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The Courthouse Film Circle presents movies on a weekly basis using state-of-the-art DVD projection and audio equipment. These screenings are friendly, informal and intimate— a chance to see top quality art-house cinema from around the world, in friendly company. Admission is still a recession-beating €6 for Friends of the Courthouse, and Film Circle members; €8 for all others. Advance booking is not necessary. |
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To download a printable version of our Spring 2010 Calendar of Events, click here! |
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... WINTER 2010 SEASON ...
Let Right One In
Starring: Kare Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar and Henrik Dahl
The title of the spectrally beautiful Swedish vampire movie “Let the Right One In” comes from a song by Morrissey, a romantic fatalist who would surely appreciate this darkly perverse love story. “Let the right one in,” he sings in "Let the Right One Slip In." I’d say you were within your rights to bite/The right one and say, ‘What kept you so long?’ ” These may sound like words to live by, though in the case of a film about a boy and the girl next door who may just be a vampire, they could easily turn out to be words to die for. I’m not sure if the director Tomas Alfredson is a Morrissey fan, even if, like the singer, his movie smoothly and seemingly without effort works through a canny amalgamation of cool and hot, diffidence and passion. (John Ajvide Lindqvist, who adapted the screenplay from his horror novel, openly borrowed the title from Morrissey, a favorite.) The film’s cool is largely expressed in visual terms, in the enveloping snow, the wintry light and the cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema’s meticulously and steadily framed compositions. There is a remarkable stillness to many of the film’s most indelible images, particularly the exteriors, which are so carefully photographed, and without the usual tiresome camera jiggling, as to look almost frozen. It’s no wonder that pale, pale little Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) looks so cold. Pale and strange: with his light blond hair and alabaster skin, the 12-year-old Oskar appears not quite of this world, an alienation of body and spirit that causes him enormous pain but proves his salvation. The seemingly friendless only son of divorced, emotionally remote parents, he is also an outcast at school. The other children taunt him, particularly a pint-size sadist who grows crueller the more Oskar retreats into himself. But there are few other places he can go, which is how he ends up alone at night outside his apartment building thrusting a knife into a tree as if stabbing his tormentor. It’s an uneasy revenge fantasy that attracts the notice of a girl even paler than he is, Eli (Lina Leandersson), an outcast of a deadlier kind.
The bedraggled Eli drops into Oskar’s life like a blessing, though initially she seems more like a curse. Mr. Alfredson has an elevated sense of visual beauty, but he knows how to deliver the splattery goods. One of the earliest scenes features Eli’s guardian or slave (it’s never clear which), a defeated-looking middle-aged man named Hakan (Per Ragnar), headed into the night with a little black kit, the contents of which — a knife, a plastic container, a funnel (ick) — are soon put to deadly use on a strung-up victim. The ensuing stream of red is all the more gruesome for being so matter-of-fact, though the sudden and comical appearance of an inquisitive poodle quickly eased at least one violently churning stomach. There are other interested animals in this story, and many more unsettling excuses to laugh. Yet while Mr. Alfredson takes a darkly amused attitude toward the little world he has fashioned such care, he also takes the morbid unhappiness of his young characters seriously. Both are achingly alone, and it is the ordinary fact of their loneliness rather than their extraordinary circumstances that makes the film more than the sum of its chills and estimable technique. Eli seizes on Oskar immediately, slipping her hand under his, writing him notes, becoming his protector, baring her fangs. “Are you a vampire?” he asks tremulously at one point. Her answer may surprise you, but it’s another of his questions — “Will you be my girlfriend?” — that will floor you. (Review © New York Times) |
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Man on Wire
Winner, Best Documentary (features), 2009 Academy Awards "This film is a celebration of human achievement; it soars with the promise that we are shackled to
the ground only by lack of imagination and will." Peter Howell, Toronto Star A man walks on a high-wire across the Twin Towers in one of the most wildly entertaining documentaries of recent year. This film of daredevil Philippe Petit, who brought together a motley crew to help him realise his dream of crossing from the top of one tower to the other in 1974, is an adventure tale that astonishes in every respect. The "heist" is actually Petit's team tensely prepping to stealthily enter the World Trade Center on Aug. 7, 1974, with doubts held by the crew's French members about some of the seemingly shady Yanks in their circle. The film is structured in a movie-within-a movie fashion, with the action of that day hurtling forward in segments, as Petit's background and previous high-wire stunts is told chronologically. Impressive from an archival standpoint is the electrifying yet pastoral color footage of Petit training for the Twin Tower walk with partner Annie Allix (who put aside her own dreams to support Petit's), longtime friend Jean-Louis Blondeau and Jean-Francois Heckel. Marsh brilliantly matches his images to the hypnotic and propulsive music of English minimalist composer Michael Nyman, including pieces from Nyman's masterpiece, "La traversee de Paris," and his collaborations with Peter Greenaway. It's a sublime choice that lifts Man on Wire to rare movie-watching giddiness. Petit's final walk -- seen here mainly in still photos -- is stunning enough, but the aftermath is unexpectedly emotional and overwhelming as human drama. The immediate effect on Petit of sudden, post-WTC notoriety mixes erotic comedy and personal loss that seems possible to be conveyed by only the best screenwriters. - Robert Koehler, Variety. |
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Katyn
Director: Andrzej Wajda Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Academy Awards, 2008 A towering presence in the world of post-World War II cinema, Andrzej Wajda has spent his career analysing in great detail Poland’s gradual social and political evolution with a considerable amount of sensitivity while maintaining an uncompromising attitude towards his complex subjects. Famous for drawing inspiration from Poland’s history, he has created a magnificent oeuvre of work that devastates even as it informs. Presented with an honourary Oscar in 2000 for his contributions to world cinema, Wajda himself is the son of a Polish cavalry officer who was murdered by the Soviets in what is known as the Katyn massacre – the subject of Katyn his latest and typically unflinching work. After Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland and following Joseph Stalin’s order, on September 17, 1939, all Polish Officers found themselves in Soviet slavery. Anna, the wife of an Uhlan Regiment captain is waiting for her man, and receives with disbelief all obvious evidence of his having been murdered by the Russians. The wife of a general, in April 1943, learns of her husband’s death after the Germans discovered mass graves of Polish officers in the Katyn Forest. Silence and lies about the crime break the heart of Agnieszka (Magdalena Cielecka), a sister of a pilot, who shared the lot of the other Polish soldiers. The only survivor is the captain’s friend Jerzy, who entered the ranks of the Polish People’s Army.
What is the life of women, waiting for their beloved in the Polish state after the war going to look like, they being still dependent on Soviet Russia? Will homeland and freedom still retain the same meaning for those who have accepted the new system? This latest offering from one of Europe’s greatest directors is a powerful work, forcing audiences to acknowledge the sheer scale of brutality meted out and the grievous consequences for the families affected. - Colm McAuliffe, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival 2008. "The great Polish director Andrzej Wajda musters the power of classical filmmaking and personal emotional investment ?to dramatize a stunning atrocity long covered up." Lisa Schwartzman, Entertainment Weekly. "Katyn is a powerful corrective to decades of distortion and forgetting in Polish history." AO Scott, NY Times. "As a portrait of hell on earth, Katyn deserves to be seen by anyone with a feeling for history, however horrifying it may be. Actually, it puts just about every other horror movie to shame." Andrew Sarris, New York Observer. |
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Frozen River 
Starring: Melissa Leo, Misty Upham, Charlie McDermott, Michael O'Keefe, Frozen River is an odd, compelling mix - a thriller about human trafficking and the unfolding of an unlikely friendshipbetween two desperate women in a desperate place in the dark chill of winter. Courtney Hunt’s drama brings us the intrigues of the ‘other border’ with America - the St. Lawrence River, across which a smuggling trade from Canada has thrived for centuries. At the centre of Hunt’s smuggling story is Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo of the TV series Homicide), a minimum-wage store clerk with two young sons in a crumbling trailer whose husband has just left town to gamble away the family’s down payment on a new trailer. Ray finds her abandoned car being driven by the sullen Lila (Misty Upham), a young mother from the Mohawk Reservation nearby who drives across the frozen St. Lawrence with illegal immigrants in the trunk. The women form a mistrustful bond to shuttle illegals between Indian reservations on both sides of the border. This odd partnership continues uneasily as the money trickles in and Ray’s bills start getting paid, but a Christmas Eve trip across the ice ends with the car and its human cargo in a hole in the frozen river. Ray and Lila must make a choice about who will pay when they are caught.
Hunt’s direction shows impressive composure for a first feature (expanded from an earlier short). The film’s visual and narrative complexity give it a gripping reality, while avoiding the ‘trailer-trash’ cliches that tend to be all over such stories. Hunt’s own lean script (with its deft sociology) and Reed Morano’s camera also guide the audience through life on minimum wage in a place where, for want of jobs, most people seem to work either in crime or law enforcement. Scenes that tumble through cars and trailers with handheld close-ups begin and end with bleak wide shots of the river and the distant horizon which frame the characters’ fatalism. As Ray, a mother raising two sons hand-to-mouth, Melissa Leo creates a chillingly vivid mix of pain and desperate practicality. Lila, played by Misty Upham, is beyond deadpan, a wounded child whose own child is taken away by her in-laws for a crime that is never disclosed. Charlie McDermott, as Ray’s teenage son, finds plenty of nuance as a young man witnessing his mother’s dilemma, while James Reilly is charming as his cheerful younger brother who doesn’t quite understand what’s going on. We’ll be hearing from these actors and this director again. - David D’Arcy / Screen I nternational. "Courtney Hunt's low-budget blue-collar thriller, Frozen River, is one of the most impressive feature debuts of the past several year. " Philip French, The Observer. "As a quiet celebration of ordinary women's resourcefulness, the film is well-crafted, sensitively acted and modestly affecting." Christopher Tookey, Daily Mail. "Original, sad, suspenseful and involving: the kind of work that helps independent American cinema retain its good name." Empire Magazine. |
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Tony Manero
Starring: Alfredo Castro, Amparo Noguera, Hector Morales, Paola Lattus, Elsa Pobletei Talk about self-delusion! The grotesque spectacle of a 52-year-old thug with a graying pompadour, stripped to his briefs in front of a mirror gracelessly imitating John Travolta’s dance moves from “Saturday Night Fever,” haunts Pablo Larraín’s film “Tony Manero” like a nightmare apparition. During his repeated visits to the nearly empty theater showing the film in Santiago, Chile, this obsessed fan, Raúl Peralta (Alfredo Castro), a petty criminal who lives on the outskirts of the city, mouths the dialogue spoken by Mr. Travolta’s character, Tony Manero, as though memorizing catechism. When he visits the theater one afternoon and discovers that “Saturday Night Fever” has been replaced by “Grease,” he goes berserk. Nothing is allowed to stand in the way of his indulging a tawdry fantasy that gives him his only sense of identity. “Tony Manero” is set in Santiago in 1978, four years into Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. As Raúl scuttles around the city like a rodent, ducking behind doorways at any sign of trouble, scenes of undercover policemen beating up and arresting suspected opponents of the dictatorship play out on the movie’s fringes without comment or elaboration. The handheld, sometimes out-of-focus camera, which trails him, often from behind, lends the action a queasy verisimilitude. For Raúl incidents of street violence are opportunities for robbery. From the window of his apartment he notices an old woman with groceries being mugged and runs downstairs to chase the crooks away. Escorting her to her home, he spies her color television set and promptly bludgeons her to death, pausing long enough to feed the cat and eat lunch from the same can. He pawns the television to buy chipped glass bricks for an illuminated dance floor like the one in “Saturday Night Fever.”
More than an indelible portrait of a sociopath with the soul of a zombie, “Tony Manero” is an extremely dark meditation on borrowed cultural identity. Poker faced, emotionally cauterized and sexually impotent (the scenes of Raúl’s trying and failing with women are unremittingly ugly), he symbolizes this Chilean director’s vision of a Latin American country mired in passivity and despair. For the illiterate Raúl, Tony Manero’s night of glory on a New York dance floor is the only dream in sight. Each week the tacky television contest in which he plans to impersonate Tony, strutting his dance moves in a white suit and black shirt, is devoted to a different star. In the movie’s opening scene he arrives a week early at the studio to find himself standing in line with a bunch of Chuck Norris look-alikes. Raúl is polishing his act in a run-down cantina where he leads a weekly revue in homage to his hero. His fellow performers not only buy his fantasy, they also look up to him. Wilma (Elsa Poblete), a Pinochet supporter who runs the cantina, and Cony (Amparo Noguera) and Pauli (Paola Lattus), a mother and teenage daughter who perform in the show, are all rivals for his affection. Goyo (Héctor Morales), the fourth member of the troupe, is a young man with polished dance moves who rents his own white suit intending to compete in the television contest; he is also secretly distributing anti-Pinochet literature. Unmentioned in a movie that touches glancingly on politics is the C.I.A.’s role in the 1973 coup that deposed Salvador Allende and installed Pinochet as president. “Tony Manero” implies that Raúl’s worship of a Hollywood movie is an indirect form of consorting with the oppressor. Although Mr. Larraín, who wrote the screenplay with Mr. Castro and Mateo Iribarren, was only 2 years old at the time the movie is set, he makes no bones about his disgust with Chile, both then and now. In his director’s statement, he writes, “With this story, I intended to take a harsh look at a society that is incapable of coming face to face with its recent past; a society whose hands are covered in blood but that tries to look stylish and trendy, dancing under flashy lights while ignoring others’ suffering; a country that turns its back on itself, in exchange for the dream of progress.” Stephen Holden, New York Times. New York Times Critics Pick "A memorably claustrophobic evocation of its time and place, as well as a reminder that the so-called escape offered by pop culture can sometimes be an escape into soul-sucking madness." Andrew O'Hehir, Salon. "Larrain evokes the bleakness and oppressiveness of life in a police state with much subtlety even as he poses a much larger question about cultural imperialism." Kevin Thomas, LA Times. |
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Sleep Furiously
Director: Gideon Koppel
Now more than ever we need films such as this: grave, measured, subtly comic and beautifully wrought, free of polemic and yet offering a new way of seeing that is as old as Arcady. sleep furiously is, simply, a masterpiece. - John Banville At the close of his recent and superb collection of essays, Gray's Anatomy, the political philosopher John Gray urges upon humanity a new quietism. "Other animals," he writes, "do not need a purpose in life. A contradiction to itself, the human animal cannot do without one. Can we not think of the aim of life as being simply to see?" It may seem an overly simplified exhortation given the dire predicament we have got ourselves into, yet would it not make at least a good start on the road to recovery from our present soul-sickness if we were to stand back and just look? Gideon Koppel would surely agree that it would, if we take as evidence of his life philosophy his profound and utterly beguiling film sleep furiously. Not that it is a 'philosophical' film in any earnest or tendentious sense. On the contrary, on the surface it seems no more than a series of carefully chosen moments from a year in the life of a small rural community, Trefeurig in mid Wales, where Koppel's parents, German Jewish refugees, settled after the war, and where the film-maker grew up. The title sleep furiously is a reference to Noam Chomsky, who in support of his linguistic theories famously offered "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously" as an example of a sentence that is nonsensical even though the grammar is perfectly correct. It is not clear what we are to take from this nudge in the ribs that Koppel delivers us; indeed the title, with its portentous lack of capitals, may put off some viewers, who might be forgiven for expecting yet another gnomic exercise in postmodernism. This would be a pity, for the film is blessedly free of pretentiousness and fashionable posing. It is simply - and it is simple in its sly way - a mutedly gorgeous, moving and deeply poetic work of art. Koppel must be the unfussiest film-maker since Robert Bresson. He sets up his camera and lets the scene unfold before it, holding the lens steady through long takes and allowing his subjects to wander offscreen and back on again as their actions dictate. Frequently his people are at work - teaching a class of small children, shearing sheep, arranging a church altar, rehearsing a choir - so absorbed in their tasks that they seem oblivious to the camera's eye fixed intently on them. Surely miles of 16mm film stock - shot in colour at once bleached and sumptuous - was consumed in the project. Or perhaps the Welsh are 'naturals', effortlessly capable of acting the part of themselves. It is Koppel's remarkable achievement to present the community of Trefeurig in such a straightforward manner, without heroics of spurious, piled-on 'emotion', while avoiding the usual clichés - eg Welsh people being 'natural singers' - and although he pays obeisance to Under Milk Wood, his film is less indulgent, and far less self-indulgent, than Dylan Thomas' play. These are real people, not 'characters' moulded in the maker's mind. The editing by the masterly Mario Battistel was done in Paris, a deliberate choice according to Koppel, taken in order to put an extra distance between himself and his material so that he might, as he writes: "engage with the material more freely. That is to say, I could be less influenced by my relationship with what lay beyond the screen and could respond to the authenticity of the moment, in terms of what was evoked rather than what was illustrated." The result is a film immediate in its human moments and yet austere to the point of abstraction in what is communicated "beyond the screen". If there is a central thread to the narrative it is the monthly visit by the mobile library van, driven by the librarian John Jones. Jones is a wonderful figure, and wonderfully representative in his vivid ordinariness of the time and the place. Man and van have their own signature tune, a jaunty little piano piece by the electronic composer Richard James, who calls himself Aphex Twin, which the viewer comes to greet with an exalted smile each time it returns - Koppel has written that music was a vital component from the outset, "not as an accompaniment, but as the different 'voices' of the key characters" - while the sight of the yellow van, frequently seen in long-shot creeping like a yellow bug through vast and lovely landscapes, is an emblem both of continuity and of the frailty of our human arrangements. If Jones is, so to speak, the male lead, then the female star is Koppel's mother Pip. And what a star she is: tiny, crop-haired, drolly humorous, an elfin figure picking her way deftly through the film accompanied by her dog Daisy and Daisy's son Jack. She is the settled and accepted outsider, a reminder of the great and fearful world that broods beyond the confines of this little valley. In what Koppel tells us was the first sequence he shot, Pip climbs with Daisy to the grave of her husband and lays a stone there for remembrance - one thinks immediately of Beckett's great late text, Ill Seen Ill Said - then walks home, a distant, diminutive figure against a great stand of sunlit trees thrashing slowly, enormously, in the wind; the same trees are seen again towards the close of the film from the same distant perspective, but this time bare and motionless in a snow-covered landscape. These are two of the most beautiful and moving sequences in sleep furiously. Indeed trees figure throughout; the very last, unforgettable image, after the credits have rolled, is of a single, leafing tree set seething by a passing breeze, as if a god were visiting there. The gods haunt this film, for we are in a kind of classic pastoral, where the nymphs are portly and wear aprons and make sponge cakes filled with jam, and the shepherds do not play pan pipes but tend their flocks with no less rough tenderness than did their Attic forebears. One of the most beautiful and mysteriously affecting sequences is shot from a high mountainside down into a rain-swept valley into which two lines of sheep straggle slowly from different directions to form a kind of ragged magic square. It is the inexplicable beauty of these images that one remembers long after the screen has gone dark. The film-maker Alex Cox described sleep furiously as "the least anthropocentric film I have ever seen", and surely it is. Koppel's vision sets man in his true context, as a part of creation and not lord over it. He has spoken of his admiration for W.G. Sebald, and sleep furiously is in the line of that new kind of post-humanist but entirely humane art of which Sebald was a leading practitioner before his untimely death in 2001. Now more than ever we need films such as this: grave, measured, subtly comic and beautifully wrought, free of polemic and yet offering a new way of seeing that is as old as Arcady. sleep furiously is, simply, a masterpiece. - John Banville © Sight & Sound. |
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