Calendar
Chop Shop
Sponsored by KCBS 91.3 FM
Apr 18 - Apr 24, 2008
Ramin Bahrani, USA, 2007, 35mm, 85 min
Ramin Bahrani, following up his auspicious debut MAN PUSH CART, sets his story of a 12-year-old Latino boy and his older sister in Willet's Point, Queens, a 20-block stretch of junkyards and chop shops (where stolen cars are dismantled for parts). Perhaps it is because Bahrani and co-author Bahareh Azimi are both foreign born that they are able to accurately render an outsider's experience with palpable compassion and realism. With no sentimentality, CHOP SHOP suggests that, for many, New York City is closer to a third world country than the glittering jewel in the "land of opportunity's" crown.
"Miraculous! Now we have an American film with the raw power of CITY OF GOD or PIXOTE, a film that does something unexpected, and inspired, and brave." -Roger Ebert
The Short Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Program 2
Apr 22 - Apr 23, 2008
(Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 1994-2007, various formats, 81min.)
THE ANTHEM (2006, 35mm, 5 min)
Apichatpong adapts the tradition in Thailand of playing a Royal Anthem before all films, proposing his own “Cinema Anthem” that praises and blesses each film screening.
0116643225059 (1994, BETA-SP, 5 min)
Alternating images of a mother˙s photo and an apartment interior are linked by a conversation, connecting memory and everyday-life space.
GHOST OF ASIA (2005, BETA-SP, 9 min)
A collaboration between Apichatpong and Christelle Lheureux, this film uses the recent Tsunami in Asia as a starting point to celebrate the spirits of humans lost at sea.
MY MOTHER’S GARDEN (2007, BETA-SP, 7 min)
An impression of a jewelry collection by Victoire de Castellane that was inspired by various types of dangerous flowers and carnivorous plants.
WORLDLY DESIRES (2005, BETA-SP, 40 min)
Both a fragmented study of the filmmaking process and a landscape film drawn from Apichatpong’s memories of shooting his acclaimed feature film Tropical Malady.
LUMINOUS PEOPLE (2006, 35mm, 15 min)
Commemorating the presence of the dead and memories of the living, this film shows a group traveling by boat along the Mekong River and incorporates conversations and stories.
The Detective
Apr 24, 2008
1968, 35mm
Frank Sinatra stars as an honest but conflicted cop, tough on crime but struggling with a law enforcement establishment where racism and homophobia are the norm. While investigating the murder of a wealthy and well-connected gay man, the mystery takes a turn with surprising results.
Divorce- Italian Style
Apr 25 - May 01, 2008
Pietro Germi, Italy, 1961, 35mm, 104 min)
Germi's most famous and successful film, DIVORCE – ITALIAN STYLE became the first foreign-language film to win an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay (it was also nominated for Best Actor and Best Director). Mastroianni gives one of his most brilliant performances as a smug and scheming Sicilian aristocrat who has to dispose of his unpleasant wife in order marry another. Divorce is frowned upon by Italian courts, but crimes of passion are winked at, so if the inconvenient missus could be maneuvered into taking a lover… Longtime Germi admirer Martin Scorsese called this beautifully photographed black comedy "one of the greatest films about Sicily...a film that truly haunts me."
"One of the most perfect comedies ever filmed!" –A. O. Scott, NY TIMES
Seduced and Abandoned
Apr 25 - May 01, 2008
Pietro Germi, Italy, 1963, 35mm, 117 min
Many critics consider this follow-up to DIVORCE--ITALIAN STYLE to be even better--blacker, funnier, and more sharply satirical in its skewering of macho attitudes. The story starts with fifteen-year-old Agnese and her family problems. The comic spotlight shifts to the girl’s furious father (a role for which portly Saro Urzì won the Best Actor award at Cannes), who resorts to a series of ever more desperate schemes in an attempt to restore family honor. Seeing the film again ten years after its release, Roger Ebert wrote, “At the time, I thought it was hilarious. . . my reaction the second time around is more complicated. SEDUCED AND ABANDONED has a lot of laughs in it, all right, but it’s not so much hilarious as painfully funny.”
"A lusty, vital satire of Sicilian mores—and a glory of Italian movie comedy! The movie is a masterpiece of mock verismo; everything accelerates into high-octane opera buffa. Pietro Germi directs with such deftness that he gets mileage from small laughs and can afford to tread lightly on big ones." -THE NEW YORKER
You Asked for it!
Apr 26, 2008
The Spring Gala
At breathtaking China Harbor, 2040 Westlake Avenue N.
Here’s How it Works
You tell us your desires and curiosities:
What would Ira Glass sound like on my answering machine?
What is it like to sit in front row seats at a Mariners game?
How do I get a kiss from Tom Waits?
Can you get me a private house party with my favorite musician?
Only you know what you really want.
Our panel of experts will comb the earth seeking what you covet.
ASK FOR IT and on April 26 BID ON IT.
GET IT? GOT IT? GOOD!
www.nwfilmforum.org/gala
THE GALA IS SOLD OUT!
Breathless
Apr 29 - Apr 30, 2008
(Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1960, 35mm, 90 min)
Jean-Luc Godard's first feature still breaks the rules nearly fifty years on. Twenty-six year-old Jean-Paul Belmondo plays the lip-stroking pug on the run, shooting cops and stealing cars - as well as cash from girlfriend Jean Seberg. With the typically French undertone of femmes vs. hommes, the couple engages in boudoir philosophy, staring contests, and plenty of le smoking. Belmondo's performance as the hood marks the real beginning of an extraordinary career of the biggest French star since Jean Gabin.
La Dolce Vita
Apr 29 - Apr 30, 2008
(Federico Fellini, Italy, 1960, 35mm, 174 min)
This film suits the freewheeling early 1960’s with its alternately funny, feral, sweet and seductive meditation on what is truly meaningful (if anything). Marcello Mastroianni was catapulted into superstar status as the sensitive tabloid reporter juggling the affections of several women (including voluptuous movie star Anita Ekberg, icy mistress Anouk Aimee and neurotic girlfriend Magali Noel) while making the rounds of the spirit-destroying nightlife of the Via Veneto. Mastroianni’s scene with Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain at dawn remains one of the most timeless, memorable images ever to emerge from world cinema.
The Films of Stephanie Barber
Sponsored by Thrid Eye Cinema
May 01, 2008
Prolific Baltimore-based filmmaker and artist Stephanie Barber has been featured in solo shows at the New York Film Festival's Views From the Avant-Garde and the Museum of Modern Art's Cineprobe series. She has established herself over the past decade as an extraordinary filmmaker, winning awards and acclaim at festivals and venues all over the world. For this program, Barber brings together a diverse selection of her work including FLOWER, THE BOY, THE LIBRARIAN, DOGS, METRONOME, TOTAL POWER DEAD DEAD DEAD; SHIPFILM; LETTERS NOTES; and CATALOG. Barber will discuss her films throughout the presentation of this short work.
Love Songs
May 02 - May 08, 2008
Christophe Honoré, France, 2007, 35mm, 100 min
A musical that transcends expectations of relationships, love, and sexuality, LOVE SONGS comes from one of French cinema’s most interesting new talents, Christophe Honoré. Riffing on Jacques Demy’s UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG, Honoré has created a charmingly scruffy musical about love and loss in contemporary France. In a 'Chanson' style reminiscent of George Brassens and Serge Gainsbourg, this is a poetic and touching film about being in and out of love, set against the bewitching backdrop of present-day Paris.
"A joy...Profound and affecting...(a) tribute to the playfulness of the French New Wave." -Sean Axmaker, SEATTLE P-I
"Not since I was a boy watching Cyd Charisse in SINGIN' IN THE RAIN has a musical made me feel so happy." -SIGHT & SOUND MAGAZINE
"Christophe Honore’s films aren't just films you like. You develop weird little crushes on them." -FILM COMMENT
Dick Tracy
Sponsored by Fantagraphics and Cupcake Royale
May 03 - May 04, 2008
Warren Beatty, USA, 1990, 35mm, 105 min
Mob bosses, machine gun fights and Madonna - could this really be family entertainment? Absolutely! Warren Beatty's surprisingly bloodless take on Chester Gould's comic strip crime-stopper will be a relief to parents who’ve shied from taking their kids to darker cartoon adaptations. Upon its release, critics cheered the film's stylish production, and audiences of all ages delighted in film’s cheerful good vs. evil smackdown. Beatty turns in an appropriately square-jawed performance as the heroic gumshoe, with Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman playing the grotesquely visaged villains to the hilt and none other than Madonna playing the sultry Breathless Mahoney. Stephen Sondheim wrote several exuberant songs for the film, including a stellar slower number sung by Mandy Patinkin as the luckless Club Ritz piano player.
NOTE: This PG-rated film contains violence (though no gore) and some sexually suggestive costumes and scenes courtesy of Madonna (which stop well short of anything explicit). Recommended for ages 8 and up.
Le Doulos
May 06 - May 07, 2008
(Jean-Pierre Melville, France, 1963, 35mm, 108 min)
Jean-Paul Belmondo, still somewhat BREATHLESS, plays Silien, a petty thief who may or may not be a doulos (stool pigeon). Indeed, Belmondo didn't know whether or not he was playing an informer until he saw the final cut of the film. The impossibly cool LE DOULOS, all turned up trench coats and brotherly betrayal, is a pure expression of Melville's style and ethos. It is also his richest tribute to American cinema.
"The second Jean-Paul Belmondo's Easter Island mug fills the screen; there's no doubt who owns LE DOULOS." -TIME OUT NEW YORK
8 1/2
May 06 - May 07, 2008
(Federico Fellini, Italy, 1963, 35mm, 135 min)
Mastroianni steals the show as Guido Anselmi, a film director experiencing a heavy dose of director’s block on his latest project. His performance here is flawless as he deals with the obstacles and crushing defeats of his life with a cock-eyed optimism. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1963, Federico Fellini's 8 1⁄2 is a dazzling mix of past and present, fantasy and reality containing all the stylistic elements and thematic obsessions that have characterized Fellini's films throughout his distinguished career.
Roots and Branches: American Music on Screen
Sponsored by KBCS 91.3 FM and Easy Street Records
May 08, 2008
NARRATED BY TOM SAUBER, MARK GRAHAM AND ORVILLE JOHNSON, FOLLOWED BY LIVE SET OF MUSIC BY THE KINGS OF MONGREL FOLK
This musical trip back in time features motion picture and newsreel footage from the 1920s and 30s of country, blues and jazz performers. Clips range from the iconic Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills and early jazz masters Ted Weems and Frank Westphal, to anonymous jugs bands, fiddlers and field hands. The footage captures musicians at work in a vanished America – at barn dances, street corners, fiddler conventions and in the fields. Tom Sauber, Mark Graham and Orville Johnson will share their encyclopedic knowledge of Americana and old-time music as they narrate these rarely seen film clips. The trio will also perform a set of their own music, inspired and informed by blues, bluegrass and American roots music.
Shotgun Stories
May 09 - May 15, 2008
Jeff Nichols, USA, 2007, 35mm, 90 min
The backdrop of Jeff Nichols' first feature is small-town Arkansas, but the scale is grand tragedy. This tale of bloody ties and vengeance combines the breadth and texture of a Cormac McCarthy novel with the lyrical naturalism of a David Gordon Green film (who co-produced it and mentored Nichols). While SHOTGUN STORIES relishes its influences, it also carves a singular space for itself as a chronicle of rural and familial decay. As Eddie Cockrell noted in VARIETY, this is "a point-blank buckshot blast of inarticulate American rage." Winner of the New American Cinema Grand Jury Prize at the Seattle International Film Festival.
www.shotgunstories.com
New Year Baby
Sponsored by KBCS 91.3 FM and Amnesty International
May 10, 2008
Socheata Poeuv, Cambodia/USA, 2006, DVD
Although born in a Thai refugee camp on Cambodian New Year, filmmaker Socheata Poeuv grew up in the United States never knowing that her family had survived the Khmer Rouge genocide. In NEW YEAR BABY, she embarks on a journey to Cambodia in search of the truth and why her family's history had been buried in secrecy for so long.
Pierrot Le Fou
May 13 - May 14, 2008
(Jean-Luc Godard, France/Italy, 1965/69, 35mm, 110 min)
Belmondo (who elevates onscreen smoking to an art form) plays a bored bourgeois who gives up his button-down life and goes on the lam with his mistress, Anna Karina (the pin-up girl for existential angst). Godard’s cinema explodes off the screen as his ideas come at a furious pace while Belmondo and Karina play out the death of romance in lurid widescreen Technicolor. A titillating blend of fiction, poetry, discussions and digressions, PIERROT is a vivid celebration (and simultaneous condemnation) of the joys of cinema. Belmondo was nominated for a BAFTA for his performance.
"Belmondo moves with the athletic grace of the boxer he had been, yet plays a complex, reflective intellectual with the ease and poignancy he brought to his Bogart-idolizing petty thief in Godard's BREATHLESS." -LA TIMES
Leo the Last
May 13 - May 14, 2008
(John Boorman, UK, 1969, 35mm, 103 min)
John Boorman's shamefully neglected dramatic comedy chronicles impoverished Italian nobleman Marcello Mastroianni's alternately whimsical and wistful experiences residing in a London ghetto. Boorman veers beautifully between a carefully observed character study and guerrilla theater. Despite a Best Director award at the 1970 Cannes Film Festival, LEO THE LAST has rarely been heard of since.
"A most engagingly shy and sensitive Marcello Mastroianni, in a performance of great self-effacing intelligence." -Roger Greenspun, NY TIMES
Georges Melies: Impossible Voyager
May 15, 2008
Georges Melies
Join us for a special celebration of the father of special effects, Georges Melies, featuring his greatest epics from the early 1900s. A stage magician turned filmmaker, Melies produced more than five hundred whimsical "trick films," crafting tales of the fantastic that pushing nearly every technical boundary of the time. His spectacular images remain some of the most iconic in film history, and continue to instill wonder and delight a century later. This special presentation includes rare tinted and hand-colored film prints accompanied by non-traditional musical selections including world music, avant-garde jazz and early electronic music. The film THE IMPOSSIBLE VOYAGE (1904) will include a rare live performance of Melies' original narration combined with an audio collage of period 78-RPM records (compiled by Robert Millis and Jeffrey Taylor of Climax Golden Twins) played live on real Victrolas. Co-presented by The Sprocket Society and NWFF.
Mister Lonely
May 16 - May 22, 2008
Harmony Korine, USA/France, 2007, 35mm, 112 min
FROM THE DIRECTOR OF GUMMO AND JULIEN DONKEY BOY
Werner Herzog, Michael Jackson, Samantha Morton, Marilyn Monroe, Abe Lincoln, Shirley Temple, and Charlie Chaplin come together in Panama and Paris for MISTER LONELY, the latest feature by wunderkind American director Harmony Korine. The titular Mister Lonely is a Michael Jackson impersonator (Diego Luna) who ekes out a living in Paris. He bumps into Marilyn Monroe (Morton) who brings him to a castle in Scotland where she lives in an impersonator community that includes her husband, Charlie Chaplin (Denis Lavant) and various others. It’s a wild world, and Harmony Korine is its playful mischievous master.
More on Harmony Korine
See the trailer
"Like (Carlos) Reygadas, Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely could be considered the first self-consciously mature work by a onetime enfant terrible." -Dennis Lim
Indigenous Film Festival Screenings
Mar 08 - May 17, 2008
Join us for the second annual Northwest Indigenous Film Festival, now expanded to a full series! On February 9, March 8, April 12 and May 17, the festival will screen a diverse group of new and experimental short and feature films either created by or made about indigenous peoples. March 8 features IMPRINT, a contemporary Native American dramatic supernatural thriller filmed on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, by Linn Productions and Native filmmaker Chris Eyre. Imprint has redefined what we've come to expect of a film depicting Native America. It is the winner of Best Picture, Best Actress (Tonantzin Carmelo), and Best Supporting Actress (Carla-Rae Holland) at the American Indian Film Festival; Best Picture at the International Cherokee Film Festival and South Dakota Film Festival and Official Selection at South by SouthWest. Other festival screenings include the last film by the late Native filmmaker Phil Lucas and films by the youth of Native Lens. Audience discussions will follow the screenings.
Alice Neel
Sponsored by Artist trust
May 17 - May 22, 2008
Andrew Neel, USA, 2007, 35mm, 82 minutes
Portrait painter Alice Neel (1900-1984) beautifully, and often hauntingly, captured the image and spirit of each of her hundreds of subjects over six decades. When the theatrics of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art consumed the art world, Neel's figurative humanism was so unfashionable that she lived on welfare and was marginalized until the 1970s, when the counterculture embraced her and major museums began showing her work. Her grandson, filmmaker Andrew Neel, directs this unique documentary portrait of the artist that both celebrates her determination and explores the effects of her choices and sacrifices. The film traces Alice Neel’s tumultuous biography, as well as delving into the conflicts that her children (the filmmaker’s father, uncle and aunt) still struggle with. By turns fascinating, uncomfortable and inspirational, ALICE NEEL is a thought provoking, personal journey.
www.aliceneelfilm.com
"The fascinating documentary Alice Neel illuminates history while also demonstrating how an artist’s style reveals his or her personality." - New York Times