An interview with Alex regarding his latest film

http://moviemorlocks.com/2013/03/31/bill-the-galactic-hero/

TOUCH OF EVIL

The print tonight is in great shape! Read my latest TCM post for more info:

http://moviemorlocks.com/2011/02/13/a-toast-to-a-touch-of-evil/

THIS WEEKEND YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE

Jerry Aronson took the pic above. That handsome devil to my right is director Derek Cianfrance. He and Joe Curtis (co-writer), Jim Helton (co-editor), and other folks hailing from hereabouts are currently making a splash with the film BLUE VALENTINE. It was one of the best films at Sundance last year, and if you buy a ticket to see it this weekend you're not just supporting one of our own, you're also helping push cinema away from its current shallows, obsessed with teen demographics, and upward toward something more adult, interesting, and intelligent.

Wide Release vs Platform Release

Big studio films usually enjoy a wide release with three to six thousand prints flooding the nation on the same weekend. Their fate is determined by their weekend grosses. Smaller films get specialized releases (aka: platform releases). This means a handful of prints are screened in certain key markets. BLUE VALENTINE, for example opened a couple weeks ago in four theaters in NYC, a few more in L.A. It did well there, so they struck more prints and now push it out a bit wider. BLUE VALENTINE opens this weekend in Colorado. I've already seen it, but plan to buy two tickets this weekend to help it gain momentum. Here's why you should too.

Authentic vs Phony

It's as clear as putting Jeff Bridges up against Matt Damon in TRUE GRIT - Jeff's character plays the authentic part with his boozy, blotched skin, straggly beard, stained clothes, and yellow teeth. Matt's mega-watt movie-star smile is not without reason as he's supposed to be a squeaky clean Texas Ranger - but it's a distraction nonetheless, one that reminds us we're watching a millionaire movie star. It's a great film, and lots of fun, but full of patented movie contrivances (ie: a person's foot being caught by a dangling root as they fall into a pit full of snakes). This kind of artifice is commonplace in movies. It's a testimony to our love of distractions , ones that take us away from the every day pitfalls of real life. Even so, for me Jeff Bridges' character was far more interesting than Matt Damon's character. Why? Everything about him seemed more authentic. Y'know: grittier.

I miss the "true grit" that American movies used to have. The late sixties and early seventies were full of great examples. Even the blockbusters back then, like THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971) had a "man, that's what it's really like on the streets" kinda feel to 'em. Speaking of Gene Hackman, I have to add that a few years later he starred in another film with even more true grit: SCARECROW (1973) - which focused on an ex-con drifter and a homeless ex-sailor. The locations were real: Colorado gets a couple nods (Canon City and Denver), and so does Michigan, Detroit. You see parts of America there that don't normally get the time of day. Thinking about drifters takes my mind to MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969) and FIVE EASY PIECES (1970) - also great examples of films infused with an authenticity for the battles of the human spirit, and both also show us places and times that we recognize as genuine. And then, of course, there are the films of John Cassavetes, which alone deserve their own essays and contemplations.

JAWS (1975) and STAR WARS (1977) ushered in the new model... and here we are still, swimming in tent-pole, big-studio films that get churned out like sausages at a factory. The cinematic marketplace is now a ruthless arena dictated by the box office and the reality is that we, the customers, make it or break it with the tickets we buy - and specifically the tickets we buy on the opening weekend.

Go!

So that's why I want to urge everyone reading this to go out there this weekend and buy a ticket to see BLUE VALENTINE. This is a film with true grit. It makes Jeff Bridges' so-called "true grit" look like a cardboard cutout on an old STAR TREK set. BLUE VALENTINE hearkens back to a time when filmmakers were interested in showing us the messy and harsh realities of what it means to be human. Now, granted, there are a lot of other movies out there that will be competing for your attention, like THE GREEN HORNET, TRON, GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, etc. And I know some folks out there have been forewarned that BLUE VALENTINE is a harsh toke, and so they might ask themselves, well... what's the point of watching a relationship disintegrate before your eyes?

The point of THE GREEN HORNET will probably be "avoid explosions." The point of TRON will probably be that "3-D is kinda cool." The point of GULLIVER'S TRAVELS will probably be to "not get tied down." Not having seen any of these, I'm guessing here, and these are all good points. But I think BLUE VALENTINE has something to say about love and the nature of being human. Which is to say, the point will be evasive - but much more interesting. Especially as you will be in the hands of a passionate filmmaker who really cares about tapping into something genuine. It's a very personal film, one that deserves your support.

As I would like to see more films like this, I urge you to go out and buy a ticket to see it this weekend. If we do, we help make it. If we don't, we help break it. And we all sorta broke the whole damn contraption already when we fell too far in love with the big studio blockbusters of the mid-seventies. It's time to take back the marketplace from all the computer generated piffle that riddles the multiplex. Make a difference this weekend: buy a ticket to a film that looks into the human soul. It might even help the next person out there who wants "to keep it real." It'll pave the way.

BLUE VALENTINE opens this weekend at the locations below. We bring it to IFS again on March 5th with Derek in-person. I encourage you to see it BEFORE that - for all the aforementioned reasons - and then to come back and see it again for free and with fresh eyes after a couple months have rolled by.

- Pablo Kjolseth, IFS Director

BLUE VALENTINE's opening weekend can be caught at these theaters:

Highlands Ranch 24

Westminster Promenade

Century 16 - Boulder

Mayan Theatre

The Greenwood Village

WestWord talks with the animator behind HOWL

Susan Froyd (WestWord) snagged an interview with New Yorker cover artist and HOWL animator Eric Drooker. Read the article by clicking on the link below:

http://blogs.westword.com/showandtell/2010/10/artist_eric_drooker_on_animating_allen_ginsbergs_howl_for_a_new_film.php?page=2

HOWL screens tonight and tomorrow at 7pm & 9pm.

PULL MY DAISY - a rare, short 16mm film, starring a young Allen Ginsberg, will precede the 7pm show at 6:30, and follow after the 9pm show.

Notes from the IFS Desk - 10/15/10

The Boulder Valley Media Alliance tagged along on a recent trip to KGNU, and they put together this clip that is less than four-minutes-long. You can see it here:

http://www.bv22.org/archive?vid=226

SUSPIRIA - 8pm - 10/10/10

"Witches always fascinated me; I don't believe in the devil, in the movies he always makes me laugh... What's more, Suspiria is heavily influenced by Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; in an early draft I even planned to have the action take place in a child's school where the witches were teachers who tortured the children." - Dario Argento

Dario Argento used to really turn my crank and I sought him out everywhere. In the the late 1980's it was hard to be a completest - but I tried. I'd watch him on VHS, bootlegs, laser-discs, (later DVD's), plus - of course - the occasional film screenings. Mostly, later, it was in my basement on laser-disc (I'm dating myself - but that's the way it was). Either way, back then Argento delivered the goods. His films were synonymous with both the visceral and the cerebral. He'd show a guy losing his teeth as he face-planted onto a glass table from many different angles, but he'd also construct a mystery on par with something I always imagined Edgar Allan Poe would get a kick out of as he revealed a trump card in the third act that could still shock the audience. And then there was the music: wasn't it always The Goblins cranked up to 11?

A few years ago I made a trek to Denver to watch a theatrical screening of Mother of Tears (2007). This final installment of the Three Mothers trilogy was (finally!) being brought to the screen by Argento and featured his daughter, Asia, in a prominent role. I have to admit to enjoying it on a distinctly campy level. But I also felt like a silly adult who dropped money to squeeze into an amusement park ride meant for teenagers. I was also left wondering what had changed - the medium or the subject? That is to say: was Argento still being Argento while I, his viewer, had grown older and jaded? Either way, Mother of Tears struck me as an overwrought mess with too many jaw-droppingly stupid head-slappers. Sure, some guilty-pleasure moments, but overall I was left feeling like a middle-aged adult who was still trick-or-treating despite not even enjoying the candy any more. It was enough to make me question my original fascination with Argento. Had my younger self been too easily charmed by the visceral, colorful, and aggressively surreal trappings of some other culture?

Tonight I will revisit that question by watching what many people agree is one of Argento's finest moments with Suspiria (1977). Suspiria is the first part of his Three Mothers trilogy, with Inferno (1980) being the second. What's on tap is this: a 35mm imported print from the U.K. whose colors are still strong - and this is important because, among other things, while Argento shot the film on Eastman Color Kodak he then printed it with one of the last remaining 3-strip Technicolor processors around. Maitland McDonagh gets even more specific in her book Broken Mirrors / Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Argento.

The consistency of Suspiria's colour stratagey, in which the riotous dayglo colours embody the hysterical, hypersensitive world of witchcraft and sorcery, is truly marvelous; it was both rigorously planned and meticulously executed. Suspira wasn't just designed and lit according to a complicated visual scheme, but was also manipulated in the laboratory to achieve its final extreme effect. "With (Director of Photography Luciano) Tovoli, we used the same procedures as they did in the fifties with Technicolor, with very vivid colours," Argento remarked. "It's a matter of using three film matrixes for the three base colours: red, green, and blue, and then superimposing them while each time stressing the colour you want to have stand out. Kodak didn't even have more than a few thousand meters of this type of stock." The success of their endeavour is evident in virtually every frame of Suspiria.

Then there's that cranked up crazy music. Not only did Argento help compose The Goblins score, he also blasted the track on the set to rattle his actors. Also, it was to have starred his girlfriend at the time, Daria Nicoladi, who both co-wrote it and was inspired by stories of her grandmother who fled a German educational institute because of the supposed witchcraft that was being performed there. The lead role was even written for Nocoladi, but for marketing reasons the studio insisted on an American actress.

McDonagh discusses Argento's inspiration behind the Three Mothers trilogy as coming "not from authentic folklore, but rather from a passage in a short essay by Thomas De Quincey, best known as the author of the autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium Eater." On several occasions McDonagh points to Argento's surreal excesses as tapping into the grammar and iconography of our unconscious: "Suspiria and Inferno, with their pervasive images of fire and water conflated into an apocalyptic mandala, beg discussion in terms of Jungian archetypes." Given the source material used from De Quincey, this makes total sense due to the many hallucinatory and feverish dreams that De Quincey had that were fueled by his opium addiction. McDonagh adds these important notes about De Quincey:

University-educated, bookish as a child, and morbidly romantic as an adult, he had visions of heaven and hell, dreams of classical deities and wholly self-generated wraiths. One such dream (or rather, literary construct that may have been inspired by an actual dream; it's far too elegantly coherent to be the direct transcription of some welling up of subconscious concerns) is recounted in De Quincey's Suspiria de Profundis (Sighs from the Depths), a collection of essays intended as a follow-up to the Confessions. Its title is Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow, and it contains the essential notions that underlie Suspiria and Inferno and that will equally shape the third film - tentatively referred to as Mother of Tears - yet to be made."

McDonagh's book came out in 1991 - a full 16 years before Argento finally put out his third installment to the trilogy. As I wondered how McDonagh reacted to Mother of Tears, I flipped around in his essay and found an interesting section where she notes that although Suspiria "proved to be Argento's greatest ever box office success in the United States," this was to be despite some very scathing reviews. Many critics harped on it for not making sense. McDonagh argues that "Well, no it doesn't precisely make sense... not in any conventional way, but then neither does the story of Little Red Riding Hood; what kind of a stupid little girl can't tell her grandmother from a great hairy wolf? Does the situation call for complicated solutions involving associative mental disorders? No. That isn't the point."

Since one of my complaints with Mother of Tears was that it made no sense, I caught myself wondering if perhaps I'd been too harsh. Was I missing the point? Now I'm doubly interested in how McDonagh reacted to Argento's last installment of the Three Mothers and what I find is a June 2008 quote on Film Journal.com with the following:

Maitland McDonagh hated the film, describing it as "sadly lacking in the baroque atmosphere and visual aesthetic that elevated Argento above the horror hacks—it's flatly lit, indifferently staged, coarsely violent and brutally straightforward. The English-language dubbing is the final indignity: even the voices are ugly."

Phew! That gives me the succor to believe that my original fascinations with Argento were not simply the bong-water enchantments of an immature mind. I have a feeling tonight's screening will still grab me from the grave of yesteryear. There does exist, of course, the chance that I have outgrown my youthful appreciations for widescreen compositions with startlingly vibrant colors that visually scream alongside jangly electronic music at every impending death... but I doubt it. Especially during this month, when so many boogeyman come back to the fore and scare up my inner-child. Speaking of Three Mothers and the boogeymen, let's not forget that three of our most infamous American slashers - Michael Myers from Halloween, Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th, Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street - all owe a tip of their hat (or mask, or glove) to various Italian horrors of the sixties and seventies, but that's conversational fodder for a future talk around the campfire. Tonight belongs to the witches.

Notes from Sundance

http://moviemorlocks.com/2010/01/24/sundance-2010-2/#more-18499

New Semester

Check out all of the great films that are coming to IFS this semester! There are some great movies that you won't see any where else in Boulder and some that you may have missed at the movie theatre. Our first showing is ONG BAK 2 on Wednesday, January 27. Come on by Muenzinger Auditorium and see some priceless films. You can check them all out at http://internationalfilmseries.com/schedule.php.

End of Our Fall 2009 Series

This week is the end of our fall series. The Starz Denver Film Festival is here this weekend, so check out these original films. Please come back to join us in the Spring for a whole new set of great films!

Daily Camera Letter to the Editor 11/05/09

When the Daily Camera contacted me for my opinion on the new art house theater I was away from my desk promoting my series on the radio and missed my chance to remind people about the International Film Series. The resulting article states that “Boulder has not had an art house presence since Landmark Theaters closed its Crossroads Cinema on Pearl Street in 2007.” Yikes! The IFS brings over a hundred international and independent films to Boulder every year, along with many special events. We are sometimes overlooked due to our location on campus, but we do our best to reward cinephiles with affordable and eclectic programming. We’ll even pay for your parking if you buy a punch card. People who patronize us have had a chance to see Albert Maysles (Grey Gardens), Werner Herzog (Aguirre, the Wrath of God), Terry Jones (Life of Brian), John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch), and many other filmmakers in-person (often for free). We’ve also been doing this since 1941; that’s not just a good art house presence, that's a singular track-record with bragging rights as Boulder's first art-house series - and still kicking.

Back to the new Dairy Center theater: It can only help to have another place showing quality foreign and independent films in the community. These films desperately need word-of-mouth and buzz which my calendar program can’t sustain since we only show films for a day (or sometimes two). On our Fall program alone we brought over 40 premieres to the Boulder area and only two non-premieres that had already shown at CineMark. Guess which film has done the best business so far? The one that had already shown at CineMark. It just goes to show that awareness is key, and the more the merrier. So welcome aboard!

Pablo Kjolseth

IFS Director

A short local view on the upcoming I CAN SEE YOU

http://moviemorlocks.com/2009/10/25/i-can-see-you/#more-15417

NO IMPACT MAN (Again)

As our screening of NO IMPACT MAN was so heavily impacted by technical problems we are going to show it again on:

Sunday, October 11 at 7pm only.
Sunday, October 18 at 7pm only.

PARKING SNAFU

Please disregard parking information on our printed schedule and from previous posts. It now appears that the only "FREE AFTER 5PM" lots that we can depend on are 396, 436, and 308.

Please accept our apologies and know that we are currently in talks with people at Parking Management to try to figure out what is going on and to see if we can come up with a creative solution for the problems that are plaguing our customers.

More highlights from the recent Telluride Film Festival.

http://moviemorlocks.com/2009/09/13/highlights-from-the-telluride-film-festival/#more-14246

Telluride Film Festival update

http://moviemorlocks.com/2009/09/06/36th-telluride-film-festival/#more-14076

CEC ArtsLink NYC in collaboration with GSLL Department at CU-Boulder PRESENT:

New short films by 4 award-winning Russian filmmakers
who were selected for their cinematic accomplishments in a competitive nomination process.

a free public screening on Wednesday, September 9th, 5-7:50pm in HUMN 150

The Last Day of I.S. Bulkin (2009, 13 minutes, dir. Aleksey Andrianov) What happens when death comes knocking…
Official Selection at various Russian film festivals.

Field, Clowns, Apple… (2008, 13 minutes, dir. Shota Gamisoniya) Dreamscape and reality meet in this surrealist and sweeping single shot film. Official selection, Rotterdam, Trieste, and Bolzano Film Festivals. Winner of the Film Critic’s Guild Prize at the Festival of Debut Film at the Moscow Museum of Cinema.

Resurrection (2008, 29 minutes, Petr Zebelin) A Tarantino-esque look at Saint Petersburg’s dark underbelly.
Official selection, 2008 Open Cinema International Film Festival (Saint Petersburg).

Sanatorium (2008, 19 minutes, dir. Natalya Govorina) It happens to all of us sooner or later… a film based on the works of Russian literary figures Venedikt Erofeev and Sasha Sokolov. Named Best Narrative Film at 2008 Moscow Short Film Festival.

Aleksei Andriyanov is a filmmaker from Moscow. Born in 1976, he holds a degree in Screenwriting from the Gerasimov Institute (VGIK), and a degree in Film Directing from Moscow’s Higher Courses of Screenwriting and Directing. His cinematography credits include Katya Grokhovskaya and Peter Stepin’s feature length film The Man of No Return (Chelovek bezvozvratnyy, 2006), and numerous promotional advertisements for major clients from Coca Cola to Panasonic. He has directed three short films, including The Last Day of I.S. Bulkin (2009) and Fun Time, which was included in the 2007 Filminute Festival (London).

Shota Gamisoniya is an actor and filmmaker living in Moscow. He was born in 1981 in Sukhumi, a city on the coast of the Black Sea in a politically volatile region of Georgia. He has lived in Moscow since 1993. His first academic pursuit was acting: he graduated from the Vakhtangov Theatre Institute in 2003, and went on to work for two years with Yuri Lubimov’s Taganka Theater. In 2007 he began a Master’s degree in Filmmaking, graduating in 2008 with his short film Field, Clowns, Apple (2008) as a final project. The film received the Film Critic’s Guild Award at the Moscow Festival of Debut Films, and was an official selection at numerous European festivals including Rotterdam, Trieste, and Bolzano. He is currently at work on his next film, with production beginning in August of 2009.

Natalya Govorina, a filmmaker, was born in 1982 in the city of Tomsk in Siberia. As a college student, she studied Philosophy at Tomsk State University and worked for the Russian television program “Rush Hour.” She went on to study at the Internews School of Film and Television in Moscow, and in 2009 she graduated from the Gerasimov Institute (VGIK), Russia’s top film school, with a degree in Film Directing. Her student films, including The Investigative Experiment (Sledstvennyy Eksperiment, 2006), Jazz (2007), and Sanatorium (Zdravnitsa, 2008) have been screened and received awards at Russian and international film festivals.

Pyotr Zabelin is an actor and filmmaker. He was born in 1978 in Leningrad. He studied Acting for Theater and Film at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Theater Arts and received a degree in Film Directing from the Saint Petersburg University of Culture and the Arts. He also studied Theory and Practice of Media Arts at the Pro Arte Institute of Contemporary Arts. He is the founder and organizer of an independent movement, The Society of Creative Adventurer Radicals (S.T.A.R.). He has worked as an actor in various Saint Petersburg theaters and his films have been screened and won awards at Russian and international film festivals. Currently he is working on a full length independent film.

Parking Update

Parking Update!!

IFS has recently upgraded and printed our map in this fall’s IFS schedule, however, with all the construction around campus, changes have continued to be made to the parking layout. As of September 4^th, the parking layout will become definitive.

This means good news for you! There are now several parking lots around the Muenzinger area that are MUCH closer than the previous free lots. The closest FREE parking lots to the IFS Theater in Muenzinger Auditorium are the following lot numbers:

Lot numbers 380, 378, 360, and 359.

Unfortunately, some of the lots that were previously marked as free on the map, no longer are free after 5. The following lots are now GATED lots, meaning that after 5 you must pay a flat rate of $3 until midnight when they close. The following lots are NO LONGER free:

Lot numbers 208, 204, 310

….and lots 221 and 210 now require permits AT ALL TIMES.

We apologize for any inconvenience and hope you look forward to all the closer lots that are now free after 5!

IFS STAFF

Weighing in on DISTRICT 9

http://moviemorlocks.com/2009/08/23/catfights-in-district-9/

Check out this list of IFS contenders for the fall - and vote!

http://moviemorlocks.com/2009/05/24/vote-for-your-favorites-part-2/

Because it's summer:

http://wondermark.com/521/