I am a sucker for Cary Grant films, and it seems they are being featured at BAM. See here for a full schedule.
I missed the double-feature tonight, but Tuesday night is the film Topper, Wednesday features Rome Express, Thursday features Penny Serenade, and Friday features The Philadelphia Story.
Saturday presents multiple screenings of To Catch a Thief, while Sunday will present The Awful Truth.
And the Cary Grant films continue next week as well, thanks to BAM's repertory film program!
Showing posts with label film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label film. Show all posts
Monday, August 10, 2009
Monday, October 20, 2008
"Happy-Go-Lucky": Movie on Pursuit of Happiness
I saw Mike Leigh's movie Happy-Go-Lucky last night. A British film by the director of Secrets and Lies and Vera Drake, it is, as director Leigh calls it in an interview with The Star, an "anti-miserabilist" film. That sums it up succinctly: the film is about a cute, diminutive cheerful woman, "Poppy," who manages to stay keenly optimistic despite the woes and unfriendliness she encounters in her life.
An English film, it was just recently released in the US and has received astounding reviews and substantial acclaim already. Besides its sentimentality and optimism in a markedly cynical and difficult time, what is striking about the film is its really jarring, realistic quality. Though I found the film slow at times (at a full two hours, it was on the longer side), I found myself forgetting that the film is fictional and the characters are, indeed, simply characters. In an interview with New York Magazine, Mike Leigh elaborates that Sally Hawkins, the actress who plays Poppy, was intended to be at the center of the film before he had worked out the plot details. It is Leigh's unconventional directorial process, wherein he determines the actors before the roles, and the actors improvise and work out the nuances of their characters and their lives, that gives the film its highly realistic, personable quality.
A review of Happy-Go-Lucky in New York Magazine by David Edelstein describes Poppy's outlook as much more than mere whimsy, but rather a deep "design for living"; and I would agree with this reviewer. It encourages us to go out and seek our inner-Poppy. The film is testimony that it is possible, even with unsettling and discouraging circumstances, to maintain a positive outlook in life.
See the official movie site here.
An English film, it was just recently released in the US and has received astounding reviews and substantial acclaim already. Besides its sentimentality and optimism in a markedly cynical and difficult time, what is striking about the film is its really jarring, realistic quality. Though I found the film slow at times (at a full two hours, it was on the longer side), I found myself forgetting that the film is fictional and the characters are, indeed, simply characters. In an interview with New York Magazine, Mike Leigh elaborates that Sally Hawkins, the actress who plays Poppy, was intended to be at the center of the film before he had worked out the plot details. It is Leigh's unconventional directorial process, wherein he determines the actors before the roles, and the actors improvise and work out the nuances of their characters and their lives, that gives the film its highly realistic, personable quality.
A review of Happy-Go-Lucky in New York Magazine by David Edelstein describes Poppy's outlook as much more than mere whimsy, but rather a deep "design for living"; and I would agree with this reviewer. It encourages us to go out and seek our inner-Poppy. The film is testimony that it is possible, even with unsettling and discouraging circumstances, to maintain a positive outlook in life.
See the official movie site here.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
"Patti Smith: Dream of Life," a Haunting, Beautiful Video Collage
This movie, www.dreamoflifethemovie.com/, ostensibly a documentary or "rockumentary," is a layered, nuanced film that hits the audience like an epic poem of words, images, and song. While the film may give little substantively on Patti Smith's amazing achievements and incredible life journey, it does reveal the surfaces, chronologically overlapped and mis-mashed of an amazing, trailblazing woman and her life. The film, apparently in the making for 12 years, is a performance piece that, in the free-spirited, artistic tradition of Patti Smith, refuses to play by the rules or conform to expectations. The result is a fantastic collage of her amiable, profoundly unique personality over the years.
Patti Smith tells the camera how bizarre it is having people come up to you and ask how it feels to be a rock icon, and that this label always makes her think of Mt. Rushmore. It is this quality of humility, warmth and humor that the film conveys, along with her deeply entrenched spiritual and musical sense of self.
I recommend learning more about Patti Smith and sitting back to appreciate her amazing accomplishments as a female rock-poet goddess. The film is now showing at Film Forum.
Two insightful reviews about the film that I recommend: Jesus died for somebody's sins ... but not hers (Salon.com) and "Patti Smith: Dream of Life," Godmother of Punk, Celebrator of Life (nytimes.com).
Patti Smith tells the camera how bizarre it is having people come up to you and ask how it feels to be a rock icon, and that this label always makes her think of Mt. Rushmore. It is this quality of humility, warmth and humor that the film conveys, along with her deeply entrenched spiritual and musical sense of self.
I recommend learning more about Patti Smith and sitting back to appreciate her amazing accomplishments as a female rock-poet goddess. The film is now showing at Film Forum.
Two insightful reviews about the film that I recommend: Jesus died for somebody's sins ... but not hers (Salon.com) and "Patti Smith: Dream of Life," Godmother of Punk, Celebrator of Life (nytimes.com).
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