To-do: Week starting Thursday 24th February: The Way Back, Conviction, The Red Chapel, screwball comedy classics, Jarmusch, Boonmee, Linda Lin Dai
Week starting Thursday 24rd February
Opening Thursday:
The Way Back, Peter Weir’s follow-up to 2003’s Master and Commander, chronicles the escape of a group of prisoners from a Siberian gulag in 1940, and their epic journey to freedom. Stars Ed Harris and Colin Farrell. According to Ebert Presents At The Movies‘ Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Colin Farrell’s Russian pronunciation of the word for “sweater” is hilarious.
Conviction is about a working class woman, played by – who else? – Hilary Swank, who goes through 18 years of education including law school to exonerate her brother (Sam Rockwell) she believes wrongly accused of murder. AO Scott of The New York Times called it an “airless, by-the-numbers story”.
In other news:
Speakeasy Cinema begins a one-week season of The Red Chapel, the results of filmmaker Mads Brügger taking two Danish-Korean comedians on a tour of North Korea in an attempt to expose the tyrannical regime for what it is. They enter the country under the pretext of being a small Danish theatre group named The Red Chapel, but unbeknownst to the North Koreans, cultural exchange is not really what they have in mind. At Long Play in Fitzroy North, February 25-March 4.
Melbourne Cinematheque begins a three week season of screwball comedy classics. This week’s double-bill is 1937’s Oscar-winning The Awful Truth, directed by Leo McCarey and starring Irene Dunne & Cary Grant as a bickering couple who divorce and then go out of their way to sabotage each other’s future romantic prospects; and Ball of Fire (1941), the Howard Hawks-directed retelling of Snow White in which the dreamy existence of a cohort of gently mouldering academics is shattered by the arrival of a brazen burlesque performer, “Sugarpuss” O’Shea, whose saucy vocabulary excites rapt amazement in the professors as they have just reached “slang” in the encyclopedia they are compiling. At ACMI, March 2.
On Tuesday, Rooftop Cinema begins its Jim Jarmusch tribute week. Mystery Train is Tuesday and Down By Law is Wednesday. Season runs March 1-5.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s masterful Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is a cinematic poem concerning a man who in his last days finds himself surrounded by his loved ones including his dead wife and his lost son who has taken the form of a ghost monkey. The film was listed in our round up of 2010 at number 3. At ACMI until March 14.
ACMI is screening a season of films focusing on Linda Lin Dai, the queen of ’50s and ’60s Hong Kong cinema, working as a star actress in the Shaw Brothers Studio stable. Season runs February 17-28.
Some well-worn double-bills at the Astor worth checking out if you haven’t seen them already (though it would be nice to get some other classics in the mix every now and again): the Italian classics The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Vittorio de Sica, 1971) and The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1971) screen February 27 and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) screen on February 28.
Also opening this week:
I Am Number 4, a movie about aliens disguised as teenagers who have escaped from their planet before it was destroyed by – I dunno – Dick Cheney?; and Season of the Witch, an abominably regressive-sounding fantasy movie set during the times of the Crusades in which a group of men set out to destroy evil, embodied by a sexually confident woman.
