Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 59: Sat Feb 28

La Haine (Kassovitz, 1995):
Reel Islington, Resource for London, 356 Holloway Rd, London, N7 6PA, 2pm

This screens as part of the Reel Islington film festival. Full details can be found here.

Here is their introduction:
This French film raises issues about police brutality, criminality and disaffected youth in the surburbs of Paris that are relevant in cities across the world.  The film will be followed by a discussion of the themes raised by the film, with a focus on how they manifest in the Islington and Holloway community.  There will also be a short presentation by Richard Frankland from Prospex.

Richard “Beef” Frankland is the CEO of Prospex, a youth work charity based in Holloway North London. He has been involved in Youth Work for over 30 years in various ways from volunteering to full time. His youth work experience has seen him run youth clubs, work in uniformed organisations, as the Youth Pastor at Morden Baptist Church, teaching RE and music in a primary school, detached work, social action projects in the UK and abroad and running Prospex since 2007. Prospex works with disadvantaged young people through its Street Teams, Youth Hubs and One2One support and works with around 360 young people on a weekly basis.

Time Out review:
Twenty-four hours in the Paris projects: an Arab boy is critically wounded in hospital, gut-shot, and a police revolver has found its way into the hands of a young Jewish skinhead, Vinz (Cassel), who vows to even the score if his pal dies. Vinz hangs out with Hubert (Koundé) and Saïd (Taghmaoui). They razz each other about films, cartoons, nothing in particular, but always the gun hovers over them like a death sentence, the black-and-white focal point for all the hatred they meet with, and all they can give back. Kassovitz has made only one film before (the droll race-comedy Métisse), but La Haine puts him right at the front of the field: this is virtuoso, on-the-edge stuff, as exciting as anything we've seen from the States in ages, and more thoroughly engaged with the reality it describes. He combats the inertia and boredom of his frustrated antagonists with a thrusting, jiving camera style which harries and punctuates their rambling, often very funny dialogue. The politics of the piece are confrontational, to say the least, but there is a maturity and depth to the characterisation which goes beyond mere agitprop: society may be on the point of self-combustion, but this film betrays no appetite for the explosion. A vital, scalding piece of work.
Tom Charity

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 58: Fri Feb 27

Cockfighter (Hellman, 1974): Genesis Cinema, 7pm

This Warren Oates double-bill (Cockfighter is showing with Drum) is presented by the Good, Bad, Unseen Film Club.

Chicago Reader review:
Except for Iguana, which is almost completely unknown, this wry 1974 feature is probably the most underrated work by Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop). Shot by Nestor Almendros on location in Georgia (partly in Flannery O'Connor's hometown, which seems appropriate), it follows the absurdist progress of a man who trains fighting cocks (Warren Oates in one of his best performances) and who takes a vow of silence after his hubris nearly puts him out of the game, though he continues to narrate the story offscreen. Produced by Roger Corman as an exploitation item for the drive-ins, this performed so badly in that capacity that it was recut and retitled more than once (as Born to Kill, Wild Drifter, and Gamblin' Man). But as a dark comedy and closet art movie, it delivers and lingers. With Richard B. Shull, Harry Dean Stanton, Millie Perkins, and Troy Donahue.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 57: Thu Feb 26

Cathy Come Home (Loach, 1966): The Russet, 17 Amhurst Terrace, E8, 7.45pm

The Cinereal film club present a monthly 16mm film screening at The Russet arts cafe. Tonight's is Ken Loach's groundbreaking TV play Cathy Come Home.

Here is the Cinereal introduction:
Jeremy Sandford‘s drama about a young family’s slide into homelessness and poverty was a defining moment in 1960s television, demonstrating how far drama could influence the political agenda. The controversy generated by Cathy Come Home led to public outrage at the state of housing in Britain, and gave a welcome boost to the (coincidental) launch of the homelessness charity Shelter a few days after the play was first broadcast, as part of the BBC’s The Wednesday Play strand.

With its abandonment of the confines of the studio in favour of location filming, and its innovative use of documentary techniques – owing something to the Free Cinema movement associated with filmmakers like Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz – Cathy played an important part in the development of television drama at a time when writers were attempting to take the form into a new territory, distinct from its theatrical origins. Loach himself had been attempting to break free of the usual restrictions of TV drama since the early ’60s, notably with the series Diary of a Young Man (BBC, 1963) and an earlier Wednesday Play, ‘Up the Junction’ (BBC, tx. 3/11/1965), which also starred Carol White (as did his first cinema release, Poor Cow (1967)).

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 56: Wed Feb 25

My Own Private Idaho (Van Sant, 1991): Cinema Museum, 7.30pm

This is the second film in the VITO Project, monthly screenings inspired by Vito Russo's groundbreaking film The Celluloid Closet.

Here is the Cinema Museum introduction:
ReShape and the Cinema Museum present the VITO Project, a series of free monthly screenings bringing generations of LGBTs together to provide an alternative space to mix, watch films and share ideas. We will be screening My Own Private Idaho (1991), directed by Gus Van Sant and starring River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, James Russo and William Richert. This was chosen by the audience at the showing of The Celluloid Closet (1995), and will be followed by an onstage discussion.

Chicago Reader review:
Gus Van Sant's 1990 feature, his best prior to Elephant, is a simultaneously heartbreaking and exhilarating road movie about two male hustlers (River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves) in the Pacific northwest. Phoenix, a narcoleptic from a broken home, is essentially looking for a family, while Reeves, whose father is mayor of Portland, is mainly fleeing his. The style is so eclectic that it may take some getting used to, but Van Sant, working from his own story for the first time, brings such lyrical focus to his characters and his poetry that almost everything works. Even the parts that show some strain—like the film's extended hommage to Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight—are exciting for their sheer audacity. Phoenix was never better, and Reeves does his best with a part that's largely Shakespeare's Hal as filtered through Welles.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 55: Tue Feb 24

Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver) & Aurélia Steiner (Melbourne) [Duras, 1979]:
Cine Lumiere, 6.45pm

This is an A Nos Amours film club presentation and here is their website article on tonight's Duras double-bill:

Marguerite Duras is a celebrated pillar of modernist French writing – above all perhaps for Moderato Cantabile, her superb novel of 1958, or L'amant (The Lover), her memoir of 1984. But she also made distinctive, experimental, intensely authored films, notably India Song of 1975. Her screenplay for Alain Resnais's masterpiece Hiroshima mon amour in 1959 earned her an Oscar nomination - astonishing for such a peerless exercise in rigorous high-brow intention. Duras - whether working with words, images or both together - is a screen poet, peerless at registering poignant, nuanced sadness. She disposes of the burden of the heavy furniture of naturalism, character and plot, aiming instead for purity, rhythm and clarity.

Cine Lumiere introduction:
Marguerite Duras is known best as a pillar of modernist French writing. But she also made distinctive experimental films, notably India Song in 1975, in which she detaches a voiced text from image, an effect that makes for a prayerful, meditative mood. She uses the same process in these two Aurelia Steiner films, blending her words to the images photographed by Pierre Lhomme, casting an incantatory spell, in which we experience a state of waking dream.

Here (and above) is an extract.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 54: Mon Feb 23

Rolling Thunder (Flynn, 1977): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

This film is part of the Taste of Revenge season at the Prince Charles. More details here.

Guardian review:
Rolling Thunder was written by Paul Schrader and – like Sydney Pollack's The Yakuza, written by Schrader and his brother Leonard – it signposts themes and imagery that would obsess Schrader in his own movies: Vietnam veterans, samurai ethics, and orgasmic explosions of cathartically violent revenge. Oh, and horribly mutilated hands. POWs Rane (William Devane) and Voden (Tommy Lee Jones) return to Texas after years of torture in a Hanoi prison. Rane's wife leaves him and his young son barely knows him. Rewarded by his hometown with a silver dollar for every day of his captivity, Rane is soon robbed of it by four men who kill his family and torture him (severing his hand in the kitchen-sink Dispose-All) to learn the money's whereabouts. Rane – now hook-handed, seething, armed to the teeth and partnered by Jones – spends the rest of the movie exacting his bloody revenge, and it's no less savage today than it seemed 30-odd years ago, climaxing with a pile of corpses in a Juárez whorehouse, as all movies should. Would it surprise you to learn that Tarantino loves it?
John Patterson

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2015 - Day 53: Sun Feb 22

Diamonds Are Forever (Hamilton, 1971): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm

The Prince Charles Cinema continues its full 007 Retrospective showing every James Bond movie over the coming months. You can see all the details of the screenings here.

The press reviews of the films don't normally capture the excitement of this retrospective for Bond fans and I have been recommending the Blogalongabond series by Neil Alcock (aka @theincrediblesuit on Twitter). Here is his take on tonight's movie.

Here's Xan Brooks with an excellent critique of Diamonds Are Forever for the Guardian series My Favourite Bond film:
No doubt each era gets the Bond it deserves. Cubby Broccoli's franchise started out in the early 60s fired by a sleek moral certitude, prowling a world of clearly defined good and evil before slipping into jokey self-parody during the mid-to-late 70s. Diamonds, though, is the missing link, the crucial transition; ideally placed at the turn of the decade and implicitly haunted by noises off in the nation at large. It's a Bond film in which the old glamour has lost its sparkle and the resolute hero has lost his way. It's jaded, uncertain and disillusioned. It's vicious, mordant, at times blackly comic. It's oddly brilliant, the best of the bunch: the perfect bleary Bond film for an imperfect bleary western world.
You can read the full article here.

The influential American critic Andrew Sarris also loved the film and wrote a most readable review which you can find here.

Here (and above) is the trailer.