Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 321: Tue Nov 27

Wings of Desire (Wenders, 1987): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.20pm

This is the first in a new series at BFI Southbank offering filmmakers, film professionals and thinkers an opportunity to reflect on European cinema.

BFI Southbank introduction: This month the European Union turns 25 – just as Britain’s relationship to the Union hangs in the balance. 12 Stars is a new series offering filmmakers, film professionals and thinkers an opportunity to reflect on European cinema and identity at a time of profound cultural and geo-political transition. In this first event Sebastián Lelio will introduce Wings of Desire with his thoughts on why the film particularly resonates. It’s the perfect moment to return to this romantic fantasy where angels keep watch over Berlin’s citizens shortly before the fall of the Wall. Two years after the film was released, Germany was re-unified and a new Europe was born.

Chicago Reader review:
Wim Wenders's ambitious and audacious feature (1987) focuses mainly on what's seen and heard by two angels (Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander) as they fly over and walk through contemporary Berlin. These are the angels of the poet Rilke rather than the usual blessed or fallen angels of Christianity, and Wenders and coscreenwriter Peter Handke use them partially to present an astonishing poetic documentary about the life of this city, concentrating on an American movie star on location (Peter Falk playing himself), a French trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin), and a retired German professor who remembers what Berlin used to be like (Curt Bois). The conceit gets a little out of hand after one of the angels falls in love with the trapeze artist and decides to become human; but prior to this, Wings of Desire is one of Wenders's most stunning achievements, certainly in no way replaceable by City of Angels, the ludicrous 1998 Hollywood remake.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 320: Mon Nov 26

The Cable Guy (Stiller, 1996): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.50pm

This 35mm screening is part of the Comedy Genius season (full details here) but there’s something more than comedy going on here. Something much darker ...

Chicago Reader review:
This curious piece of work (1996) starring Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick has been passed off as a comedy, and I suppose I laughed a few times during the first third or so; but it coheres only as a vaguely homoerotic nightmare patterned loosely after Fatal Attraction, with suggestive notations on TV pathology. As such it's a fairly interesting effort—much more ambitious than most Carrey vehicles. Broderick plays an architect recently evicted by his girlfriend and getting settled in a new flat; the technician (Carrey) who sets him up with free cable turns out to be a lonely, psychopathic control freak who makes his life miserable. Ben Stiller directs Lou Holtz Jr.'s script with plenty of unsettling edge, and Carrey throws himself into his part as if it meant something.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 319: Sun Nov 25

The General (Keaton, 1926): Electric Cinema, Portobello, 2pm

This is part of the season which marks the 50th anniversary of the Electric Cinema Club, when the Electric Portobello's programming inspired the likes of Stephen Frears and Nic Roeg, and spawned any number of cineastes.

Chicago Reader review:
Buster Keaton may have made more significant films, but The General (1927) stands as an almost perfect entertainment. Keaton is a locomotive engineer in the Civil War south whose train is hijacked by Union spies; his attempts to bring it back become a strangely moving and very funny account of man's love for machine. Marion Mack is the girl, who can't quite compete.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 318: Sat Nov 24

Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942): Prince Charles Cinema, 6pm

This 35mm screening is part of the Classic Film Season at the Prince Charles. Details here. 

Time Out review:
Half the world can repeat half the dialogue of Michael Curtiz’s great wartime (anti-)romance and half of Hollywood’s scriptwriters worked on it. If Peter Bogdanovich is right to say the Humphrey Bogart persona was generally defined by his work for Howard Hawks, his Rick, master of the incredibly ritzy Moroccan gin-joint into which old Paris flame Ingrid Bergman walks, just as importantly marked his transition from near-psychopathetic bad guy to idiosyncratic romantic hero. Sixty-odd years on, the film still works beautifully: its complex propagandist subtexts and vision of a reluctantly martial America’s ‘stumbling’ morality still intrigue, just as Bogart’s cult reputation among younger viewers still obtains. Claude Rains is superb as the pragmatic French chief of police, himself a complex doppelgänger of Bogart; Paul Henreid is credible and self-effacing as the film’s nominal hero; Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre give great colour; and Bergman literally shines. Arguably, cinema’s greatest ‘accidental masterpiece’, it still amounts to some hill of beans.
Wally Hammond

Here (and above) is the trailer. 

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 317: Fri Nov 23

Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960): Royal Academy, 6.30pm

Royal Academy introduction to this special screening:

With Cornelia Parker’s PsychoBarn in our courtyard, watch a special screening of the film that inspired it – followed by a talk with the Metropolitan Museum of Art curator who originally commissioned the work, examining the psychological associations of the architecture in the film. Inspired by the installation Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) by Cornelia Parker RA in the RA’s Annenberg Courtyard, we have joined forces with MUBI for a special screening of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s greatest masterpieces, Psycho (1960). Psycho is a thriller illustrating the case history of the young Norman Bates, played by Anthony Perkins, whose deep attachment to his mother gives him a murderous split personality. Filmed in black and white with long, tense shots including little dialogue, Hitchcock crafts a slow burning suspense movie that leaves you constantly on edge. Using two iconic buildings as a background for the film: the Bates’ Motel and House, the architecture became the inspiration behind Parker’s PsychoBarn. Originally commissioned in 2016 for the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, PsychoBarn merges two iconic examples of American architecture: the red barn and the infamous mansion on a hill from Psycho, itself inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper. Parker’s large-scale sculpture is created from a deconstructed red barn and seems at first to be a genuine house, but is in fact a scaled-down structure consisting of two facades propped up from behind with scaffolding. Simultaneously authentic and illusory, the project evokes the psychological associations embedded in architectural spaces, in the same way that the Psycho house was designed and repurposed over the decades for different movies. The screening will be followed by a conversation with the original commissioner of Cornelia Parker’s installation, Beatrice Galilee, Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at The Metropolitan Museum, New York.

For anyone interested in looking in more depth at the film (and this is truly in-depth) the BFI book by celebrated British film critic Raymond Durgnat called A Long Hard Look at Psycho is a must.

Chicago Reader review:
A dark night at the Bates Motel, in the horror movie that transformed the genre by locating the monster inside ourselves. Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 masterpiece blends a brutal manipulation of audience identification and an incredibly dense, allusive visual style to create the most morally unsettling film ever made. The case for Hitchcock as a modern Conrad rests on this ruthless investigation of the heart of darkness, but the film is uniquely Hitchcockian in its positioning of the godlike mother figure. It's a deeply serious and deeply disturbing work, but Hitchcock, with his characteristic perversity, insisted on telling interviewers that it was a "fun" picture.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the famous trailer featuring the director. 

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 316: Thu Nov 22

Les Choses de la Vie (Sautet, 1970): Cine Lumiere, 4pm

This film is part of the Classics season at Cine Lumiere. Full details here.

Time Out review:
A not uninteresting attempt to make a film about ordinary, everyday minutiae, with Michel Piccoli as an average sensual man, vaguely torn between a demanding mistress (Romy Schneider) and an ex-wife (Lea Massari) to whom he still feels bound. Quietly and deftly, Claude Sautet sketches in the portrait of a man gradually becoming aware that he is coming to a crossroads in his life. But since the opening sequence reveals that he is shortly to die in a car crash, his attempt to make some decision about his life is much ado about nothing - which is precisely the point of the film. Difficult to make a film about banality without being boring in the process, but Sautet all but pulls it off, thanks to a beautifully understated performance from Piccoli which manages to extract a whole lifetime of meaning from a simple gesture like lighting a cigarette, and to illuminate the film's meticulously detailed naturalistic surface.
Tom Milne

Here (and above) is the trailer.

Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 315: Wed Nov 21

City of Lost Souls (Von Praunheim, 1983): Castle Cinema, 6.45pm

Castle Cinema introduction:
City of Lost Souls is an explosively fun musical set in West Germany's only trans-owned burger bar, presided over by the incredible Leila, played by Jayne County. With the celebratory approach to deviance you find in John Waters' work, the wonky cabaret of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the inclusive, permeable underground of Derek Jarman's work, this is hilarious, raunchy, low budget delightful filmmaking. All topped off with some amazing songs.

Come and see this rare screening of a hidden classic of queer cinema, introduced by Juliet Jacques (Trans). All profits for this event for Trans Day of Remembrance, supporting the amazing work of Gendered Intelligence, helping trans youth.

This event is programmed by Nobody Ordered Wolves.

Time Out review:
Rosa von Praunheim's fictionalised account of the lives of his expatriate American acquaintances in Berlin. On the surface, a deranged comedy caper; sympathetically observed TVs and TSs, bizarre cabaret artistes, prostitutes, gays, straights, blacks and whites thriving in adversity in a Berlin of hallucinogenic fast-food outlets, lunatic self-improvement cults, cartooned nightclub life and immigration-squad raids. But behind the laughter there are numerous pointed comments on modern-day Germany, on fascism and on sexual, social, political and geographical statelessness. Heavy stuff - but von Praunheim ends up celebrating his friends' lives in a funny, startling and mocking 'punk' musical that even finds time for a Broadway-style happy ending. Jayne County's rise to Iron Curtain pop stardom is debilitatingly funny, and the whole might be described as a Rocky Horror Gastarbeiter Problem.
John Gill

Here (and above) is an extract.