Capital Celluloid 2013 - Day 123: Fri May 3

TAKE YOUR PICK TONIGHT

1 Wolfen (Wadleigh, 1981): Phoenix Cinema, 11pm
Another brilliant midnight movie screening from the Cigarette Burns film club. More details on the film club's Facebook page here.

Here is the Cigarette Burns introduction:
It's 1981 and the Year of the Wolf. Released between Joe Dante's HOWLING and John Landis' AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, WOLFEN was swiftly over shadowed by the two other beasts. Left to rot on the back shelf like the decaying Bronx it depicts, WOLFEN is in a class of it's own, mixing Native American folklore with a gritty NYC cop, taking enough from the horror genre to raise the tension and enough from a crime thriller to keep you going. Your average gorehound was going to walk away a bit confused and perhaps even disappointed. Oscar winning director Michael Wadleigh laced his gritty NYC crime horror with heavy lashings of politics, taking a long hard look at the mistreatment of Native Americans at the hands of the American establishment and ultimately making one of the most interesting. intense, and underrated werewolf films of 1981.


Time Out review:
School-leavers whose ambitions lean towards criminal pathology will pick up useful tips on wielding the scalpel and the white sheet in this foray into the bleakly explicit world of the contemporary shocker: a werewolf movie for an ecology-conscious age. The last-reel process whereby the lurking terror breaks cover and is transformed into a 'sympathetic' but unconquerable force is smoothly convincing: we are a long way here from simply feeling a bit sorry for King Kong. The setting is two New Yorks: that of the multinational, politically-amoral corporations, and that of the slum wastelands, both with the same landlords. The camera's vision is a fresh one, and though the wolf's eye view sequences threaten at first to become a nuisance, they are soon justified as a dramatic device, and ultimately as essential to the plot.

Here is the trailer. 

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2 It's Such a Beautiful Day + The Don Hertzfeldt Experience: ICA Cinema, 8pm

Here's the ICA introduction to what promises to be a fascinating evening:
Join us for an evening of Don Hertzfeldt films, with Time Out's Tom Huddleston and Little White Lies' David Jenkins presenting Hertzfeldt's debut feature It's Such a Beautiful Day alongside a selection of his incredible short works. 

For almost 20 years, Don Hertzfeldt has been one of the world's most inventive, prodigiously talented and bracingly sardonic directors of hand-drawn animated film. It's Such a Beautiful Day is his scintillating feature debut, coming on the back of such celebrated (and Oscar-nominated) short works as Rejected, Wisdom Teeth and The Meaning Of Life

The film follows an anxiety-stricken stick man named Bill for whom the mundane tasks of everyday life prove Earth-shatteringly momentous. We join him on a bittersweet existential odyssey which takes in dead birds, big onions, lunchbox messages, trains, manatees, leaf-blowers and the eventual death and rebirth of the known universe. The film is a pocket-sized epic, incorporating the blistering deadpan of Buster Keaton, the narrative back-flipping of Charlie Kaufman, the blissful Zen contemplation of Yazujiro Ozu and the grand philosophical investigations of Terrence Malick. It's Such a Beautiful Day is filmmaking at its most original: like nothing you will have seen before.

The film's US release last year was greeted by a chorus of positive reviews: it currently has a 100% positive score on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics describing it as 'rapturous', 'evocative' and 'beautiful'. It's Such a Beautiful Day was also selected as one of the AV Club's top 10 films of 2012.

It's Such a Beautiful Day subsequently screens from Saturday 4 May.

Here's an idea of what to expect.

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