To-do: Week starting 29/4: Iron Man 2, Blind Company, Black Orpheus, Night of the Hunter, Demy
Click the links for trailers. The rest of the week and venue information after the jump.
THURSDAY 29th
Iron Man 2, the superhero popcorn flick from Jon Favreau starring Robert Downey Jr., opens.
Blind Company, a drama about family disfunction or something from Australian auteur Alkinos Tsilimidos, opens. Prominently features dreary weather and violence.
Amos Oz, a documentary on the Israeli writer, opens.
The Concert, a comedy about Andrei Filipov, the once celebrated conductor of the Bolshoi Orchestra, since relegated to janitorial duties after refusing to fire his Jewish players during the communist era, opens.
44 Inch Chest, from the writers of Sexy Beast, opens. The film concerns a man shattered by his wife’s infidelity and his friends who are more than eager to assist him in revenge. Stars Ray Winstone, Ian McShane and Tom Wilkinson.
D.E.B.S., the lesbian schoolgirl spy film (!), is showing in the Queerspace of Melbourne Uni’s Union House. Get there at 4.30 for a 5pm start.
FRIDAY 30th
The American Astronaut, a 2001 sci-fi musical western of Ed Wood-ian proportions from Cory McAbee, opens.
SATURDAY 1st
Black Orpheus, the 1959 Palme D’or-winning film is a Brazilian retelling of the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice by Marcel Camus with an influential bossa nova soundtrack. Showing at ACMI as part of its Jazz on Film programme.
SUNDAY 2nd
Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense is a document of the current state of Jazz featuring such musicians as Herbie Hancock, Terence Blanchard, Bill Frisell and Ravi Coltrane. Showing at ACMI.
A slapstick double-feature matinee at the Astor with Buster Keaton’s The General (1927) and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936).
In the evening the Astor screens The Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton’s endlessly referenced film from 1955 (Serge Daney, in a memorably turn of phrase, once called it “The most beautiful American film in the world”) about two children chased down by a psychotic religious fanatic played iconically by Robert Mitchum, and Robert Aldrich’s classic Kiss Me Deadly (1955), about which François Truffaut remarked that “it is not unusual to encounter a new idea with each shot.”
MONDAY 3rd
The Abyss, James Cameron’s 1989 follow-up to Aliens, screens at Astor.
TUESDAY 4th
Tuesday sux.
WEDNESDAY 5th
Cinematheque continues its Jacques Demy retrospective with 1961’s Lola, Demy’s debut film, and Jacquot de Nantes, Agnes Varda’s tribute to her husband Demy based on his recollections of childhood. Screening at ACMI.
A preview screening of I Love You Too, a “comedy” written by and starring Peter Helliar, at Nova. Helliar will appear after the screening for a Q&A. The film is about a committment-phobe (Brendan Cowell) winning the girl of his dreams with the help of Peter Helliar and a dwarf (Peter Dinklage).
