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!