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 […]
Film
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"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 […]
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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.
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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, […]
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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 wood-paneled veneer of Midwest structures.
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Unabridged: 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 hippie friends. My first night in town they took me to see a midnight showing of…
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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.”
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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” […]
