November 19, 2003

Rep Rep Repertory

Too. Much. Hollywood. Product. Elves, suicidal literary chicks, philosophy spouting super humans and now this weekend disaster prone cats. Must have balance in our viewing. Must attend some repertory movie screenings before Cinecultist's brain implodes from slick pre-packaged over stimulation.

Your fanboy heart called out for more after watching Kill Bill? Might we recommend some communing with one of the sources, as the Leonard Nimoy Thalia/Symphony Space screens Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog, Drunken Angle, Yojimbo and Sanjuro. And they have double features, 2 movies for $10 bucks. It don't get much more fanboy than that, kids.

For more auteur action, the American Musuem of the Moving Image in Queens is doing a series on Francis Ford Coppola. This weekend, you can remind yourself to leave the gun, take the cannoli with the Godfather on Friday and Saturday evenings.

For national cinemas you didn't know you needed to know about, the MoMA Gramercy Theater provides for your needs. Cinema from developing nations is more than just Abbas Kiarostami, as is evident in the Global Lens series and German film did progress after Fassbinder as the curators of Das Neue Kino would like you to know.

One last suggestion for cinecultists: you can't really call yourself a cinecultist if you're not intimately familiar with Federico Fellini. You've lived La Dolce Vita and you've walked down La Strada but perhaps Amarcord didn't satisfy you in terms of Fellini's reminiscing on his fertile childhood? Then I Vitelloni is for you. Our girl Pauline Kael called it the director’s “first fully confident piece of direction”, and according to Film Forum "its style and story of aimless youth inspired, among others, George Lucas’s American Graffiti and Scorsese’s Mean Streets."

Sounds like a full weekend of quality film viewing, no?

Posted by karen at November 19, 2003 7:56 AM