Screen Machine

To-do: Week starting Thursday 3rd March: Mizoguchi, Le quattro volte, screwball comedies, Uncle Boonmee, CineCult303, Jarmusch, Antichrist, Fellini

Week starting Thursday 3rd March:

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.

The Water Magician is Japanese master filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi’s silent film about a female magician who promises to support a young male student and the dramatic events that follow when her career begins to fail. Ichiro Kataoka will accompany the film with live music and narration as was the style in early Japanese cinema. At ACMI, March 5.

Le quattro volte is a film from Italian director Michelangelo Frammartino that explores the philosophical idea of transmigration - the passing of the soul from human, animal, plant and finally mineral. Perhaps a good accompaniment with Uncle Boonmee. At ACMI, March 6-15.

Melbourne Cinematheque presents the second week of its season of classic screwball comedies. This week’s double bill is Preston Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek starring Betty Hutton as a dizzy blonde who falls pregnant after a tryst with a soldier she can only recall as “Ratsky-Watsky”; and Mitchell Leisen’s Midnight, a Bill Wilder/Charles Brackett-scripted film about an out-of-work American showgirl who enters by chance into Parisian high society. At ACMI, March 9.

CineCult303 present Hands of Steel, a 1986 action film about a half cyborg assassin sent to assassinate the popular but subversive blind ecologist/political leader Reverend Arthur Mosley but whose humanity causes him to switch sides. At Bar 303 in Northcote, March 8.

The tail-end of Jim Jarmusch Week can be caught at Rooftop Cinema. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Jarmusch’s hip-hop-inflected take on Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai, screens March 3. Night on Earth, featuring a series of vignettes set in taxicabs, screens March 5.

Lars Von Trier’s shocking supernatural horror film Antichrist (starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) screens at the Astor on Sunday afternoon, March 6. In the evening is a Federico Fellini double bill: La Strada – about a poor girl sold to a circus strongman – and Roma – a semi-autobiographical, poetic film depicting Fellini’s move from his native Rimini to Rome as a youth.

Finally, new films opening this week:

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is a thriller based on the novel by Stieg Larsson, a sequel to The Girl Who Played With Fire.

Wasted on the Young is some Eurotrash direct-to-video thriller where the actors all inexplicably have Australian accents.

Wagner and Me is a film about how much Stephen Fry’s jowls jiggle when he chortles and says something witty about culture.

Hall Pass is a movie about a bunch of American comedians who are given a “hall pass” to make a commercially risky film with full artistic freedom but decide to make a movie about man-children looking to get some ass.

The Adjustment Bureau is a film starring Matt Damon as some guy.

Night On Earth