Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 139: Sun May 19

No1: Someone to Love (Jaglom, 1987): ICA Cinema, 6.15pm

This 35mm screening os part of the ICA's Celluloid on Sunday strand.

Chicago Reader review:
Another of Henry Jaglom’s let-it-all-hang-out gabfests, this one set in a beautiful, about-to-be-destroyed Los Angeles theater, where Jaglom invites his friends on Valentine’s Day. It certainly has its moments—most of them provided by Orson Welles (in one of his last extended film performances), his vivacious long-time companion Oja Kodar, and the venerable Sally Kellerman—but most of this largely improvised movie, as critic Elliott Stein has pointed out, is pretty much the equivalent of the Donahue show, with all the strengths and limitations that this implies, and Jaglom’s own earnest inquiries about what makes so many people lonely can get a bit cloying after a while. However, Welles, as the equivalent of a talk-show guest, is very much in his prime, and his ruminations about feminism, loneliness, drama, and related subjects certainly give the proceedings an edge and a direction that most of the remainder of this floundering movie sadly lacks. Among the other participants in this encounter session are Jaglom’s brother Michael Emil, Andrea Marcovicci, Ronee Blakley, and Monte Hellman.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

****************

No 2: Barbarella (Vadim, 1968): Cinema Museum, 2pm

 
This is a 35mm screening. There will be an introductory illustrated talk by Jon Davies, tutor in French Cinema at Morley College.

Time Out review:
Director Roger Vadim kicks off his adaptation of Jean-Claude Forest's 'adult' comic strip by stripping Jane Fonda starkers. From there on it's typically vacuous titillation as Barbarella takes off for the mysterious planet Sorgo in 40,000 AD, there to survive attack by perambulating dolls with vampire fangs, receive her sexual initiation from a hairy primitive, fall in love with a blind angel, be whisked off to an alarming Lesbian encounter with the tyrannical Black Queen, etc. But Terry Southern's dialogue occasionally sparkles, and the imaginative designs, as shot by Claude Renoir, look really splendid.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.