shoot 'em up sequence in the opening reel, and closes on a note of profound ambiguity and regret. In look and tone, it recalls moody revisionist Westerns like McCabe & Mrs. Miller and The Shooting, but with a special attentiveness to the natural world that's closer to Terrence Malick. But perhaps its closest antecedent is Walter Hill's underrated Wild Bill, another story of an outlaw who had the misfortune of being a legend before his death, thus inviting fame-seekers to strike him down. Both films derive a sick sort of tension from the inevitable, as their paranoid anti-heroes wait for an end that they seem to know is coming.

Though the furthest thing from effects-laden spectacle, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's mesmerizing Distant needs to be seen in a movie theater, because without the subtle impact of its photography and soundtrack, it wouldn't amount to much of anything. A deadpan comedy/drama that details the chilly relationship between an urbanite loner and his visiting cousin from the sticks, the film recalls the odd-couple dynamic in Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, but with even less incident. In a medium primed for movement and action, it's tough to make ennui register for audiences as something other than outright boredom, but Ceylan sustains a precise, evocative mood that's saturated with melancholy. An emerging name in world cinema, Ceylan has drawn comparisons to Andrei Tarkovsky (whose Stalker plays on TV in one scene) and Abbas Kiarostami, but his long takes and funny/sad look at urban alienation have more in common with Taiwan's Tsai Ming-liang (What Time Is It There?), almost like a mirror image from the other side of the continent. The slow-burning tension in Distant only manifests itself in one melodramatic scene, yet the film communicates everything it needs to about the ever-widening gulf that separates two men from each other and the world around them. Living a comfortable middle-class existence in Istanbul, photographer Muzaffer Özdemir numbs the pain of a recent divorce through discreet sessions with a prostitute, but his sadness swells when his ex-wife announces that she's moving to Canada to start a new life with someone else. A clean, fastidious, and antisocial personality, Özdemir finds his sanctuary broken when his cousin Emin Toprak, a slovenly simpleton from his old hometown, comes to stay with him while looking for work on a ship. After quickly finding that the recession is as bad in Istanbul as it is in the country, Toprak spends the days and weeks wandering the city aimlessly, trying (and failing) to work up the courage to approach various young women. These men have loneliness in common, but they certainly don't turn to each other for company—especially Özdemir, who drives Toprak out of the room by flipping to soporific TV shows, then pops in a porno tape after he leaves. More often than not, Ceylan favors camera and sound effects over dialogue and action to suggest their feelings of remove, blurring the foreground or background of a shot to make focal distance seem physical or suffusing scenes with the far-off horns and lapping waves of the harbor. While it takes a little patience to engage with it, Distant has an indelible sense of city life that can't be expressed in words.

Scott Tobias

The pageant will start at 9 with host Jared Whitham and Musical guest: Something In Spanish

After party ($5) will start at about 11:45PM with a set by Something In Spanish followed by DJ Sir Hannett

Again seats are going fast; r.s.v.p. at mizzgreenpoint@brooklynglamour.com

Many surprises and lots of fun ahead.

Amy Daulton and Robert Cividanes each present their one person show in which they explore their personal journeys that led them to stand up comedy.
They offer a glimpse into what it takes to look at the not so funny truths in life and create comedy out of them.

How to be a better neurotic
written and performed by Amy Daulton

Amy's voice is currently starring in a Mastercard radio commercial. Amy is one half of the two person sketch sho, Fantastic Genius, and will be performing in their 2 year anniversary show in July.

I cried until I laughed
written and performed by Robert Cividanes

Robert can be seen performing stand-up every Friday night at New York Comedy Club.  Robert has  also performed at The Broadway Comedy Club, Stand Up New York, the Comedy Village and Carolines. Robert's recent road gigs include  Poconuts and The Weston Firehouse Fundraiser, both located in Pennsylvania.

La Jetée (The Pier)
Chris Marker
France 1962 28 minutes

Revived most recently as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, "La Jetée" considers a future eradicated by war, but it's really more about holding onto the past. Through an assemblage of gorgeous black-and-white stills, Marker shows a devastated Paris in the aftermath of World War III, where the few survivors are scurrying underground due to radiation levels on the surface. A man is chosen to embark on an experimental time-travel mission to find a solution to humanity's dire situation, but temporal folds prove to be tricky. With its brilliant conceit, which tightens the narrative and offers a lesson on editing fundamentals, the film reaches a conclusion common to a lot of time-travel stories, which is that knowledge of the future doesn't necessarily empower people to change it.

Scott Tobias

Wallace & Gromit in The Wrong Trousers
Nick Park
UK 1993 30 minutes

Wallace and Gromit, an inventor and his highly intelligent dog, live together in a cozy English idyll aided by various handy gadgets straight out of the cartoons of Heath Robinson. Then they take in a devious penguin lodger who drives Gromit from his room, and ultimately out of the house. The evil little bird also happens to be a master criminal and he soon exploits Wallace's peculiar genius to steal a diamond from the local museum.

Nick Park creates a kind of dynamic previously confined to two-dimensional animation and with tightly structured narrative pays homage to a broad cinematic heritage. The penguin's efforts to drive a sleeping Wallace through the museum in a pair of remote-controlled trousers and the finale in which they hurtle around the house on a model train are set pieces as thrilling as any in live action blockbusters.

Gromit is the most expressive cartoon dog since Snoopy, and without uttering a word he carries the story through its all too brief 30 minutes. Attention to detail makes it a rewarding film to watch and re-watch, with amusing headlines and daft wallpaper. The film earned itself an Oscar and its studio a reputation big enough to make the feature length claymation movie, "Chicken Run". It's the kind of children's fare adults want to be a part of.

Nick Hilditch

Nuit et Brouillard (Night & Fog)
Alain Resnais
1955 France 32 minutes

Alan Resnais' profoundly influential and powerful documentary was hailed by Francois Truffaut as "the greatest film ever made." It takes its title from Hitler's decree that anyone who endangered Germany's security was to "vanish without trace (in the) night and fog" of the Third Reich. Commissioned by the French Committee for the History of the Second World War, Night And Fog was made in 1955 and illustrates with brutal detail exactly what went on inside the 'death factories' of Struthuf, Oranienburg, Auschwitz, Belsen, Ravenbruck and Dachau. Footage was shot with the Nazi's own cameras, and those of the liberating Allied Forces. These black and white images are carefully juxtaposed with color footage of a tour of the ruins of Auschwitz in the 50s, and newsreel pictures of high-ranking Nazi's such as Julius Streicher, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler.

César Award winning actor Michel Bouquet narrates Jean Cayrol's script, accompanied by an emotive yet unobtrusive score from Hanns Eisler. No holocaust documentary could ever make for easy viewing, but Night And Fog is about as graphic as it gets, showing buckets of detached heads lining the corridors, medical 'experiments' in progress, and huge mounds of half burnt bodies being bulldozed into mass graves. It also investigates the design, building and day-to-day running of the camps, as well as highlighting bizarre attempts to create 'mini-villages' in the larger camps, by installing zoos, brothels and, ironically, prisons.

Aidan Elliott

8 PM
DRAW
Nisi Jacobs and Michael J. Schumacher, live video and electronic sound

8:45 PM
Lovid: a screening of “Cyclops”

9 PM
dj sniff & Keir Neuringer
turntables and saxophone

9:45 PM
Fred Worden: a screening of “Everyday Bad Dream”

10 PM
Aki Onda and Alan Licht: “Cinemage”

DRAW is the live video and sound project of Nisi Jacobs and Michael Schumacher. They create compositions that form the basis for improvisations involving multi-screen video, algorithmically generated sound and live musicians. They make work that retains the spontaneity of improvisation while exploring in depth the relation between sound and image. Their practice involves a number of strategies to achieve this end, such as coupling specific sound and image sequences, using multi-channel setups for both video and sound, role-switching, and exploring notational techniques.

LoVid is an interdisciplinary artist duo composed of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus. Our work includes live video installations, sculptures, digital prints, patchworks, media projects, performances, and video recordings. We combine many opposing elements in our work, contrasting hard electronics with soft patchworks, analog and digital, or handmade and machine produced objects. This multidirectional approach is also reflected in the content of our work: romantic and aggressive, wireless and wire-full. We are interested in the ways in which the human body and mind observe, process, and respond to both natural and technological environments, and in the preservation of data, signals, and memory.

dj sniff (Takuro Mizuta Lippit) believes in the instrumental autonomy of the turntable and the musicianship of the DJ. He is a turntable musician working in the field of improvised and experimental music. His music focuses on the live reconstruction and narratization of the phonographically amplified - the music, the sound, the technology and the past. To achieve this, he uses a unique setup consisting of hand-made hardware interfaces and a custom Max/MSP software along with one turntable and DJ mixer. He is also a concert/event curator for electronic music and a researcher of music technology.

Keir Neuringer was born in New York in 1976 and has lived in Europe since 1999. He is active as an improvising saxophonist and a composer of electronic and acoustic music. He also writes texts and makes videos and installations critical of the destructive behavior exhibited and accepted by the dominant culture. He studied in the US, UK, Poland and The Netherlands.

Cinemage is Aki Onda's audio-visual project, which performances are composed of slide projections of still photographs and guitar improvisation. Cinemage means "images for cinema," or "homage for cinema." The visual images in Cinemage are snapshots taken from Onda's daily life. By documenting fragments of his personal life, something is revealed in their accumulation--the particulars within lose significance. What emerges is the architecture, and the essence, of memory. The sensibility of Cinemage is essentially filmic. The photos are more like moving images than stills and the style is similar to Chris Marker's La Jetee. Projected on a screen, the images have the eerie familiarity of an out-of-focus memory and evoke a feeling of déjà vu. On this occasion, Alan Licht plays guitar along with Onda's visual images.

Fred Worden, filmmaker, has been involved in experimental cinema since the 1970s. His work has been screened at The Museum of Modern Art, in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, The Centre Pompidou, in Paris, The Pacific Film Archive, The New York Film Festival, The London Film Festival, The Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Toronto Film Festival, and The Hong Kong International Film Festival. He was an editor for Criss-Cross Art Communications form the 70's through the 80's and his writings have appeared in Cinematograph. His work is included in in the Stan Brakhage Collection and the collection of the Centre Pompidou and others. Worden’s interest in intermittent projection: how a stream of still pictures passing through a projector resonates with a viewer on a level beyond representation . Fred teaches film and video production classes as well as film history and theory courses at the University of Maryland.


Diapason gallery for sound and intermedia is a non-profit performance and exhibition space that invites the public, artists and composers to engage with contemporary music and sound practices. Established in 2001 by composer Michael J. Schumacher and choreographer Liz Gerring, Diapason continues to be the sole venue in New York City (and one of few internationally) that is dedicated to both presenting multichannel sound installations and providing space for composers and sound artists to experiment, exhibit and perform.

Additional info at Ba-Rock Brooklyn.org

VENUES

T.B.D. Brooklyn is a new, chic addition to the Greenpoint bar scene. Located on Franklin Street between Eagle and Freeman Streets, the bar features drink specials, live music, monthly art exhibits, and a tasty bar menu.

East Coast Aliens is a non-for-profit center for art, culture and debates located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Van Gogh’s Radio Lounge is a cozy dive located on Franklin between Java and India Streets. Drinks are cheap ($2 PBRs!), couches are cozy, and Wednesday is open mic night.

BANDS

Headlining: Apollo Heights

The City and Horses "is a catchy, jangly, lo-fi project out of New York from generously talented, and generous, Marc Louis,” says sixeyes, while Monkey calls their three song EP "Little Finland," "a little gem" that "starts as Teenage Fanclub and ends as Belle & Sebastian yet has a homespun charm all of its own."

The So So Glos. The So So Glos are a punky rock and roll band from Brooklyn. They play music to combat apathy and won’t stop until everyone is a believer. BANG!

The Shot Heard Round the World.Recently receiving an honorable mention in the L-magazine’s Best NYC Bands, the harmonies and folk-pop guitars of TSHRtW transport their listeners to a lawn full of dancing hippies in the summer of ’68. You don’t want to miss it. Myspace: tshrtw

Backwords. Based out of Brooklyn and Philadelphia, Backwords blends modern psychadelics with 50s rock, roots, and alt-country. They take a gulp of harmony, fuse it with sonic experimental firecrackers, and end up bouncing with love on stage. Think Neil Young meets Built to Spill.

Flowers is a brand new group from Philadelphia coming up to play their first show in New York. The band meshes layers of swirling guitar feedback to structurally subverted avant -garde pop songs. In short, experimental music you can hum along to. Myspace: flowersnohippie

Madam Robot and the Lust Brigade is a Williamsburg trio bringing you dynamic, yet playful psychedelic garage-rock. “For fans of: The Beatles, United States of America, Velvet Underground, Bowie, Aphex Twin, and 13th Floor Elevators”. Myspace: madamrobot

Heavy Creatures are a beautifully loud and fervent foursome from Greenpoint who combine psych, golden rock and oceanic whispers into a confection that TimeOutNY refers to as "curiously potent". myspace: heavycreatures

Broken Trees are a folk/pop trio from Philadelphia, fronted by Liz Boyd on vocals and Fender Rhodes, with Adam Ravtiz on upright bass and Joe Baldacci on drums and percussion. Boyd's folk-inspired songwriting is coupled with the group's respective Jazz, Rock, and Classical influences. The trio recently completed its 10-song, self-titled album that ranges from catchy piano-pop to moody introspection, complete with brass, woodwinds, orchestral percussion and toy piano. Myspace: brokentrees

Mobile Wash Unit is the brainchild of Greenpoint local Andy Snyder. Punk to folk influences combine seamlessly into the guitar-driven rock let loose by Andy and a “rotating collective of talented friends.” Myspace: mobilewashunit

A M is electric powered Dada pop with acoustic footnotes. Myspace: amtheband

Declan Zimmerman. Declan Zimmerman's music will make you laugh knowingly, shift uncomfortably, weep uncontrollably and then it will get stuck in your head for days. That said, it is quite entertaining and relatively harmless. Someone once told him the songs remind them of The Magnetic Fields. He was flattered. Myspace: declanzimmerman

Discovery. This fancy four-piece from Brooklyn writes catchy, sparse pop with deep disco and jazzy flourishes. Dig Cholewka's wise and smoky vocals and Marsh's synth and bass lines grooving wickedly to Garwacke's bright and bouncy drumming. Meanwhile Smith laces the stuff with effects-heavy, spaced-out trombone gold. The group featured in Italian Vogue and Germany's Z magazine has been called "post-punk meets tropicalia" and "Eastern European nu wave." Their cover tunes range from Smokey Robinson to The Rolling Stones to 80s dance music mavens Nu Shooz. Fans leave Discovery live shows singing--first-timers wake up with Discovery songs still in their heads. Myspace: thisisdiscovery


Williamsboy. The Williamsboy is a singer-songwriter, whose live performances and gritty original Rock-N-Roll are reminiscent of artists such as Wilco, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen. Equally at home playing ramshackle folk, bar-room-blues, modern rock and alt-country; The Williamsboy’s sound is timeless.

And more to come!

This installment features:

1. GO, SPEED RACER, GO! by Ali Dee and the Deekompressors (3.5 min)

2. CONSCIENCE by Steven Salerno (1 min.)

3. RESIST! by Mike Park (18.5 min.)

4. MONTAGE AUS LICHT by Joshua Ahlers (5,.5 min.)

5. PANDORA by Robert Allen (2 min)

6. YELLOW MOSHENE: EDGE by Natalia Babinski & Janene Knox (7 min)

and the feature film

7. LEAF by Tim Carr (77 min)

There's no better filmmaker in the world than Michael Haneke—no one more rigorous, no one more provocative, and certainly no one more in command of an audience's emotions—yet for these very reasons, respect and gravitas haven't always been forthcoming. A prude among sensualists on the film-festival circuit, Haneke is an unsparing moralist who dares to criticize viewers while offering them a singularly unpleasant moviegoing experience. His recent hit Caché may be his most accessible work to date, perhaps because its mysteries are more conventionally inviting, but even it left behind a residue of shock and puzzlement. More common are films like The Seventh Continent, Benny's Video, 71 Fragments Of A Chronology Of Chance, and Funny Games, four disquieting early efforts about the atrocities that occur when people become detached from their own humanity.

Haneke's schoolmarm tendencies come to the surface in 1992's Benny's Video, which implicates the media for desensitizing people to violence. The film opens with home video of a pig getting shot by a butcher's gun, perhaps the most cherished footage in the sizeable collection of teenager Arno Frisch. What follows when Frisch shows the tape to an unknown girl isn't terribly surprising, but the unexpected aftermath deepens what might have been a Joe Lieberman speech writ large.

IN the 1960's and 1970's, American film makers, equipped

with newly refined, easily portable camera and sound equipment - much of it based on the work of Morris Engel (''The Little Fugitive''), pioneered a new kind of documentary, one that could speak for itself without the ubiquitous, voice- over narration associated with earlier ''fact'' films like the old ''March of Time'' series.

It's in the tradition of these still very active ''pioneers,'' including D. A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock and Albert and David Maysles that ''Seventeen,'' by Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines, belongs. The film, which opens today at the Film Forum, is one of the best and most scarifying reports on American life to be seen on a theater screen since the Maysles brothers' ''Salesman'' and ''Gimme Shelter.''

In fact, ''Seventeen'' was not originally designed for theatrical distribution, having been conceived by Peter Davis, the producer, as one of six television documentaries to be broadcast under the collective title of ''Middletown.'' Each of the six was made by a different team of film makers who set out to explore some aspect of life in Muncie, Ind., the locale of those seminal sociological studies by Robert and Helen Lynd, ''Middletown,'' published in 1929, and ''Middletown in Transition'' (1937).

The idea for the ''Middletown'' television series came to Mr. Davis, himself a film maker (''Hearts and Minds''), when he was gathering material for his ''Middletown''-like study of life in Hamilton, Ohio, published by Simon & Schuster in 1982 as ''Hometown.'' Everyone connected with the ''Middletown'' television series would like it to be known that the television films are in no way adaptations of the Davis book. They are entirely separate endeavors, Mr. Davis emphasizes, and are meant ''to complement one another.''

Five of the Muncie films were presented by the Public Broadcasting Service in March and April 1982. The sixth, ''Seventeen,'' was never shown, apparently because PBS and the underwriting sponsor objected to a lot of the content. This would include, I assume, the rough language and also one of the film's ''narrative'' lines about the rather hysterical romance of a 17-year-old white girl named Lynn and a young black man named Robert. ''Seventeen'' refuses to observe the niceties of sit-com land where everything comes out happily at the end.

''Seventeen'' is, instead, raw material, by which I don't mean that it hasn't been expertly edited by Miss DeMott and Mr. Kreines, who also co- produced, directed, photographed and recorded the footage. The footage is raw in that it is not always coherent, and especially in that the film makers have not attempted - as far as I can see - to impose some arbitrary order on the events they witnessed.

These have to do with a small group of white and black teen-agers, the children of working-class parents, and their lives in school, at home, boozing, smoking pot, getting fatally smashed up in auto accidents and, at one point, preparing for a neighborhood race war. At the center of the film is Lynn, the pretty, tough-talking high school student whose pleasure principle is measured by the men in her life, including Robert.

Lynn's mother doesn't exactly disapprove, but she does point out that everything Lynn is doing is designed to upset both blacks and whites in their neighborhood, all of which makes Lynn more stubborn. As it turns out, Robert isn't all that serious anyway, as his black friends, who seem to be about the most decent people in the film, keep telling her.

Things start getting nasty when a cross is burned in Lynn's yard and when Lynn begins getting threatening phone calls, apparently from Robert's other girlfriends. Lynn reacts like a nascent Belle Starr. ''Listen,'' she tells one caller, ''my mom carries a gun and she ain't afraid to use it. Neither am I.''

Though Lynn's problems provide the movie with some sort of continuity, ''Seventeen'' comes most effectively to life in its moments of casual cruelty and emotional confusion - in the uproarious classroom scenes and in a beer party watched over by Lynn's life-of-the-party mom, who gently strokes the forehead of one tearfully drunken young man on the verge of vomiting. Some of it is funny, much of it is sad, and all of it dramatizes a pervasive aimlessness and ignorance that spells out cultural bewilderment.

As in all films of this sort, one can never be sure exactly what effect the presence of the film makers has on the behavior of the people being photographed. In an effort to minimize their intrusiveness, Miss De Mott and Mr. Kreines divided up the shooting, with Miss DeMott, equipped with a camera and sound equipment, concentrating on the women, and Mr. Kreines, similarly equipped, concentrating on the men.

The soundtrack often is unintelligible, and the lack of any special lighting sources sometimes results in very dark images. The total effect, though, is healthily disturbing and provocative. ''Seventeen'' does not provide answers or make judgments. Like good reporters, Miss DeMott and Mr. Kreines say simply, ''This is what we saw.''

Back Home Again . . .

Vincent Canby NYT

Also with Mike Mikos and a special musical guest

Video clips on the screen and an after party with DJ Sir Hannet

EARANO    TBC
Dir: Luke Matheny, United States, 13 min, 2007, Short
In this comic twist on the classic Cyrano de Bergerac tale, a shy, big-eared tutor named Earl longs for a romance with the lovely librarian Roxie.

WELL-FOUNDED CONCERNS    confirmed
Dir: Tim Cawley, United States, 14 min, 2007, Short
Nathan Weller is an unapologetic germophobe. Aside from weekly group therapy, he lives in isolation, happily spending his days in a sealed-off bubble

THICK-SKINNED    TBC
Dir: Jean-Bernard Marlin & Benoit Rambourg, France, 14 min, 2007, Short
A child of 12 years old tries to kill a boy from his neighborhood to impress his father

FUTURES (AND DERIVATIVES)    confirmed
Dir: Arthur Halpern, United States, 19 min, 2007, Short
To impress a disenchanted client, a desperate group of lawyers hires an untested office temp to create a winning presentation -- overnight.

LINE, THE    confirmed
Dir: Kent Bassett, United States, 23 min, 2007, Short
A migrant father and son run out of water while crossing the desert border and must seek help from a ranch house

Cool Hand Luke
Stuart Rosenberg
USA 1967 127 minutes

That traditional object of sorrow and compassion in American folk song and lore, the chain-gang prisoner, is given as strong a presentation as ever he has had on the screen in Cool Hand Luke, which opened at Loew's State last night. It will continue there and at Cinema I today.

Indeed, in my recollection, he has never been as forcefully revealed as a victim not only of the brutality and sadistic discipline of his captors, but also—and this is most important—of the indirect cruelty that comes from idolization in the eyes of his fellow prisoners and, finally, of himself.

This reticent young fellow who is picked up by the police at the beginning of this film and sent off to a correctional workcamp in what is evidently some Southern state for the minor offense of vandalizing parking meters is more than a conventional misused convict, more than a human being who is unjustly abused. He is a psychologically disturbed and complicated victim of his own self-ostracism and pride.

He is a curiously calculating loner, a terse and sarcastic misanthrope who treats his jailors with taciturn defiance and his fellow prisoners with cool contempt—at the start. He takes with bland endurance the kicks and proddings and verbal insults the skulking guards rain on him, and he smiles when his fellows ridicule him and haze him unmercifully.

But he has pride and the dignity of detachment grown out of some boyhood hurt, perhaps. He isn't a coward or weakling. So when things finally come to the point that he must fight the top-dog prisoner to a showdown, he does so gamely, ferociously, and defiantly until he drops.

That is the turning point for him, because from there on the top-dog takes him in tow, makes him his boasted companion, and, recognizing his superior skill and wit, backs him in poker games and, most impressively, in a refreshingly funny wager that he can eat fifty hard-boiled eggs.

This elevation does it. Now he is Cool Hand Luke, the idol of the sychophantic prisoners and the growing concern of the guards. He assumes bravura postures to demonstrate his contempt. And because it is expected of him, when he  receives word that his mother has died he makes a break for freedom. He almost gets away, but is caught and returned.

The inevitable commitment to this pattern—other breaks, other returns, other and crueler beatings and tortures until his pride and will are destroyed—leads to the sad and grisly finish for this congenital fugitive—a fugitive not only from the chain gang, but also from society, and, indeed, from life.

What elevates this brutal picture above the ruck of prison films and into the range of intelligent contemplation of the ironies of life is a sharp script by Donn Pearce and Frank R. Pierson, ruthlessly realistic and plausible staging and directing by a new man. Stuart Rosenberg, and splendid acting by Paul Newman and a totally unfaultable cast.

Mr. Newman is excellent, at the top of his sometime erratic form, in the role of this warped and alienated loner whose destiny it is to lose. George Kennedy is powerfully obsessive as the top-dog who handles things his way as effectively and finally as destructively as does the warden or the guards. Strother Martin, Luke Eskew, Morgan Woodward, and several others are blood-chilling as these red-necked brutes, and any number of others are fine as prisoners.

A special word of commendation must be said for Jo Van Fleet as Mr. Newman's mother, who, in one scene, in which she comes to visit him propped up in the back of a truck, does as much to make us comprehend the background and the emotional hang-up of the loner as might have been done in the entire length of a good film.

Mr. Rosenberg's skill with the camera, his sense of graphic imagery and cinema pace, and Conrad Hall's superb color photography, merit conversation and awards.

Bosley Crowther
NY Times

OR

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Richard Brooks
USA 1958 108 minutes

AN all-fired lot of high-powered acting is done in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," film version of the Tennessee Williams stage play. Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Judith Anderson, Jack Carson and two or three more almost work and yell themselves to pieces making this drama of strife within a new-rich Southern family a ferocious and fascinating show.

And what a pack of trashy people these accomplished actors perform! Such a lot of gross and greedy characters haven't gone past since Lillian Hellman's "The Little Foxes" went that way. The whole time is spent by them in wrangling over a dying man's anticipated estate or telling one another quite frankly what sort of so-and-so's they think the others are.

As a straight exercise in spewing venom and flinging dirty linen on a line, this fine Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production in color would be hard to beat. It is done by superior talents, under the driving direction of Richard Brooks, making even the driest scenes drip poison with that strong, juicy Williams dialogue. And before the tubs full of pent-up fury, suspicion and hatred are drained, every major performer in the company has had a chance to play at least one bang-up scene.

The fattest and juiciest opportunities go to Mr. Newman, Miss Taylor and Mr. Ives as the son, his wife and the former's father (the Big Daddy of the lot), respectively. In their frequent and assorted encounters, they have chances, together and in pairs, to discourse and lash each other's feelings over the several problems of the family.

First there is the private problem of why this son and his wife do not have any children—and, indeed, why the young man shuns his wife. Why does he spend his time boozing, hobbling around his bedroom on a crutch and reviling his wife, who quite obviously has the proclivities of that cat on the roof?

And, secondly, why does this young fellow resent and resist his old man, who as obviously wants to be pals with him and leave him his estate if he will only have kids?

Let it be said, quite frankly, that the ways in which these problems are solved do not represent supreme achievements of ingenuity or logic in dramatic art. Mr. Williams' original stage play has been altered considerably, especially in offering explanation of why the son is as he is. Now, a complicated business of hero-worship has been put by Mr. Brooks and James Poe in place of a strong suggestion of homosexuality in the play.

No wonder the baffled father, in trying to find out what gives, roars with indignation: "Something's missing here!"

It is, indeed. And something is missing in the dramatists' glib account of how the son gets together with his father in one easy discourse on love. But what is lacking in logical conflict is made up in visual and verbal displays of vulgar and violent emotions by everybody concerned.

Mr. Newman is perhaps the most resourceful and dramatically restrained of the lot. He gives an ingratiating picture of a tortured and tested young man. Miss Taylor is next. She is terrific as a panting, impatient wife, wanting the love of her husband as sincerely as she wants an inheritance. Mr. Ives snorts and roars with gusto, Miss Anderson claws the air as his wife, and Mr. Carson squirms and howls atrocious English as their greedy, deceitful older son.

Madeleine Sherwood does a fine job as the latter's cheap, child-heavy wife and a quartet of unidentified youngsters insult the human race as their brats.

Lawrence Weingarten's production is lush with extravagance, which is thoroughly appropriate to the nature of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof."

The stage show at the Music Hall, entitled "Autumn Gallery," features Jeanette Scovotti, coloratura; Jack Beaber and Françoise Martinet, soloists; the Two Martys, novelty performers, and the Corps de Ballet and Rockettes.

Bosley Crowther
NY Times

Following the disastrous Paris première of Jean Renoir's 1939 masterpiece The Rules Of The Game, a scene so volatile that one man reportedly tried to light the theater on fire, the film was recut from 94 minutes to 81 in accordance with the audience's howls. It's hard to fathom any movie provoking that kind of a response today, much less a comedy of manners that treats its damnable characters with a complexity and tact that defies mere caricature. Yet its reception, on the eve of WWII, ironically cements its status as one of the consensus greats, because Renoir's scathing critique of the bourgeois establishment was precise enough to strike a chord and subtly predict the coming doom. But not until 20 years later, long after the original negative was destroyed in the war, was The Rules Of The Game fully constructed into its current 106-minute form, with new footage added (with Renoir's approval) based on the shooting script. In the most illuminating feature on Criterion's new two-DVD edition, scholar Chris Faulkner conducts a side-by-side comparison between the shortened 1939 release and the 1959 restoration, cogently arguing that the two versions are completely different films. The one that originally enraged the masses plays more harshly as social commentary, depicting, in Faulkner's words, "unsavory characters in a vicious world." Missing are crucial scenes that grant its principals greater dimension and humanity, especially the character played by Renoir, whose actions lead directly to murder in the 1939 version, but seem more ambiguous in the restoration. Time hasn't cooled Renoir's provocative vision of a decadent and immoral society crumbling into chaos, but the changes have balanced and deepened it, clarifying the tangled relations among the eight major characters and giving the rhyming structure the bounce of great poetry. Set over a weekend hunting party at a luxurious château, The Rules Of The Game makes sharp distinctions between the wealthy in the upper floors and the servants below; any crossover carries dire consequences. When underclass pilot Roland Toutain repeats Charles Lindbergh's flight over the Atlantic for the well-heeled Nora Gregor, he meets only indifference. His invitation to the château unmasks and inspires more dalliances, including one between Gregor's husband (Marcel Dalio) and a socialite (Mila Parély), and another between a servant girl (Paulette Dubost) and local poacher Julien Carette. A mascot of sorts—part interloper, part court jester—Renoir the actor moves freely from one floor to the other, unattached to and unclaimed by all the parties involved. Renoir's contempt for these rotten, insular aristocrats gets its strongest workout in the famed hunting sequence, when wild rabbits and pheasants are driven out into the open and slaughtered for sport. He once said later that none of these people are worth saving, but The Rules Of The Game isn't the pheasant shoot that Renoir suggests: Its characters aren't without depth or feeling, and they're not incapable of love. Far from muting the satire, Renoir's hearty characterization complicates it and gives it life, which is rare among broadsides at the bourgeoisie. After all, to quote the film's most famous line, "Everyone has their reasons."

Scott Tobias
The Onion

Put your driving skills and pride on the line and test your nerves
in head to head rubber on plastic racing action on 3 blazing fast AFX
electric slot-car tracks

On the main floor
emcee ZeroBoy calls the action on the tracks
DJ's Autovac and BZ will shred your ears with racing themed beats
slathered in distortion and delay
Slotcar themed art by subtexture
Racing movies and video manipulation on 2 large projection screens

In the cellar
HI-WAY STARS 9pm
KATIE MAE 10pm
FAST BOYFRIENDS 11pm

This absorbing documentary follows Kenzo Okuzaki--a veteran of Japan's WWII campaign in New Guinea--as he searches out those responsible for the mysterious deaths of several soldiers in his unit. Though he holds Emperor Hirahito accountable for all the suffering caused by WWII, he painstakingly tracks down former military officers and accuses them of specific war crimes, often times abusing them verbally and physically. Director Kazua Hara's subtle cinema verite not only captures the zeal of Okuzaki's lifelong mission, but also exposes the atrocities committed by the Japanese military against its own soldiers. The film created such controversy in Japan upon release that no major distributor would touch it. "The most amazing piece of filmmaking" (Michael Moore). Winner of the Caligari Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival. In Japanese with English subtitles.

THE UNIDENTIFIED by Dir. Kevan Tucker USA 113 minutes
BEST NEW DIRECTOR at BiFF 2008

Estlin, a young idealist, is thrust into the real world without the protective bubble of college he's grown accustomed to. His job at a local newspaper doesn’t promote social change and Brooke, his political partner in crime, is leaving Brooklyn for Ohio. Frustrated and lost, he falls for Sophie, a whimsical artist with an optimistic view of life. As their relationship grows, Estlin discovers a dark, secretive undertone to Sophie's simplistic take on the world. As Estlin pursues the truth, their relationship crumbles, plunging him further into confusion and isolation. With seemingly nowhere else to go, he heads to a protest in Washington, DC. But as he searches for the remains of 1960s idealism, he must come to terms with what has been lost, what still remains and where he must go from here.

Kevan Tucker was born and raised in Brooklyn. He showed early promise as a filmmaker when he won the prestigious ARTS award in the nationwide NFAA competition for his short, Silent Film. He experimented with higher learning at Hampshire College, but after three years he and the school had a mutual breakup and he returned to his native city. When he was 22 years old, he co-founded Floodgate Features with Tim O'Neill and Stephen Gifford and began production on The Unidentified, which is his first feature film.

Perhaps Kubrick's most perfectly realised film, simply because his cynical vision of the progress of technology and human stupidity is wedded with comedy, in this case Terry Southern's sparkling script in which the world comes to an end thanks to a mad US general's paranoia about women and commies. Sellers' three roles are something of an indulgent showcase, though as the tight-lipped RAF officer and the US president he gives excellent performances. Better, however, are Scott as the gung-ho military man frustrated by political soft-pedalling, and - especially - Hayden as the beleaguered lunatic who presses the button. Kubrick wanted to have the antics end up with a custard-pie finale, but thank heavens he didn't; the result is scary, hilarious, and nightmarishly beautiful, far more effective in its portrait of insanity and call for disarmament than any number of worthy anti-nuke documentaries.

Featuring:

White Road Dance Media (dance)

Anne Spurgeon (video)

Charlie Gaeta (comedy)

Noah Fisk (video)

Mofongo (music)

Spiritbear (dj)

Christopher Reiger (art & video)

Susan Brennan (poetry)

James Wendell (photography)

Kate Gilmore (video)

Grag Hillelson (comedy)

Broadway and Film Sensation

Started as a Broadway Production
"A Raisin in the Sun" began as a groundbreaking Broadway play. When it premiered in 1959, it was a smash hit with audiences - black and white alike.

It won the 1959 New York Drama Critics Award for best play of the year and catapulted playwright, Lorraine Hansberry into the national spotlight. She became the youngest and the first African-American to win this award.

A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by an African-American woman (Lorraine Hansberry) and directed by an African-American man (Lloyd Richards) to appear on Broadway. It also became one of the longest-running African-American theatrical production at the time with 530 performances.

Film Version Released in 1961

In 1961, the film version of A Raisin in the Sun was released. Lorraine Hansberry wrote the script and all of the major actors who appeared on Broadway agreed to play the same roles on screen. This included Sidney Poitier as Walter Lee Younger, Claudia McNeil as mother Lena, Ruby Dee as his wife Ruth, and Diana Sands as the sister, Beneatha.

Creatively, Sidney Poitier and Claudia McNeil had differences of opinion about who should be the focus of A Raisin in the Sun. This created real tension between the two actors.

In his book, The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography, Sidney Poitier states, "Claudia McNeil, a fine performer, was in complete dominance over the most of the other members of the cast. Naturally enough, she perceived the play as being best when it unfolded from the mother's point of view. I perceived the play as being best when it unfolded from the son's point of view, however, and I argued that position. In fact, we argued constantly."

Based on Lorraine Hansberry's Life

Lorraine Hansberry uses some of her own life experience in A Raisin in the Sun. When she was nine years old, her family moved to a white neighborhood in Chicago. The family faced a lot of hostility from neighbors and was sued in court based on housing racial restrictions.

In her book, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, Hansberry wrote about this experience. She states, "I also remember my desperate and courageous mother patrolling our household all night with a loaded German Luger pistol, doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington court."


Title Inspired by Langston Hughes Poem
The inspiration for the title, A Raisin in the Sun, came from the Langston Hughes poem entitled "Harlem: A Dream Deferred."

Harlem: A Dream Deferred
By Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore --
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over -
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load

Or does it just explode?
A Raisin in the Sun was one of the few black cast movies made during its time. It is considered a breakthrough drama because it showed a dimension of African-American life that had never been seen before on stage and screen. It successfully brought to life the social realities of racial segregation and frustrated ambition.

Award Winning Film

Sidney Poitier and Claudia McNeil were both nominated for Golden Globe Awards for their performances in the movie. Ruby Dee won the Best Supporting Actress Award from the National Board of Review.

The movie was selected in 2005 to the U.S. Library of Congress National Film Registry. The purpose of the registry is to preserve films that are "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant films."

A combination of real actors and stop-action animation, Jan Svankmajer's ''Little Otik'' is a handmade dream, cobbled together from dirt, wood and more imagination than most of us can muster in our most fevered states. Because this Czech master refuses to work in the scrubbed, antiseptic manner of most animators, this fable comes to life as hilarious and creepy. Finally, though, because of its obvious, reductive condescension, the picture is a half-hour too long.

''Otik,''centers on a desperate, childless couple, Karel (Jan Hartl) and his anxious wife, Bozena (Veronika Zilkova). He's so overwhelmed by their infertility that he sees babies everywhere; as he waits for his wife at the doctor's office, he imagines that babies are being scooped out of a tank with a net like fresh fish, then wrapped in newsprint for a queue of happy customers -- including himself. Hartl's long, rubbery face complements Mr. Svankmajer's cartoonish vision of hell perfectly -- the actor is like a lifesize realization of an R. Crumb cartoon; he's missing only huge beads of sweat popping off his forehead like exclamation points.

It's appropriate that Mr. Svankmajer uses fishing in the movie, because ''Otik'' has a mordant clamminess: even the people seem to be made of rubber and acrylic, with a skin tone seen in latex masks. Alzbetka (Kristina Adamcova), Karel and Bozena's little girl neighbor with an unnatural interest in sex and babies, has the exaggerated round face and corn-silk eyebrows of a Cabbage Patch doll. She wants the couple to have a baby because, as she wails during one of her tantrums, ''I'm the only child in the building.''

The theme of infantilism is prevalent in ''Otik.'' Everyone wants what he wants right away, which leads to doom, especially for Karel and Bozena. When Karel finds a tree stump that reminds him of a baby and brings it to Bozena, she hungrily lavishes it with maternal care and demands they treat it as a real child. Things gets worse when the stump, which they name Otik (''After my grandfather,'' Karel stammers), comes to life and begins eating everything put before it -- this embodiment of the unchecked appetite is another of Mr. Svankmajer's spankings of the self-absorbed middle class. Folkloric ramifications emerge when Alzbetka -- when not fending off the shaky hands of the building's aged resident child molester -- finds the story of Otik in a book of fairy tales; it's also about a tree stump given life by a needy couple and that chomps everything and everyone. ''This is only the beginning,'' Alzbetka notes after a postman disappears.

''Little Otik'' is a constant assault on the commodification of everything, including babies. The movie is awash in an audio stream of commercials, always selling something new to be ingested; Otik is the worst-case-scenario version of the media-created consumer.

The crowded, messy homes and the glazed concoctions that pass for the food that the ''Otik'' cast cram into their mouths are all rooted in the director's contempt for his creations. He refuses to sentimentalize baby love, which is an easy target. An exception is Otik: this ungainly bundle of branches and knots manages to soften the director.

''I've been waiting for you for so long,'' Bozena coos to the gurgling hunk of wood, as she trims its appendages with a hedge clipper and rants at Karel for neglecting to varnish their son. The hysteria-bred tenderness gives the movie a chance to take a breath and show some understanding of its characters before Little Otik swallows them whole.

ELVIS MITCHELL NYT

Decaying flesh and strewn entrails don't usually equal funny. But "Shaun of the Dead," a remarkably fresh and inventive British import, transforms the unintentional camp of the zombie subgenre into full-on, hilarious comedy. "Shaun,'' already a huge hit in England, rounds things off nicely with romance, buddy hi-jinks and a coming-of-age story.
That the coming-of-age story involves a 29-year-old is half the fun. Simon Pegg, an appealing everyman with crack comic timing, plays Shaun, an underachieving electronics salesman whose longtime girlfriend (Kate Ashfield) is still waiting to meet his parents. Part of Shaun wants to grow up, but the other part is addicted to video games and getting wasted with his best pal and roommate Ed, played by a sublimely Neanderthal Nick Frost.

It takes an attack of the walking dead to jostle Shaun out of his stupor. And that's only after he ignores the presence of zombies for as long as possible. Director Edgar Wright and his co-writer Pegg, collaborators on a hit British sitcom about slackers, play on the myopia of arrested adolescents determined to avoid reality, and by extension, responsibility. Shaun switches the telly from zombie reports to soccer matches, and fails to notice people dropping dead on the street or sporting complexions of alarming pallor, even for England.

Pegg's use of zoom-ins and quick cuts keep things humming, but his most felicitous visual touches are those hinting at what's just out of the frame. Severely hung over, Shaun goes to the corner store for a soda, failing to notice the bloody handprints on the glass case. He slips but quickly recovers. The camera is trained on Pegg's deadpan mug the whole time, and neither the character nor the audience sees the blood on the floor. Shaun and Ed, urged by newscasters to stay indoors, believe they are safe on the couch. Then the camera pans to the front door, habitually left unlocked by these wankers.

Ed, a part-time pot dealer and full-time sloth, is redeemed by his obvious love for Shaun, his lifeline to the real world. Shaun fails to heed the advice of others to drop his pal. When an acquaintance calls Ed "a f -- idiot,'' Shaun responds with "What's that supposed to mean?" Frost and Pegg are so convincing as partners in immaturity that they transform a flatulence gag into a sweet moment. Ed delights in his enduring ability to amuse his friend, and Shaun laughs despite himself.

But the zombies in the boys' backyard demand attention. Following instructions from newscasters to try to cut off the monsters' heads, the boys Frisbee old LPs at the undead. Cricket mallets and shovels prove more effective weapons. Shaun and Ed, now inside their own video game, head off to save Shaun's girlfriend and his mum.

"Shaun'' offers enough gore to satisfy zombie-movie fiends without being overly gruesome. Pegg picks his moments, lulling the audience into thinking the movie is pure comedy, then spilling blood and guts. There's genuine poignancy as well, especially in a scene between Shaun and his hated stepfather, played by Bill Nighy (the aging rock singer from "Love Actually''). Nighy lends authority to the role, despite looking green around the gills much of the time.

As Shaun's beloved mum, Penelope Wilton brings new meaning to denial. Ashfield, as the long-suffering girlfriend, shows the frustration and affection inherent to a love affair with a manchild. The ensemble cast shines in setups exploiting the silliness of the zombie concept. The movie's flesh- craving maniacs turn out to be easily distracted from their mindless, arms- forward march.

-- Advisory: This film contains violence, gore, profanity.

Carla Meyer

“ PRENOTIONS IN RED, WHITE, AND BLUES “
16 MM & SUPER 8 MM / LIVE SOUND ::: Fern Silva / Doron Sadja
The geo-political rise and fall of a future American hero, a vague visionary representation of the assassination of our new president. Conceptually influenced by the 8mm Zapruder film of the assassination of JFK, which made waves around the world, the importance of motion picture.  Sound will play a part in this by creating overwhelming psychological collages through feedback, mutated instruments, extreme frequencies, dense splashes of light, color, texture, & action.
 
“ARCHITECTURE OF THE SUN”
16 MM / LIVE SOUND ::: Brittany Gravely & Jennifer Pipp /
Ken Linehan, Rick Prior, & Sean Andrews
A common affinity for scientific-nostalgic-hallucinatory-mystical-types of sounds, feelings, & imagery leads the way for this group. A collage of electronic-analog sounds respond to sequential images while projections are modified by hand with filters, focus & prisms in response to psychedelic sound.  Depending on strategy, but mostly telepathy & synchronicity, the performance unfolds … strange at times, capricious, and surprising to both performers and the audience.
 
“BLUSH”
SUPER 8 MM / LIVE SOUND ::: Sam Dishy / Lily Pickett
A series of moments captured in a way only Super 8 knows how to do.  This film is a simple and pure expression of cinema. A reminder to the audience of the short glances, daydreams, and emotions which carry us through life.  The piece will be accompanied by guitar and violin.
 
“MEKANIKDOLLS”
16 MM & SUPER 8 MM / LIVE SOUND & PERFORMANCE
Seyhan Muaoglu & Jess Ramsay
Abandon all conventions associated with performance as the boundaries between audience & artist are blurred in a roomful of film projections, sounds, contemporary dance & audience participation.  Projectors, an array of analog devices, digital instruments, & live sampling of sounds help marry technology with obsolete media.  Driven by fascination and obsession of all mediums, the visual language is expanded upon expressing the beauty of film, cinema as experience.

MONO NO AWARE

A beautiful film, a perfect comedy, and a gentle triumph of silliness over pomposity, self-importance, and intolerance - "Life of Brian" could be the best British comedy ever.

In Judea, a mother tends her newborn child. Lo, from the east three wise men appear to pay tribute to the infant - but they want the stable next door: this is Brian Cohen not Jesus Christ! Rolling forward 33 years, Brian joins the People's Front of Judea, a wannabe terrorist cell out to undermine the occupying Romans. Brian gets roped into their plot to kidnap Pontius Pilate's wife but they run into another terrorist gang on the same mission and everyone is captured while squabbling among themselves.

From the opening scene and the belting Shirley Bassey-esque score, this is Python par excellence. This is the "Catch 22" of cinema, and in its politics, like Joseph Heller, the Python crew refuse to spare anyone. Always threading in and around biblical stories, the plot never contradicts or denies the Bible, it just pokes fun at the hangers-on, charlatans, and pompous officials that organised religion often attracts. This playful subversion is hilariously shown in the scene where Brian escapes from the Romans by posing as a preacher. At first he is mocked by a crowd of jaded messiah seekers, then they seize on a bizarre interpretation of his words and proclaim him their Messiah. Brian denies it, only to be told "I say you are Lord, and I should know. I've followed a few."