Taxi Driver, playing at 2:00am on September 30th on TCM.
A few to highlight this week: Martin Scorsese’s electrifying Taxi Driver is playing late Tuesday/early Wednesday on TCM, the small but highly worthwhile The Station Agent is on Wednesday on IFC, and TCM is showing a Marx Brothers double-feature Friday morning.
Monday, September 28
5:10am – Sundance – That Obscure Object of Desire
Luis Buñuel, ever one to come up with outlandish conceits, here directs two women playing the same role. The result is trippy and mesmerizing.
1977 France/Spain. Director: Luis Buñuel. Starring: Fernandy Rey, Carole Bouquet, Ángela Molina.
6:55am – IFC – Wild Strawberries
On his way to accept an honorary degree, elderly medical doctor Victor Sjöström thinks back and re-evaluates his life while being plagued by nightmares. Sounds kinda depressing, but then again, it is Ingmar Bergman. And he has a way of making depressing seem AWESOME.
1957 Sweden. Director: Ingmar Bergman. Starring: Victor Sjöstroöm, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Björnstrand.
9:00am – Fox Movie Channel – The Mark of Zorro
Not perhaps one of the greatest adventure films ever made, but a perfectly servicable one, and quite enjoyable for fans of Zorro. Tyrone Power was Fox’s version of Errol Flynn, and though he doesn’t have quite the panache that Flynn does, he’s still fun.
1940 USA. Director: Rouben Mamoulian. Starring: Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Basil Rathbone, Gale Sondergaard, Eugene Pallette.
Newly Featured!
12:00M – IFC – The New World
Terrence Malick may not make many films, but the ones he does make, wow. Superficially the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, The New World is really something that transcends mere narrative – this is poetry on film. Every scene, every shot has a rhythm and an ethereal that belies the familiarity of the story we know. I expected to dislike this film when I saw it, quite honestly. It ended up moving me in ways I didn’t know cinema could.
2005 USA. Director: Terrence Malick. Starring: Colin Farrell, Q’orianka Kilcher, Christian Bale, Christopher Plummer.
Must See
(repeats at 12:45pm on the 29th)
12:00M – Sundance – Man on Wire
I haven’t taken the opportunity to see last year’s highly-acclaimed documentary about high-wire walker Philippe Petit yet, but here it is already on Sundance.
2008 UK/USA. Director: James Marsh. Starring: Philippe Petit, Jean François Heckel, Jean-Louis Blondeau.
(repeats at 12:00M on the 30th/1st)
But it’s not much fun if you can only see it yourself, right? Well, you can also add your friends on Flickchart if they’re already there (start with me, if you want – I’m 
So what’s next for Nathan and Jeremy? Well, first off, something I’ve been asking them about for a long time: A user-submission system to help finish building their database. I mentioned I’ve been using Flickchart for months, and Nathan’s been after me to feature it on RowThree for nearly as long. My deal was that they mostly had popular, newer, American films in the database and that as much as I enjoyed using Flickchart, I didn’t feel like it could be pushed as a competent rating system, at least not for our cinephile-leaning readership, until it had some basic classics like, oh, 
(4.5/5)
Young Ana has two questions for her older sister Isabel: Why did the monster kill the little girl, and why did the villagers kill the monster? The fact that she doesn’t wholly connect the two events together perhaps makes it less surprising that she soon identifies much more with the monster than the villagers (the lack of perceived causal connection between the two also indicates to the audience that we shouldn’t look for exact 1:1 correlations between 
Isabel effectively replaces the mythology of the movie with mythology of her own, fundamentally affecting Ana’s imagination and actions through the rest of the film. Ana becomes obsessed with finding Frankenstein, returning to the abandoned house time after time. She feels that he would be a friend to her – though it isn’t clear in the film, her quiet shyness seems to make her something of an anomaly among the village children. A few events involving a deserter soldier eventually occur near the house that drive Ana even further into her imagination, and perhaps into madness. The thing that makes all of this so fascinating is writer/director Victor Erice’s understanding of imagination – everything Ana does and sees is filtered through her imagination and her imaginative perception of the film, and as such, everything makes perfect sense, even though trying to make direct connections with 
In fact, perhaps the greatest thing about the film as a whole is Erice’s extremely subtle approach. In one violent scene that is a turning point in the film, he shows nothing but distant gunfire, then cuts to the aftermath. When Ana first visits the abandoned house, the forbidding darkness inside contrasts so strongly with the bright outdoors that it looks like an impenetrable barrier to entrance, creating through a basic visual an intense sense of mystery and dread. Whatever the mother is doing with her letter-writing is never made clear – we retain the children’s in-the-dark viewpoint on adult matters. This subtlety yields a moody, mesmerizing quality, with the sense that everything is happening just under the surface – reinforcing that the driving force in the film is not anything that actually happens, but what happens in the imagination.
