March 29, 2006

Dispatch #126

TV Box Sets are the theme this week, and in addition to that, we've got oodles of news, and a tip about a great screening we're sponsoring later in the week.

#126 | March 28, 2006
 
"Truth be told, I was jolly fed up with being a hero. Having to save the country two or three times a week meant I could get nothing done at all." -- Ripping Yarns.

If you miss those Editors' top lists that used to live on GreenCine's home page, don't fret - you can still look through all of them by clicking through our handy top list archives. Hours and hours of browsing and queueing fun!

Criterion's new set of three beautiful films by Louis Malle includes the warm, funny Murmur of the Heart, the morality tale Lacombe, Lucien, and the Oscar-nominated masterpiece Au Revoir les Enfants. The set also includes... read the rest here.

Our low price: $67.45 for the set, or $25.45 for each film separately.

Independent in the best sense, the lovely drama Spring Forward, directed by Tom Gilroy from his play, is a breath of fresh air. A carefully told story of male friendship, so rarely depicted with this kind of nuance, it's an opportunity for Liev Schrieber and Ned Beatty to really shine. As A.O. Scott wrote in the New York Times, there's a "real satisfaction in watching such exact and unpretentious applications of craft."

Available now or any time via GreenCine's Video-on-Demand: "Words jump off the page and into the lives of cafe habitues," Variety wrote of J.P. Allen's indie film Coffee and Language, "a single-setting chatfest that avoids almost all the pitfalls of dialogue-heavy urban fare." Beautifully shot in black and white... read the rest here.

 

More like this: Europa Europa | Elevator to the Gallows (out 4/25) More like this: Jerry and Tom | Ice Men More like this: Hope & Play | Love & Plutonium

A few Oscar winners are sprinkled in among other fine new releases this week:

The Children Are Watching Us is "a marvel of complex visual and emotional scope, and its surface is no less simple than the fabulous shells of Shoeshine and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," writes Slant's Ed Gonzalez of this classic from Vittorio De Sica. The Criterion disc features video interviews with star Luciano De Ambrosis and De Sica scholar Callisto Cosulich.

Memoirs of a Geisha surprised by winning three Oscars (Art Direction, Cinematography and Costume Design); it's the sort of literary adaptation Miramax used to excel at, only it came from DreamWorks and featured a stunning cast: Zhang Ziyi, Michelle Yeoh, Gong Li and Ken Watanabe.

Surely one of the oddest pairings of a director and a star since, well, Curtis Hanson and Eminem for 8 Mile, Get Rich or Die Tryin' is 50 Cent's own story, helmed by Irish filmmaker Jim Sheridan.

Also out this week: 

King Kong, Peter Jackson's spectacular remake of the 1933 original; David Lynch's Dumbland, which he describes as "a crude, stupid, violent, absurd series"; Adam Goldberg's intriguing tragicomedy, I Love Your Work, featuring Giovanni Ribisi; and the documentary TransGeneration.

New anime:

Ah! My Goddess Volume 4: We've Got Tonight (1993). "Long-time fans of Fujishima's work will love this series for how faithful it remains to the manga," writes Theron "Key" Martin for the Anime News Network, "while newcomers will find a light-hearted and enchanting take on anime romantic comedies."

A complete list of this week's New Releases | Coming Soon | New Releases Archive | Your Queue

 Those wacky "vidiots" at TeeVee.org have given us a primer for boob-tube afficianados everywhere: TV Box Sets. That's right, they've pried themselves away from the set long enough to collect their thoughts on some of the best (and wonderfully worst) television box sets out there. So get lost, wire yourself with coffee before you commit homicide, and start reading.

The latest from David D'Arcy is a two-parter, really. Following an overview of several highlights at the recent International Festival of Film on Art in Montreal, he talks with Danielle Schirman, who makes films about objects that have made such a profound impact on our lives we never even think about them.

The GreenCine Daily is in full throttle mode: Shorts, fests, magazine peeks (including Cahiers du Cinéma) and obits (Richard Fleischer and Stanislaw Lem).

Speaking of TV box sets, our genre of the week is: British TV. Loads of ripping good shows - including Ripping Yarns, Michael Palin and Terry Jones' amusing comic adventure series, and of course those two chaps' previous excursion into television, some show called Monty Python's Flying Circus. Here, too, you'll find more recent forays, like the fine series The Forsyte Sage, League of Gentlemen, and, of course, The Office. You'll have a cracking good time. (And while you're at it, check out our British Comedy primer, too.)

 

The GreenCine member list of the week is postmod's "An extra in the movie adaptation of your life" - which refers to a line from a Pavement song; "if you're making the film of someone's life and they're still around, it's a little rude not to put them in."

GreenCine is proudly sponsoring the opening night film of the Seattle Arab and Iranian Film festival: Iraq In Fragments, a documentary by Seattle filmmaker James Longley (Gaza Strip) and producer John Sinno that was the recipient of three awards at this year's Sundance Film Festival. The film was culled from 300 hours of footage taken over a two year period, featuring indelible portraits of the Iraqi people, illuminating the textures and tensions of a country wrenched by occupation and pulled in disparate directions by religion and ethnicity. 7pm, this Friday, March 31, at the Cinerama Theater (2100 Fourth Avenue) in Seattle.

And don't forget about our screening at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, next Wednesday, April 5, as we proudly unleash Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf. The film is by notorious Japanese director Teruo Ishii, known in some circles as the "King of Cult Movies," who single-handedly crafted some of the strangest motion pictures ever released. Blind Beast is based loosely on the writings of Edogawa Rampo. Wednesday April 5, 7:30 pm. 701 Mission Street, San Francisco. $8, $5 GreenCine members, students, seniors & teachers, $5 YBCA Members.

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Posted by cphillips at March 29, 2006 4:47 PM