Oops, Netflix Did it Again
Now Showing Global Lens 2011 Since 2003 the Global Lens film series has been providing a platform for interesting movies from around the world. Their board, including such modern masters as Lars von Trier, Pedro Almodóvar and Béla Tarr, has chosen nine fascinating films which premiere at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,...
Postville Documentary to Screen in Iowa City, 10/27/11
On Thursday, October 27, the University will host a screening of abUSed: The Postville Raid, a documentary depicting the May 12, 2008 raid on the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa—the largest, most expensive immigration raid in U.S. history. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (I.C.E.) officers arrested 389 undocumented workers, the majority of whom were convicted within...
Talking Movies: The Future Is Now
Richard Wagner dreamt of a Gesamtkunstwerk, “a total artwork,” a theatrical production that puts the entire human imagination into play and expresses nothing short of the truth. Metropolis--Fritz Lang’s operatic, balletic, mythic, expressionistic, crazy, nightmarish, silent movie--is about as gesamt a Kunstwerk as there is, especially if you add to it the live music...
Talking Movies: Film Fests 2011
Is this heaven? No, it’s the Hardacre Film Festival, every bit as magical as a diamond in a cornfield where the ghosts of old baseball players congregate. Every August, in the town of Tipton, Iowa (population 3,155), great movies, filmmakers from all over the country and interesting Iowans magically appear in a gorgeous old movie...
"American Meat" Plans Iowa City Showings Aug. 3 & 6
In Iowa, perhaps no politics hit home quite like the politics of food. While films like Food Inc. and King Corn have helped familiarize us with the scope of industrial agriculture and the problems associated, American Meat, a new documentary by Graham Meriwether, tells the stories of farmers finding alternative markets for their products, offering...
Talking Movies: Some Liked it Hot
In 1925, Willis Carrier, the inventor of the air conditioner, convinced Paramount Pictures to install his relatively new system in the Rivoli Theater, their big movie house under construction in Times Square. It was a brilliant decision.
Talking Movies: Is Quentin Tarantino Overrated?
The featured director this month in the Englert’s American Filmmakers Series is Quentin Tarantino. True Romance, which he wrote but didn’t direct, is showing Tuesday, May 10, and Pulp Fiction, his dubious masterpiece, plays the following Thursday. Does the director of Kill Bill: Vol. 2 and Inglourious Basterds deserve to be ranked alongside John Cassavettes,...
Talking Movies: A Caricature with Character
Directed by Miguel Arteta--of Youth in Revolt and The Good Girl--Cedar Rapids represents yet another stereotypical journey through the comic banality of Middle America. Amusingly, the reviews of the film, good or bad, are more trite than the film itself--I'll refrain from using such repossessed phrases as “hayseed” and “flyover country” or references to the...
An Interview with John Waters
Everyone has their first time with John Waters. For me, it was the summer of 1976, when I took off from my Grandmother’s house in Provo Utah, after a weird, lonely, freshman year at BYU (don’t ask) and hitchhiked around the West. I ended up–rather crazed after sleeping rough alongside Interstate 5–in Berkeley, crashing with...
WikiLeaks and the Movies
In a recent “dump” of diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, Putin and Medvedev were compared to Batman and Robin. The Slovenian philosophical rock star Slavoj Žižek has taken the simile further and compared Julian Assange, the spooky mastermind behind WikiLeaks, to the Joker in The Dark Knight. In Christopher Nolan’s twist on the Batman myth, the...
John Waters
This Filthy World Friday, April 1 – Englert Theatre John Waters first became famous–or infamous–for a series of movies that plumbed the depths of depravity and bad taste. Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living were about murder, rape, cannibalism, sexual fetishes and an unhealthy affection for eggs. They were also wickedly, deliriously funny. He...
Talking Movies: Enter the Void
Gaspar Noé will be known to some for his 2002 film Irreversible in which two men avenge the brutal rape and murder of a woman played by Italian beauty Monica Bellucci. Though its style and substance (particularly the rape scene) are notorious, it’s unfortunate that its infamy has surpassed its praise because I revere Irreversible...
Talking Movies: Hausu
Once in a while we come across a piece of art so outlandish that it defies all our categories; something which brings our neat generalizations up short. Hausu is one such work of art for me, and I suspect I am not alone. If you haven’t seen it, it may very well be the most...
Talking Movies: Well Spoke’n
I’ve now seen Vittorio De Sica’s masterpiece The Bicycle Thief twice in my life. I’m not sure how many more times I’ll be able to bear it. It’s too real; reality is too heartbreaking; and, as T.S. Eliot drily observes, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
Reel IC: One more week of Bijou
The Bijou wraps up its semester next week with two films from fantastic Asian directors. South Korea’s Bong Joon-ho brings us Mother and the Bijou resurrects the classic Fallen Angels by Wong Kar-wai out of Hong Kong. But first, a few notes from the IC film world. 1) That’s Rentertainment is having a “Grand Reopening”...
Reel IC: The Way We Get By
The Way We Get By Bijou Theatre Saturday, April 24, 7pm Why did buying DVDs become all the rage in the 2000s? Director commentaries. Just as interesting as watching the film (or, often more so) was listening to the people who made the movie talk about the work, the thought process and the people on...
Reel IC : ICDOCS keeps it real
I’ll always take a good documentary over a good drama. Any good cinema is like a daydream, but to disappear into a dream that isn’t a dream? That’s a pleasure only found in a great doc–the beautiful offspring of cinema and journalism, with only the best genes of both parents passed on. (of course, there’s...
Greatness Unbroken
Talking Movies: March 2010 – If you’re the kind of moviegoer who wishes you’d lived back when X was making movies (where X stands for your favorite great director), if like me you wish you had been there for the fresh projections of Godfather I rather than opening weekend of...
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