TCM continues their Oscar-nominated month, bringing us a few choices we haven’t featured before, including Sophie’s Choice, which we all hope we never have to make, plus Bananas, The Graduate, and Chinatown. Also, IFC has a chance to catch up with or re-visit Soderbergh’s Solaris. Some other great repeats, especially on Sunday, when it looks like TCM is trying for a stranglehold on my schedule.

Monday, February 8

9:15am – TCM – Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Frank Capra puts on his idealist hat to tell the story of Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), an inexperienced young man appointed as a junior senator because the corrupt senior senator thinks he’ll be easy to control. But Smith doesn’t toe the party line, instead launching a filibuster for what he believes in. Wonderful comedienne Jean Arthur is the journalist who initially encourages Smith so she can get a great story from his seemingly inevitable downfall, but soon joins his cause.
1939 USA. Director: Frank Capra. Starring: James Stewart, Jean Arthur, Claude Rains, Eugene Pallette, Thomas Mitchell.
Must See

12:15am (9th) – TCM – Sophie’s Choice
Meryl Streep’s second Oscar came for this film, playing an Auschwitz survivor who was forced to make an impossible choice.
1982 USA. Director: Alan J. Pakula. Starring: Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Peter MacNicol.
Newly Featured!

5:30pm – IFC – Bananas
One of Woody Allen’s earlier films, when he was still in full-on crazy comedy mode. This time around, he rebounds from a bad break-up by heading to South America to become involved in a rebellion in a banana republic.
1971 USA. Director: Woody Allen. Starring: Woody Allen, Louise Lasser, Carlos Montalban.
Newly Featured!

Tuesday, February 9

9:50am – IFC – Primer
Welcome to sci-fi at its most cerebral. You know how most science-dependent films include a non-science-type character so there’s an excuse to explain all the science to audience? Yeah, this film doesn’t have that character, so no one ever explains quite how the time travel device at the center of the film works. Or even that it is, actually, a time-travel device. This is the sci-fi version of getting thrown into the deep end when you can’t swim. Without floaties.
2004 USA. Director: Shane Carruth. Starring: Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Casey Gooden, Anand Upadhyaya, Carrie Crawford.
(repeats at 3:45pm)

8:00pm – TCM – Ninotchka
“Garbo Laughs!” proclaimed the advertisements, playing up the comedic factor of the usually implacable Greta Garbo’s 1939 film. True enough, though it takes a while for the charms of Paris and Melvyn Douglas to warm the Communist Ninotchka to the point of laughter. Pairing up director Ernst Lubitsch and writers Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder (who had yet to become a director himself) turns out to be a brilliant move, as Ninotchka has just the right combination of wit and sophistication.
1939 USA. Director: Ernst Lubitsch. Starring: Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas.

12:15am (10th) – TCM – Network
Newscaster Peter Finch is as mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore. To see why, watch this incendiary unmasking of the ruthless world of network television. Finch, Dunaway, and Straight all won Oscars for their roles.
1976 USA. Director: Sidney Lumet. Starring: William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, Beatrice Straight.

Wednesday, February 10

6:30am – IFC – Solaris (2002)
Kurt recently made a case for Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris being better than Tarkovsky’s original. I still haven’t seen either, but here’s your chance to re-evaluate Soderbergh’s, should you so desire.
2002 USA. Director: Steven Soderbergh. Starring: George Clooney, Natascha McElhone.
(repeats at 2:30pm)

7:00am – Sundance – Ran
Akira Kurosawa’s inspired transposition of King Lear into medieval Japan, mixing Shakespeare and Japanese Noh theatre tradition like nobody’s business.
1985 Japan. Director: Akira Kurosawa. Starring: Tatsuya Nakadai, Akira Terao, Jinpachi Nezu, Daisuke Ryu.
Must See

10:15am – TCM – On the Town
Sailors on leave Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munshin hit New York City, spending the day sightseeing and searching for Kelly’s dream girl Vera-Ellen, meanwhile picking up Betty Garrett and Ann Miller for the other boys. Not much plot here, but enough to precipitate some of the best song and dance numbers on film. Also one of the first musicals shot on location.
1949 USA. Directors: Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly. Starring: Gene Kelly, Vera-Ellen, Frank Sinatra, Betty Garrett, Ann Miller, Jules Munshin, Alice Pearce.
Must See

8:00pm – TCM – 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 3:00am on the 11th)

Thursday, February 11

12:00M – TCM – Singin’ in the Rain
Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly team up for what is now usually considered one of the greatest musicals of all time. Inspired by songs written by MGM producer Arthur Freed at the beginning the sound era, Singin’ in the Rain takes that seismic shift in film history for its setting, focusing on heartthrob screen couple Don Lockwood (Kelly) and Lina Lamont (the hilarious Jean Hagen) as the transition into sound – problem being that Lamont’s voice, like many actual silent screen stars, doesn’t fit her onscreen persona. Hollywood’s often best when it turns on its own foibles, and this is no exception.
1952 USA. Directors: Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly. Starring: Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor, Jean Hagen.
Must See

2:00am (12th) – TCM – The Band Wagon
There are many reasons to consider The Band Wagon among the best movie musicals ever made. The satirical plot involving a Shakespearean director who tries to turn a lighthearted musical into a doom-and-gloom version of Faust, the bright yet sardonic script and score by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (who basically appear in the film as the characters played by Nanette Fabrey and Oscar Levant), the last really great role for Fred Astaire (maybe Funny Face is a contender, but barely), and of course, the never-surpassed beauty of dance numbers like “Dancing in the Dark” with Fred and Cyd Charisse. But even if it didn’t have all that, I’d still rank it among my favorites for the epic “Girl Hunt Ballet” number spoofing hard-boiled detective fiction.
1953 USA. Director: Vincente Minnelli. Starring: Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Jack Buchanan, Oscar Levant, Nanette Fabrey.
Must See

Friday, February 12

6:45am – IFC – Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
Lawrence Sterne’s 1769 proto-postmodern novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy has long been considered unfilmable. So what does director Michael Winterbottom do? He makes a film about the difficulty of filming Tristram Shandy. Winterbottom’s film is something of an experiment, but it’s a delightful one, showing the behind-the-scenes antics of production as well as highlighting the circularity and self-defeating narrative of Sterne’s novel in the film-within-the-film.
2005 UK. Director: Michael Winterbottom. Starring: Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Keeley Hawes, Shirley Henderson, Jeremy Northam.
(repeats at 12:00N)

12:00N – TCM – Mildred Pierce
In quite probably Joan Crawford’s best role (only perhaps excepting her catty “other woman” in The Women), she plays a woman trying to work her way up in the world from lowly waitress to entrepreneur, all the while dealing with her shrew of a daughter. Melodrama isn’t a particularly prized genre these days, but films like Mildred Pierce show how good melodramas can be with the right confluence of studio style, director, and star.
1945 USA. Director: Michael Curtiz. Starring: Joan Crawford, Zachary Scott, Ann Blyth, Eve Arden.
Must See

5:30pm – IFC – Manhattan
In one of Woody Allen’s best films, he’s a neurotic intellectual New Yorker (surprise!) caught between his ex-wife Meryl Streep, his teenage mistress Mariel Hemingway, and Diane Keaton, who just might be his match. Black and white cinematography, a great script, and a Gershwin soundtrack combine to create near perfection.
1979 USA. Director: Woody Allen. Starring: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, Mariel Hemingway, Alan Alda.
Must See

8:00pm – TCM – The Graduate
Benjamin Braddock has just graduated college and doesn’t know what to do with his life. So he starts an affair with his father’s business partner, Mrs. Robinson. To be fair, she WAS trying to seduce him. A sharply written and realized coming-of-age story – perhaps one of the best Hollywood has ever made.
1967 USA. Director: Mike Nichols. Starring: Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross.
Newly Featured!

1:30am (13th) – TCM – Chinatown
A crime film simultaneously resurrecting many of the tropes of film noir (kicking off what would become neo-noir) and telling a very timely story of political corruption, with the kind of intensity that only Jack Nicholson could put across.
1974 USA. Director: Roman Polanski. Starring: Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, John Huston.
Must See
Newly Featured!

Saturday, February 13

8:00am – TCM – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Charles Laughton plays the put-upon hunchback Quasimodo, a young Maureen O’Hara the lovely Esmerelda in one of the best film versions of Victor Hugo’s classic of gothic romanticism.
1939 USA. Director: William Dieterle. Starring: Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Hara, Cedric Hardwicke, Thomas Mitchell, Edmond O’Brien.

12:15pm – TCM – Jezebel
Bette Davis got one of her Oscars for this film, playing a suspiciously Scarlett O’Hara-like Southern belle the year before Gone With the Wind made it onto the screen.
1938 USA. Director: William Wyler. Starring: Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, Fay Bainter.

5:45pm – TCM – Roman Holiday
Audrey Hepburn’s first lead role, and the one that immediately catapulted her into stardom. She’s a princess who runs away to try out being normal, and spends an adventurous day exploring Rome with incognito journalist Gregory Peck. Pretty much delightful right the way through.
1953 USA. Director: William Wyler. Starring: Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Albert.

8:00pm – IFC – Secretary
Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader – making sado-masochism fun since 2002! But seriously, this was Maggie’s breakout role, and it’s still probably her best, as a damaged young woman whose only outlet is pain. And despite the subject, Secretary is somehow one of the sweetest and most tender romances of recent years.
2002 USA. Director: Steven Shainberg. Starring:James Spader, Maggie Gyllenhaal.
(repeats at 2:05am on the 14th)

2:00am (14th) – TCM – Blowup
In Michelangelo Antonioni’s first (only?) English-language film, a photographer captures an image in the background of a shot that may or may not be a murder. Sounds like a detective film, but it’s far more abstract and distancing than detective stories can usually afford to be. Full of sixties-ness.
1966 UK. Director: Michelangelo Antonioni. Starring: David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, John Castle.
Must See

Sunday, February 14

6:15am – TCM – Notorious
One of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films, and one of the greatest spy films ever. Spy Cary Grant recruits Ingrid Bergman because of her relationship with suspected enemy spy Claude Rains – but how far is she willing to go? Simply fantastic on every level.
1946 USA. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. Starring: Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains.
Must See

8:00am – TCM – High Society
This is not one of the best music-centric films ever made, but it is the musical version of The Philadelphia Story, with both Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra crooning it up with songs by Cole Porter. Oh, and one of Grace Kelly’s last roles before she retired to become a princess and stuff. Still, you wish with that pedigree that it were better than it is. Ah, well.
1956 USA. Director: Charles Walters. Starring: Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Grace Kelly, Celeste Holm, Louis Calhern.

8:15am – IFC – Picnic at Hanging Rock
I have a love-hate relationship with Aussie director Peter Weir. His films are almost always slow and methodical, which works for me sometimes and not others. It works in Picnic at Hanging Rock, one of his earlier films, in which a group of schoolgirls goes into the wilderness for a picnic and mysteriously disappear.
1975 Australia. Director: Peter Weir. Starring: Anne-Louise Lambert, Rachel Roberts, Vivean Gray, Tony Llewellyn-Jones, Karen Robson.

12:00N – TCM – The More the Merrier
A World War II housing shortage has Charles Coburn, Joel McCrea and Jean Arthur sharing an apartment; soon Coburn is matchmaking for McCrea and Arthur, and we get a wonderful, adorable romance out of it.
1943 USA. Director: George Stevens. Starring: Jane Arthur, Joel McCrea, Charles Coburn.

4:00pm – TCM – The Lady Eve
Barbara Stanwyck and her father Charles Coburn are cardplayers, cheating cruise ship denizens of their wealth. Millionaire (and snake afficianado) Henry Fonda is a good mark, especially since he’s a bit dense and spacey. Stanwyck’s plot is hugely elaborate, only a little muddled by her falling in love with Fonda as well, and she’s a delight from start to finish. As she usually is.
1941 USA. Director: Preston Sturges. Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Charles Coburn, William Demarest, Eugene Pallette.
Must See

6:00pm – TCM – Ball of Fire
Howard Hawks tries to recapture a little bit of Bringing Up Baby in this tale of a showgirl (Barbara Stanwyck, who’s trying to recapture a bit of The Lady Eve) who ends up among a bunch of stuffy professors, including Gary Cooper. Ball of Fire isn’t as memorable as either of those other films, but it has its own charm, and it’s certainly a lot of fun.
1942 USA. Director: Howard Hawks. Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper, Dana Andrews, S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall.

8:00pm – TCM – Casablanca
Against all odds, one of the best films Hollywood has ever produced, focusing on Bogart’s sad-eyed and world-weary expatriot Rick Blaine, his former lover Ingrid Bergman, and her current husband Paul Henreid, who needs safe passage to America to escape the Nazis and continue his work with the Resistance. It’s the crackling script that carries the day here, and the wealth of memorable characters that fill WWII Casablanca with life and energy.
1943 USA. Director: Michael Curtiz. Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains.
Must See

10:00pm – TCM – The African Queen
One of several films John Huston and Humphrey Bogart made together pits Bogart against the Amazon river – and straight-laced missionary Katharine Hepburn, who is forced to travel with him to escape Germany enemies. Well, boats are small, and one things leads to another, you know.
1951 USA. Director: John Huston. Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, Robert Morley.

4:00am (15th) – IFC – Shadow of the Vampire
What if actor Max Schreck, who played the vampire in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, actually WAS a vampire and kept eating various members of the cast and crew? That’s the premise set forth by this slight but entertaining film, with John Malkovich as Murnau and Willem Dafoe as the eccentric Schreck.
2000 USA. Director: E. Elias Merhige. Starring: John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe, Cary Elwes, Catherine McCormack.

An afternoon visit to my local video store (the most excellent Videoflicks) made me think about the 2006 film Ten Nights Of Dreams. Not because they had it featured anywhere (it’s sadly not well known), but because I came across the new release of another omnibus film – the recent New York, I Love You. While others in these parts quite enjoyed that film, I’m still smarting from the work in progress print I saw over a year ago. It made me think of, in my opinion, a much better omnibus film…

Written by author Natsume Soseki as a series of ten short stories, the fantastical dreams of Ten Nights Of Dreams cover a wealth of fleeting moments and feelings via different styles and tones. Soseki became quite an accomplished and famous author in his relatively short life – succumbing to a stomach ulcer at the age of 49, he still wrote very popular Japanese novels such as “Botchan” and “I Am A Cat” – and was granted the honour of appearing on the 1000 Yen bank note from 1984-2004. He must have been drawn to the device of using dreams for these stories, because it lets him dabble across a variety of different themes without really having to be concerned about specific plot or character continuity. That’s not to say that there’s no structure to the individual stories, but be prepared to just let yourself float with each individual director’s visualization of their interpretation of Soseki’s writing.
 

11 different directors take the helm (2 collaborating on one film and another handling both a film and the prologue/epilogue sequences), so there’s enough change of pace to keep the viewer on their toes. Like most anthology films, you have to be ready every so often to switch gears and reset yourself as a new story begins (about every 10 minutes or so in this case), but it shouldn’t be too much of a challenge here since whatever perceived reality you’ve assumed for any one story is tenuous at best…
 

The film is really asking for the viewer to simply just give in to the dreams and pick and choose your own meanings and ideas from the thoughts flying around you. Though the prologue sets up the idea of a riddle of the Ten Nights Of Dreams, I can’t help but think that’s simply thrown into the mix to encourage the viewer (or reader in the case of the original stories) to attempt to make connections between the dreams simply as an exercise in creative thinking. There’s no obvious through line across the stories, but more than one of the segments touched on themes like loneliness, the relative nature of time and the fragility of childhood memories. And they each have their own way of making you feel somewhat unsettled.
 

The opening two dreams (the second being one of Kon Ichikawa’s final films) are confusing affairs that don’t seem to have any foothold in linear time. Though somewhat slow moving, they set the stage with their eye catching (though completely different) visual approaches and allow the quicker paced, more entertaining middle section of the film to get away with a lot more – the third and fourth segments have nods to J-Horror while the fifth borders on lunacy (but has a great final sequence). The sixth segment is one of my favourites – an artist named Uneki dances robotically for most of the film (his dance sequence wouldn’t have felt out of place in a film such as Funky Forest) before carving out a huge head from wood with one strike to it. The seventh uses some interesting animation techniques to create a fine feast for the eyes, but suffers somewhat with an awkward English voiceover which might be characterized as ponderous…So there’s quite the variety of tone to each story, but that’s to be expected when your list of directors includes Ichikawa, Takashi Shimizu (Ju-On: The Grudge), Nobuhiro Yamashita (Linda, Linda, Linda), Akio Jissoji (Rampo Noir) and Yudai Yamaguchi (Battlefield Baseball). Yamaguchi’s closing segment, by the way, is the funniest twisted story of the bunch. Let’s just say it put me off pork for awhile…
 

With only a few slow spots, the film succeeds at not only making me want to read the original stories, but also to understand Soseki himself as well as the many and varied viewpoints of the cast of directors. The lack of consistency in the approaches to the source material is in my mind a benefit to the film as a whole. I mean, do your dreams always look the same?
 

Looks like they’re playing up Adèle Blanc-Sec as an adventurer looking into a supernatural danger, with a lot of Indiana Jones-esque touches. The trailer and description make me think a bit of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which doesn’t sound like a good thing if you’re thinking of the craptastic film, but the original comic series is quite good. I certainly hope that Besson is able to make this into a fun, entertaining romp that we’ll be eagerly awaiting on our shores. In any case, I’m always up for adventure/mystery stories with strong female protagonists.

Thanks to Quiet Earth (and Marina!) for alerting us to this. Trailer after the jump.

On his site where he posted the video, Joe talked about the experience:

Albert proposed an off-kilter writing exercise, and then Metaphorest’s beautifully strange short story inspired it all. I read the story aloud, Jenyffer.Maria started drawing the characters, Tori animated Jen’s drawings, Lula and I did a live-action rendition, Lawrie Brewster took the project to soaring heights with his gorgeous visuals, and along the way there was the help, encouragement and roughly 180 contributions from throughout our community. We brought it to Sundance, and Nathan coaxed the lush and vast music out of the newly coined hitRECorchestra. (Good_Girl_Indie has written out a fabulously detailed timeline documenting what happened and when along this RECord’s progression.)

Not only did we close our (two) official hitRECord screening(s) in the New Frontier Microcinema with this piece, but the next day, Sundance added it as a short film to play before the award-winning feature HOMEWRECKER on a much bigger screen.

I actually watched the thing again just now. And I can whole-heartedly say that, besides the progressive methodology with which it was made, and besides the warm reception it received at Sundance, just purely as a little piece of art, as a short film, as a RECord — I’m as proud of Morgan M. Morgansen’s Date with Destiny as I am of any work I’ve ever done.

This is very cool stuff and I really dug this short film. I’m looking forward to seeing whatever else these folks can put together in the future. And if you’re feeling your creative juices flowing, skip on over to the site and see what you can contribute.

And here’s a video highlighting their Sundance experience:

In a pre-youtube age, Ethan Mather made a series of smile-worthy and observative mini-films called simply “Sodapop.” For each under-a-minute-in-length film, the gag was that of someone opening a can of soda in the auteur stylings of multiple different directors (Woody Allen, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese). Taking the same concept, more than a decade later, and applying to the Superbowl broadcast, is this winner of a video from director Andrew Bouvé, featuring Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, Wes Anderson, Jean-Luc Godard, and Werner Herzog.

Hattip to MovieCityIndie. Video is tucked under the seat.

Hattip to MovieCityIndie.