No1: Targets (Bogdanovich, 1967): Prince Charles Cinema, 1pm
This rare 35mm screening is also being shown on August 2nd. Details here.
Time Out review:
'Boris
Karloff in effect plays himself as Byron Orlok, a horror star on the
point of retiring, who suddenly confronts the reality of contemporary
American horror in the form of a psychopathic sniper (Tim O'Kelly) picking
off anyone he can see with a vast artillery of weapons. Peter Bogdanovich was
given the money to make the film by Roger Corman, who also allowed him
to use extensive footage from Corman's Poe movie The Terror in the
sequences at the drive-in cinema where the confrontation takes place.
The result is a fascinatingly complex commentary on American mythology,
exploring the relationship between the inner world of the imagination
and the outer world of violence and paranoia, both of which were
relevant to contemporary American traumas. It was Bogdanovich's first
film, and despite his subsequent success, he has yet to come up with
anything half as remarkable.'
David Pirie
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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No2: Romance and Cigarettes (Turturro, 2006): Garden Cinema, 8.45pm
Time Out review:
John Turturro’s first film as a writer-director, ‘Mac’, was an
impressive realist drama inspired by his construction-worker father. His
second, ‘Illuminata’, was a more ambitious if slightly clumsy affair
celebrating theatrical life. This, his third effort in the hyphenate
role, is in many ways a blend of the two, in that it’s a blue-collar
musical comedy-drama. So yes, it’s sometimes a little shaggy – the
pacing, particularly, stumbles towards the end – but it’s also
Turturro’s best yet, and one of the most personal, deliciously fresh
American films of recent years. The theatricality, complete with
characters breaking into dance and voicing their emotions loud and clear
in tolerably tacky old tunes like ‘A Man without Love’ and ‘Delilah’ is
appropriate, even though the protagonist, Nick (James Gandolfini), is a New York ironworker who shares his unremarkable suburban home with wife Kitty (Susan Sarandon)
and three grown-up daughters. Appropriate because for Nick life has
become all about performance: for one thing, when Kitty finds he’s
having an affair and his family turn against him, there’s the matter of
whether he’ll be able to act his way out of trouble; for another, if
he’s to hang on to improbable paramour Tula (a physically voracious,
foul-mouthed lass from the north of England played by an almost
unrecognisable Kate Winslet), he needs to keep his end up in all sorts
of other ways. It’s not as if he’s getting much help from his profoundly
unreconstructed fellow-worker Angelo (Steve Buscemi); Kitty, on the other hand, can count among her cohorts family (Christopher Walken), friends (Barbara Sukowa), even a Holy Father (Eddie Izzard). The
story’s the stuff of domestic melodrama, then, save that it’s played
for laughs as well as emotional effect. Turturro pulls off a very tricky
balancing act, by trusting in the expertise of his performers and by
infusing the whole film with energy and affection. Even the very
plentiful in-your-face bawdiness is liberating in the Chaucerian/
Rabelaisian tradition rather than sniggeringly, timidly puerile as it so
often is in the movies. Indeed, it’s all part of a fond tribute to the
vitality and passionate emotional integrity of a certain kind of
working-class experience, rooted in the knowledge that goodness, real
goodness, can be found in the unlikeliest creatures.
Geoff Andrew
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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