Tag: movie night

pass the popcorn

Hominid from Brian Andrews.

Hominid is an animated teaser based on the Hominid series of photo composites by Brian Andrews, described as “photo composites made from human and veterinary images”.

-::-


A weekly movie night has sprung up in the homeless-yet-have-a-place dichotomy I’ve been inhabiting. Challenging films, insistent and smart, things I haven’t seen before, but have dearly wanted to. An exquisite corpse of connections from week to week.

It started with Fassbinder’s Macbeth, a faithful and brutal retelling of Shakespeare drenched in colour, shouting, and death, then moved to Far Side of the Moon, written, directed, produced, designed, and starring Robert LePage. Based on his visually striking theater production of the same name, he plays two Quebecois brothers awash in tides of their mother’s recent death, set in the context of the USSR-United States Space Race of the 1960s.

The loss of a parent, the small kingdom of the stage, brothers, strife. Small threads, alike in dignity.

LePage is known in Canada as a national treasure, the intellectual French-Canadian prince of visual delights. The transitions in his films are especially beautiful, as the round door of a coin laundry becomes the port of a space capsule or the green screen background of a weather channel becomes the wall of someone’s apartment. They are playful and unexpected, much like the films of Michel Gondry, the French-Parisian master of surprise and whimsy, who directed the next choice, Mood Indigo.

Based on a book written in 1947 and set in a blur between an imaginative retro-future of when the book was written and the modern day, it concerns a joyful couple who meet, fall in love, and marry, but the wife, played by Audrey Tatou, falls ill with a flower in her lung. What was bright, grows dark.

Next, pivoting on the love story, the toxic flower, the here and now, we showed Upstream Color, written, directed, produced, edited, composed, designed, cast by and starring Shane Carruth, the man responsible for Primer, which details the path of a man and a woman who fall in love after being poisoned by a parasite from a specific flower. From darkness, comes light.

It ends with an unconventional family, isolated in the country, like the subjects of Dogtooth, a Greek film by Yorgos Lanthimos we’re showing this week.

come one, come all

Secret Film School presents Todd Rohal’s “Guatemalan Handshake” tonight.


“A feast for the senses… a challenge for the brain.”

Film at 7 sharp. 400 West Hastings. Arrive early as doors will be locked.

In the confusion following a massive power outage in small-town America, human doormat Donald Turnupseed (actor-musician Will Oldham, Old Joy) suddenly vanishes, setting in motion a surreal series of events affecting his hapless father, his pregnant girlfriend, a pack of wild boy scouts, a lactose-intolerant roller rink employee, an elderly woman in search of her lost poodle, and his best friend: a ten-year-old girl named Turkeylegs.

One of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film, writer-director Todd Rohal charts strange new cinematic waters with his madly innovative feature debut, The Guatemalan Handshake. Winner of Special Jury Prizes at 2006 Slamdance and Torino, Rohal’s vivacious feast for the senses “bristles with his anarchic visual language, offbeat humor, ephemeral sense of narrative, circuitous character sketches, and freewheeling sense of mirth” (Baltimore City Paper).

Corey McAbee, (Billy Nayer Show, The American Astronaut), also stars, and has sent me some anecdotes about making the film to pass on to everyone who attends.

falling in love with the fall

In Los Angeles circa 1915, a little immigrant girl (Catinca Untaru) is in a hospital recovering from a fall. She strikes up a friendship with a bedridden stunt-man (Lee Pace), who captivates her with a whimsical story that removes her far from the hospital doldrums into the exotic landscapes of her imagination. (All of which are actual places ~jh). Making sure he keeps the girl interested in the story he interweaves her family and people she likes from the hospital into his tale. Shot on location in 18 countries around the world, The Fall is a moving, visually sumptuous fantasy of exotic bandits, evil tyrants, dream-like palaces and breathtaking landscapes.


I’m showing Tarsem Singh’s The Fall at my place Sept 9th, 8 pm.

FYI events

There will be a movie night at my place, Tuesday the 13th, of Snow White: a Tale of Terror, a more faithful adaptation of the Grimms Brothers’ tale, starring Sigourney Weaver and Sam Neill. A Potluck will start at 7:00 with movie at 8:30.

Today Graham and Burrow and I are going to Grandview Park to sell books off a blanket. Bad fantasy novels and old sci-fi for a negotiable two bucks a book. Come join us, we’ll be there until the weather kicks us out.

EDIT: The weather won.

Saturday is Quickie Culture Night

The plan is: A display of short visual pieces found or created by everybody. This means music videos, short films, weird art things, motion graphics, a short scene from a full length film etc. Not imposing hard time limits or anything, just use your best judgment.

There will be a projector with which to put things on the wall and the hardware to feed it anything in digital or DVD form. If it’s VHS you’ll need to bring a player with you (there’s plenty of cables though), find someone who can, or tell us in advance and we’ll try to dig one up. Drop James a line at jameseverett(at)gmail.com to let him know if you’re coming and if you’re bringing more people with you. This is just so we have a rough idea of how many bodies to expect and can provide the complete address.

Downtown at Davie & Jervis, starting around 9pm this Saturday, July 16th.

Also, there’s talk of watching a Night With Kevin Smith tonight at my place. Go bother Andrew for details. I’m assuming it’s an early-ish start, around seven.

Woe-Tse-Tsi-Lee-G’Huetzhi-Lee-Mien.

I have a weakness for pretty. I wanted to dance tonight, move myself in ways I’d forgotten how to, grind my hips in some suggestive way and take my time remembering the swing or rather the knack to flying. My toes curl at certain media, little snippets of lonely sandscape and all of the sudden I want someone, I need someone, and it feels like I could find a little death. In my eyes are the reflection of a fictional world where people when they cry remain beautiful, obviously not anywhere I’ve ever lived. The luxurious cruise liner launches from the great shipbuilding asteroid and takes my hormones with it, a surge of warmth engulfing my heartbeat in palm sticky ways.

Korean movie night hit the little button tonight. That language switch I have, it wanted badly to be flicked. I’ll be set once I figure out how to make repeats a reliable thing. As is it’s hit and miss, more likely to miss, like everything else in bed. A very great pleasure until it isn’t, just the same as the other way around. To console me, however, from almost falling off my seat in public, I have discovered a song which rapes the seventies like it well deserves to be. It’s erasing the gorgeous fleet of ships from my head and should let me sleep without difficulties. Otherwise that sort of thing tends to be a noise slightly overpowering, an exercise in writing later and wishing I knew the right kind of self to Berlin my spray-painted mental walls.

Less out the window, my head. I turned around, knew you didn’t see me. More does a whisper like feet on a bland carpet. Nowhere again. It’s a hallway, ten steps long. I need ten such steps, strong as a dream. It was an acreage, the land I found you. A square of honesty. Wish fufillment, has it ever happened before? One a year, like a circle, I expect somehow. I will bring roses next time. Next minute, this minute, the colour of what’s under my skirt. The apple a surprise to us both. Bite, the sky will erase it. We don’t wear bands, we wear music. Tense, tenses, the letters, the words on glowing thighs. Red stains, where are you? Appearing miracles. So low this quickly, but it doesn’t apply. Gave your rules the board, the west too far away to care.

edit: as well, I have been sucked into MySpace. Add me at your inclination.

dee: “you’re like a slightly battered version of Erato”

suspician (noun): one who plays the oddly insidious music of the paranoiola

After brushing me teeth, I sat on a black couch and cut out stitches with the little scissors which live on my keychain. I think now that I quite badly want a little nurses hat. A nurses hat and white garter belt stockings.

That, however, is an aside.

Last night was Korean Movie Night, and it very insidiously blew me away. I suspect it cashed all of us in, actually. A Tale of Two Sisters is intense. The whole thing is lush, every shot a gift. A movie loosely based on a murder-revenge fairytale, it follows the life of a family in a delightfully morbid house. I don’t think I can explain. It was filmed with incalculable impact, seeming like a nightmare at times, but always progressively more logical in its unbelievable mental twists. Invariably, we found ourselves shouting, “Yes!”, when another piece of the puzzle was revealed. When the credits rolled, we yelled and howled and hugged each other. It was a victory. Just, really, go buy the damned thing.

Experts have discovered a previously unknown work by Johann Sebastian Bach in documents taken from a German library shortly before it was heavily damaged by fire.