October Film Club: 13th Annual Crete Library Horror Fest

 Well well well, here we are again at my favorite time of year: HALLOWEEN! There's a chill in the air, the leaves are falling, the days are getting shorter, and spooky things abound. Well, that last one might not be a natural thing, but you know what I mean. 

Of course, if it's Halloween then it must also be: THE 13TH ANNUAL CRETE LIBRARY HORROR FEST! My favorite program. So, without further ado, our theme for 2024 is: "POSSESSED!" We will be watching 4 films featuring possession of some sort, but not your typical, "exorcist" style possession films. I've selected 4 films from America, Australia, Iran and Argentina that showcase possession in some way or another.

The Taking of Deborah Logan (2014)- America

Talk to Me (2023)- Australia

Under the Shadow (2016)- Iran

Terrified (2017)-Argentina

(click the titles for trailers)

We will be meeting Wed. Oct. 23 and Thurs. Oct 24 at 4 and 6 each day. Hope to see you there!

September Film Club

 Hello everyone! I can't believe the summer is basically over and we're already in September, the time is just flying by! Thank you to everyone who braved the Weird and Wonderful this summer, we watched a lot of strange films by a lot of strange directors and had some good, and only a little strange, discussions. For the month of Sept. we will briefly return to the world of normal films (well, kind of). We will be watching the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man.

A Serious Man is a 2009 black comedy-drama film written, produced, edited and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. Set in 1967, the films stars Michael Stuhlbarg as a Minnesotan Jewish man whose life crumbles both professionally and personally, leading him to questions about his faith.

A Serious Man received widespread positive critical response and was nominated for Best Picture. It currently holds a fresh rating of 89% on Rotten Tomatoes and Roger Ebert awarded it 4/4 stars saying this in his review, "Beginning with a darkly comic prologue in Yiddish, "A Serious Man" inhabits a Jewish community where the rational (physics) is rendered irrelevant by the mystical (fate). Much of the success of "A Serious Man" comes from the way Michael Stuhlbarg plays the role. He doesn't play Gopnik as a sad-sack or a loser, a whiner or a depressive, but as a hopeful man who can't believe what's happening to him. What else can go wrong? Where can he find happiness? Who can he please? Have I mentioned "A Serious Man" is so rich and funny? This isn't a laugh-laugh movie, but a wince-wince movie. Those can be funny, too."

We will be meeting Thursday, Sept. 26 at 5:30pm

Here's a trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDKHWRbK2_Q

Hope to see you there!

August Film Club #2

 Our 6th and final film in our Summer Series comes to us from the inimitable Andrei Tarkovsky, the great Soviet director whose films were suppressed for years. We will be watching Mirror.

Mirror is a 1975 Soviet drama film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. It is loosely autobiographical, unconventionally structured, and incorporates poems composed and read by the director's father, Arseny Tarkovsky. The film features Margarita Terekhova, Ignat Daniltsev, Alla Demidova, Anatoly Solonitsyn, Tarkovsky's wife Larisa Tarkovskaya and his mother Maria Vishnyakova. Mirror is structured in a form of a nonlinear narrative. It unfolds around memories recalled by a dying poet of key moments in his life and in Soviet culture. The film combines contemporary scenes with childhood memories, dreams, and newsreel footage. Its cinematography slips between color, black and white, and sepia. The film's loose flow of oneiric images has been compared with the stream of consciousness technique associated with modernist literature.

Mirror initially polarized critics and audiences, with many finding its narrative incomprehensible. Since its release, it has been reappraised as one of the greatest films of all time, as well as Tarkovsky's magnum opus.

We will be meeting Thursday, August 29th at 5:30 pm.

Here's a trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2U9TXmYJ94&ab_channel=FilmatLincolnCenter

Hope to see you there!

August Film Club #1

 Our fifth film in our Summer Series comes to us from one of my favorite directors, Werner Herzog. We will be watching his second feature film made in 1970, Even Dwarfs Started Small.

Even Dwarfs Started Small (German: Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen) is a 1970 West German absurdist comedy-drama film written, produced, and directed by Werner Herzog. Dwarfs confined in an institution on a remote island rebel against the guards and director, also dwarfs, in a display of mayhem.

Alex Peterson of Spectrum Culture wrote this in his review, "Herzog has never been shy about speaking in depth about his films—a happy fact of film history provided by one of its key artists—but with this one he doesn’t have much to explain: Even Dwarfs Started Small is about a young filmmaker with a killer eye and access to a haunting location and incredible subjects, stringing a story together on the sheer strength of his creativity and willpower. See it to find out where the mind behind the films Fitzcarraldo and Stroszek came from. Werner Herzog’s second feature film is a small, strange, black-and-white movie shot in 1969 and yet it’s still a movie that matters, because Herzog’s career is still going strong. He hasn’t gone the way of other aging greats who piddled out irrelevant films late in life after making era-defining work in their heyday. No, Herzog is another Godard, just as influential in film history, a legend who cannot be stopped at any age because he lives and bleeds film."

We will be meeting Thursday, August 23rd at 5:30

Here's a trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58NK-rez8Bs&ab_channel=CathodeRayTerrors

Hope to see you there!

July Film Club #2

 Our fourth film in our Summer Series comes to us from Monty Python alum, Terry Gilliam. (Film Club veterans may remember that we watched Gilliam's brilliant Brazil 11 years ago! Time flies when you're watching good movies!) We will be watching The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a 1988 adventure fantasy film, cowritten and directed by Terry Gilliam, starring John Neville, Sarah Polley, Eric Idle, Jonathan Pryce, Oliver Reed, Robin Williams, and Uma Thurman. The film is based on the tall tales of the 18th-century German nobleman, Baron Munchausen, and his wartime exploits against the Ottoman Empire. It underperformed at the box office, but received favorable reviews from critics and was nominated for 4 Academy Awards: Best Art Direction, Costume Design, Visual Effects, and Makeup. It currently holds a 91% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and Roger Ebert gave it 3/4 stars saying this in his review, "There really was a Baron Munchausen, and he lived from 1720-1797. He was, it is said, in the habit of embellishing his war stories, and in 1785 a jewel thief from Hanover named Rudolf Erich Raspe published a book in England which claimed to be based on the baron's life and times. The real von Munchausen apparently did not complain about this book that made free with his reputation, even though it included such tall stories as the time the baron tethered his horse to a "small twig" in a snowstorm, and discovered when the snow melted that the twig was actually a church steeple. Terry Gilliam's film is, in itself, a tribute to the spirit of the good baron. The special effects are astonishing, but so is the humor with which they are employed. The wit and the spectacle of Baron Munchausen are considerable achievements. Gilliam says it's the third part of a trilogy, his first film, "Time Bandits" was about childhood, his second, "Brazil" was about adulthood. "Baron Munchausen" is about old age. He may be telling us the truth. He may also be telling us he tethered his film to a twig in a snowstorm."

We will be meeting Thursday, July 25th at 5:30 pm

Here's a trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1M-vhN8lsg&ab_channel=TrailerChan

Hope to see you there!

July Film Club #1

 Hey! It's already July! Hope you're enjoying the warm weather. Our third film in our Summer Series is Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowksy's El Topo.

El Topo (Spanish "The Mole") is a 1970 Mexican acid western film written, scored, directed by and starring Alejandro Jodorowsky. Characterized by its bizarre characters and occurrences, used of maimed and dwarf performers, and heavy doses of Judeo-Christian symbolism and Eastern philosophy, the film is about El Topo-a violent, black-clad gunfighter played by Jodorowsky-and his quest for enlightenment. The film is widely considered the igniting film of the midnight movie movement, and for decades, El Topo could only be seen at midnight screenings in art houses and via partially censored Japanese laserdiscs and bootleg videos. 

The film currently holds an 80% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and Roger Ebert gave it 4/4 stars, later adding it to his list of Great Movies, saying this in his review, "Jodorowsky lifts his symbols and mythologies from everywhere: Christianity, Zen, discount-store black magic, you name it. He makes not the slightest attempt to use them so they sort out into a single logical significance. Instead, they're employed in a shifting, prismatic way, casting their light on each other instead of on the films conclusion. El Topo's quest supply most of the films generous supply of killings, tortures, disembowelments, hangings, boilings, genocides, and so on. El Topo's violence is extreme and yet somehow it doesn't come over as an exploitation film. Maybe that's because Jodorowsky dazzles us with such delicate mythological footwork that the violence becomes distanced, and we accept it like the slaughters in the Old Testament. I'm not sure. El Topo is a movie it's very hard to be sure about after a single viewing. It weaves a web around you, and you're left with two impulses. One is to accept it on its own terms, as a complex fantasy that uses violence as the most convenient shorthand for human power relationships. The other is to reject it as the work of a cynic, who is simply supplying more jolts and shocks per minute than most filmmakers. The first impulse seems sounder to me, because if Jodorowsky were simply in the blood-and-guts sweepstakes he could have made a much simpler, less ambitious movie that would have had the violence of  El Topo but not its uncanny resonance."

We will be meeting Thursday, July 18th at 5:30 pm

Here's a trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjTlNTbv-xs&ab_channel=ABKCORecords%26Films

Hope to see you there!

June Film Club #2

Our second film in our Summer Series comes to us from Winnipeg, MB, Canada, director Guy Maddin's weird and wonderful The Saddest Music in the World.

The Saddest Music in the World is a 2003 Canadian film directed by Guy Maddin. Maddin and co-screenwriter George Toles based the film on an original screenplay written by British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, from which they kept "the title, the premise and the contest-to determine which country's music was the saddest" but otherwise re-wrote. Like most of Maddin's films, The Saddest Music in the World is filmed in a style that imitates late 1920's and early 1930's cinema, with grainy black and white photography, slightly out of sync sound and expressionist art design. A few scenes are filmed in color, in a manner that imitates early two-strip Technicolor. The film was well received by critics. It currently holds a fresh rating of 79% on Rotten Tomatoes and Roger Ebert gave the film 3.5/4 stars saying this in his review, "So many movies travel the same weary roads. So few imagine entirely original worlds. Guy Maddin's "The Saddest Music in the World" exists in a time and place we have never seen before, although it claims to be set in Winnipeg in 1933. You have never seen a film like this before, unless you have seen other films by Guy Maddin. The more films you have seen, the more you may love "The Saddest Music in the World". It plays like satirical nostalgia for a past that never existed. The actors bring that kind of earnestness to it that seems peculiar to supercharged melodrama. You can never catch them grinning, although great is the joy of Lady Port-Huntly when she poses with her sexy new beer-filled glass legs. Nor can you catch Maddin condescending to his characters; he takes them as seriously as he possibly can, considering that they occupy a mad, strange, gloomy, absurd comedy. To see this film, to enter the world of Guy Maddin, is to understand how a film can be created entirely by its style, and how its style can create a world that never existed before, and lure us, at first bemused and then astonished, into it."

We will be meeting Thursday, June 27 at 5:30 pm

Here's a trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyAlgfHgrk0&t=17s&ab_channel=RottenTomatoesClassicTrailers

Hope to see you there!