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September 2004

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From:
Jim Greenberg <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Teaching Breakfast List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 9 Sep 2004 11:23:41 -0400
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UCCCA is proud to announce the lineup for the Fall
FilmFest, Tuesdays 7 PM, the Oneonta Theater, 47 Chestnut St., Oneonta.
Tickets: $6; UCCCA members, students: $5.  Screenings are sometimes followed
by discussions at UCCCA, 11 Ford Ave.

COFFEE AND CIGARETTES            SEPTEMBER 7
Jim Jarmusch, US, 96 min., R: tobacco, strong language

Nicotine, caffeine, and great music from Mahler to the Skatalites alter the
perceptions of an eclectic gang of actors and musicians (Bill Murray, Cate
Blanchett, Roberto Benigni, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, among
others) who play themselves‹more or less‹in wry, surprising comic vignettes.
Beauty and meaning in odd places at unlikely, idle moments flicker through
this lovely, semi-improvised film filled with complex characterizations.

OSAMA                        SEPTEMBER 14
Siddiq Barmak, Afghanistan/Japan/Ireland, 83 min., PG13

There are four scenes in this life-changing film you will never forget, one
of which is hilariously perverse.  "The first film made in post-Taliban
Afghanistan, this is a gripping small story with big implications about what
happens when a desperate family commits the unthinkable crime‹sending a
daughter out in boy's clothing to earn a living.  It is an Ockham's razor of
narrative and image which reaches out from the screen and cuts the viewer;
more than the heart bleeds as the twelve-year old protagonist negotiates her
impossible world." Pakistan Times.   Best Foreign Language Film: 61st Golden
Globes 2004; Best Foreign Language Oscar Nominee 2004; Special Mention:
Cannes Film Festival 2003; Best First Feature: London Film Festival 2003; NY
Times Critic¹s Pick.

FESTIVAL EXPRESS                    SEPTEMBER 21
Bob Smeaton, Canada, 1 hr. 30 min., R: language, adult situations

Okay, Boomers have now become geezers!  "lntimate geezerfest and rock-doc
holy grail presents long-lost footage (hidden for years by legal wrangling)
of a forgotten Woodstock on wheels‹the 1970 bacchanal in which a pair of
22-year-old entrepreneurs contrived to place the Grateful Dead, the Band,
Janis Joplin (two months before her death), and a half-dozen other acts
(Buddy Guy, Flying Burrito Brothers, Sha-Na-Na ) on a chartered train across
Canada.  The 20 counterculture bands on the roster ate, slept, partied‹and,
most wonderfully, jammed together‹aboard a special train that ferried them
from Toronto to Winnipeg.  ŒWe achieved lift-off,¹ recalls the Dead's Bob
Weir.  You will, too."  Megan Lehmann, New York Post


SUPER SIZE ME                        SEPTEMBER 28
Morgan Spurlock, U.S., 96 min., NR

Affable and horrifying at the same time, this is Greek character and
morality drama masquerading as jaunty documentary.  The film "turns on the
question of responsibility:  Does it rest with those of us who eat, drink
and inhale the products that clog our arteries and corrode our livers and
lungs, or with the companies who sell and advertise them?  The director¹s
conclusion is that it's us or them, that we should kill McDonald's before
McDonald's kills us." A. O. Scott,  N. Y. Times.  Directing Award, Sundance.

INTIMATE STRANGERS                        OCTOBER 5
Patrice Leconte, France, 1 hr. 44 min., R:frank sexual talk

A sleek, Hitchcock blond bares her private life to an analyst...who turns
out to be not an analyst, but an accountant.  Beguiled by her erotic
secrets, he then can¹t admit who he really is.  A therapy session gone
seductively astray, a voyeuristic fantasy, darkish-light, this French film
stars the beautiful, seriously talented actress Sandrine Bonnaire.

THE CORPORATION                        OCTOBER 12
Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, US., 2 hrs. 25 min., NR  THIS FILM BEGINS
AT 6:30 PM!

"Since a corporation is legally defined as a person, it makes some sense to
ask what kind of person a corporation might be. The answer offered by this
smart, brooding documentary, is: not a very nice one.  A psychiatrist who
has advised the F.B.I. declares that the corporation has Œall the
characteristics of a prototypical psychopath¹.''  A.O. Scott, N.Y Times.
Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Moore, Ray Anderson, Jane Akre, Steve
Wilson, and Mark Barry appear.  THIS FILM BEGINS AT 6:30 PM!

MARIA FULL OF GRACE                            OCTOBER 19
Joshua Marston, Spain, in Spanish with English subtitles, 101 min., R: drug
trafficking, violence

"Treacherous territory: a young woman with a hopeless future in Colombia,
seduced by suave, sweet-talking recruiters, can earn a large sum by
smuggling heroin into the U. S.  Any hope of success as a smuggler requires
that Maria lie with a straight face under extreme stress.  Her journey from
Bogotá to New York in a plane with three other smugglers is one of the
tensest flights ever filmed.  In a performance that feels lived in rather
than acted, Catalina Sandino Moreno's Maria is an attractive, smart,
spirited young woman who faces the challenge of fending for herself with a
fierce determination and an ingenuity that compromises but never undermines
her essential decency and morality."  Stephen Holden, N.Y. Times.  Winner
Sundance Film Festival's Audience Award.


SEDUCING DR. LEWIS                            OCTOBER 26
Jean-François Pouliot, Canada, 109 min, NR

"La Grande Séduction," the film¹s French title, says it best. Residents of
an impoverished fishing village need to trick a doctor into staying with
them.  This sweet, gentle, funny story was best French feature at the
Montreal Film Festival and a Sundance Audience Award Winner.


SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER...                    NOVEMBER 2
Kim Ki-Duk, S. Korea, in Korean with English subtitles, 102 min., NR: strong
sexuality

Not only dazzlingly beautiful, lush, and painterly, (set on Jusan Pond, a
Korean national natural treasure), but also earthy, insightful, active,
sharply humorous, spirit-fillling, and magical.  "The symbolic framework is
Buddhist, but the feelings are universal and this film about a Buddhist
master and his student casts its own rhapsodic spell.  We see life
whole--with all its violence, desire and savagery--and all its beauty,
compassion and delight as well.  It's a wonderful film." Metromix. "This
beautifully composed canvas is the sort of film one falls into, resurfacing
at the end with great reluctance."  E.W., The Daily News.  Critic's Pick:
N.Y. Times


KITCHEN STORIES                                        NOVEMBER 9
Bent Hamer, Norway, in Swedish and Norwegian with English subtitles, 92
min., PG

This may well be the oddest, nuttiest film you¹ll ever see.  "This wry,
uninflected, deadpan social comedy points as straight and true as a compass
fixed on magnetic north. It has the tingly, dry shock of a snootful of
sub-zero air. The material, a comic melodrama about conformity (a
documentary of a home efficiency expert pretending to be invisible as he
sits on an umpire¹s stool, watching a bachelor in the kitchen), displays
streaks of subdued peculiarity raining down at unexpected moments.  The
stoic freakishness, the stinging brilliance of the colors, and Mr. Hamer's
skill and discipline grow out of a hilariously demented brand of
obsessive-compulsive disorder." Elvis Mitchell,  N.Y. Times.  It is "so
funny and so emotionally precise. Once you've adapted to its rhythms, the
humor is like contagion." Newsday. Toronto International Film Festival,
Cannes Film Festival.


DOOR IN THE FLOOR                        NOVEMBER 16
Tod Williams, U.S., 111 min., R: nudity, obscenity and sexuality

"A beautifully acted examination of the bedeviling and perversely inspiring
legacy of family tragedy, this is one of the most sophisticated American
films of the year.  But what really sends it over the top is the acting
(Jeff Bridges, Kim Basinger), certain to be remembered at awards season.
Ted Cole may be the most complex husband and father, not to mention artist
(he writes children¹s books), to grace an American movie. In a richly
nuanced, often both literally and figuratively naked performance, Bridges
makes this monster, if not lovable, at least undeniably human.  Basinger,
too, has never been better or more radiant.  She transforms Marion's morbid
depression and withdrawal into a form of ravenous sexual longing for a much
younger man."  James Vernie, Boston Herald.


TOUCHING THE VOID                        NOVEMBER 23
Kevin Macdonald, U. S., 102 min., NR.

"A very challenging day out" is how phlegmatic British climbers Joe Simpson
and Simon Yates perceived their 1985 bid to climb 21,000-foot-high Siula
Grande in the Peruvian Andes. Halfway down, Simpson fell, atomized his left
leg and had to be lowered by Yates on a 300-foot rope. Unbeknownst to a
blizzard-blinded Yates, Simpson ended up dangling over a sheer precipice
with no way to climb back up. Unable to hold on, Yates was forced into the
climber¹s worst existential dilemma: to cut or not to cut the rope; to save
himself or not to save himself, by letting his friend die. He cut it. This
hugely stirring, appropriately vertiginous hybrid of documentary and
docudrama mixes the participants¹ accounts with frostbitten, snow-lashed
re-creations of their ordeal: Simpson feared he would die alone, and with a
horrible Boney M song stuck in his head, even as Yates was tormented by
guilt. Breathtaking stuff."  John Patterson, LA Weekly.


UCCCA¹s FILMFEST is funded in part by NYSCA
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See you at the movies!




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