Thursday, October 15, 2015

Flick Picks 10/15/2015: Tomorrowland, San Andreas, Varda a-go-go

We might not have something for everyone this week, but we come mighty close.  George Clooney, meet The Rock.  The Rock, meet legendary French filmmaker (and someone about half your size) Agnes Varda.  Now that would be an interesting dinner party.  Not to mention the entertainment that  Channing Tanning and his buff friends might provide....


Feature Films

TOMORROWLAND

Never one to miss a marketing tie-in, the people at Disney renamed the film that had a working title of 1952 to Tomorrowland, after the futuristic themed land found at Disney amusement parks.  George Clooney stars as a disillusioned inventor joined by a young science enthusiast in the titular world where their actions have a direct consequence not only on themselves, but the ambiguous world itself.



SAN ANDREAS

Fear not, California.  The Rock is here to save the day.  Well, even The Rock has his limits.  That very famous fault slips to the tune of 9.1 on the Richter Scale and a great deal of death and destruction follow.  Is there any hope for the future?  Is this perhaps a good time to buy real estate in San Francisco?  Watch and find out.    



ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL

One of the audience favorites of 2015, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is based on the young adult novel by Jesse Andrews.  Rachel, the dying girl in question, is befriended by filmmaking friends Greg and Earl.  She's amused by their film parodies and eventually the boys are convinced to make a film for Rachel as she begins a course of chemotherapy to fight her leukemia.  Me and Earl and the Dying Girl deftly parries  this tearjerker set-up with frequent humor and insight into adolescent bravado and coping.



MAGIC MIKE XXL

Well, you know.

It's nice to see a young man wearing a tie these days, isn't it?  


Also new:

3 WOMEN

Named by Roger Ebert the best film of 1977, 3 Women is a Robert Altman classic long unavailable on video.  Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek star as two Texas natives who become roommates in a remote California town.  Much strangeness ensues when the more shy of the pair (Spacek) becomes obsessed with the more charismatic woman (Duvall).  We have 3 Women in a new Criterion Collection edition.






Series

THE SLAP

Told from multiple points of view, The Slap unfolds after a man strikes the misbehaving son of a friend at a social gathering.  A thorny aftermath divides the attending families, as some consider the slap justified, while others consider it criminal.



BATES MOTEL, SEASON 3

The back story of Norman Bates continues as we find out what went so horribly wrong with the infamous mamma's boy.  Here, mother is actually quite alive and played by the appealing Vera Farmiga.




Also new:

AMERICAN HORROR STORY, SEASON FOUR

SILENT WITNESS, SEASON TWO

DCI BANKS, SEASON FOUR




Classics

MAN WITH THE GUN

We have recently acquired two classic films starring Robert Mitchum:  Foreign Intrigue and Man With the Gun.  In the latter, the question is what price law and order?  Mitchum plays Clint Tollinger, a gunfighter hired to save Sheridan City from a band of thugs ever threatening the peace of the town.  But will the cure be worse than the disease?





Foreign

LA POINTE COURTE
CLEO FROM 5 TO 7
LE BONHEUR
VAGABOND

French filmmaker Agnes Varda  is in the midst of a brief Chicago residency.  To celebrate this fact, we have acquired Criterion Collection editions of four classic Varda films.  Her first film, La Pointe Courte (1955), told with two interwoven narratives, serves as a kind of bridge between Italian neorealism and the French New Wave.  Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962) is basically a real-time account of a lovely French singer biding her time around Paris as she awaits the results of a medical test.  Several luminaries from French cinema make cameo appearances.  Le Bonheur (1965) and Vagabond (1985) arrived twenty years apart and couldn't be more different on their surface, the the former colorful and serene, the latter a rather more harsh affair.  But both deal with the reality lurking beneath their charactes and relationships.  Long a rare female voice among more celebrated male contemporaries, Agnes Varda is one of the greats of French cinema.

Cleo From 5 to 7
Le Bonheur


Agnes Varda at work









Documentary

BLACKOUT

1977 was a wild year in New York City.  Adding to the chaos of that particular summer in the city was a blackout that affected virtually the entire metropolitan area for two hot days in July.  A product of the PBS series The American Experience, Blackout sets the tumultuous context of New York in the 70's and offers first person accounts from those who lived through those strange days.



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