Before you go home to eat your turkey, come enjoy some delectable cinematic treats. And then when you return from Thanksgiving rested and five pounds heavier, you’ll be ready for some more!
“Sherlock Jr.”
(U.S., D.: Buster Keaton, 1924)
Friday, Nov. 17, 8 p.m. FREE!
In “Sherlock Jr.” Buster Keaton plays a projectionist who has hopes of becoming a detective. When his sweetheart believes he has stolen a pocket watch, a dejected Keaton returns to work and falls asleep. He dreams that he has entered the world of the movie he is projecting, a meta-textual device that provides a rich reservoir of opportunity to play with film form and create innovative gags and jokes. Watching Keaton makes you realize how many of your favorite contemporary comedians, and even action stars, are indebted to this great silent star.
I’ve always had a thing for Keaton; let’s call it a friendly crush. Something about his pathetic little flat hat, his extraordinary physical agility, and his trademark deadpan expression forever emblazoned on the harsh contours of his face just gives me butterflies. Watching him is both agonizing and pleasurable, tragic and joyous, creepy and charming. Among the master silent comedians—such as Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Harry Langdon—Keaton is the most endearing. His taste for bizarre, surreal humor, his mastery of purely visual action, and his desire to play with the film medium makes him one of the most revered and enduring filmmakers.
So I encourage you all to come out this Friday evening and experience a cinematic master at work. The film is under 45 minutes long, there will be live organ accompaniment, and it is FREE! And maybe you, too, will go gaga for Buster.
“Bunny Lake is Missing”
(U.K., D.: Otto Preminger, 1965)
Saturday, Nov. 18, 8 p.m. FREE!
No, Bunny Lake is not a body of water. But she is missing. Single mom Ann Lake (Carol Lynley) goes to pick up her sweet-faced daughter Bunny (Suky Appleby) from her first day at nursery school, only to find she has mysteriously gone missing. The worst part is no one else seems to remember seeing Bunny, or even believes she ever existed. Laurence Olivier is the police officer who must find the little girl, or determine whether she is merely a figment of her mother’s imagination. Preminger guides the viewer into a disturbing and frightening web of deception and madness, in which the viewer is always on edge and never sure what to believe. This brilliant psychological thriller verifies that they really don’t make ’em like they used to. The film puts any M. Night Shyamalan contrivance to shame; it breaks the “Unbreakable,” burns down “The Village,” and throws back “The Lady in the Water.” Move over “Sixth Sense,” ’cause “Bunny Lake is Missing.”
“La Jetée”
(France, D.: Chris Marker, 1962)
“12 Monkeys”
(U.S., D.: Terry Gilliam, 1995)
Wednesday, Nov. 29, 8 p.m. $4
Chris Marker’s “La Jetée” provides a unique viewing experience of haunting lyricism and horrifying beauty as it blurs the line between memory and reality, probing into the concreteness of time itself. Set below a post WWIII Paris devastated from nuclear warfare, “La Jetée” follows a time traveler sent through time in hopes to save the present. Marker assembles his 28-minute film as a photomontage of black-and-white images, which dreamily slowly dissolve into one another. “La Jetée” stands as one of the most staggering and influential of the science fiction genre, and is the main inspiration of Terry Gilliam’s “12 Monkeys.” Gilliam builds on Marker’s short film and deepens it with his own disquieting, dark vision. Like its precursor, “12 Monkeys” is provocative and mind-bending as it paints a brutally grim vision of the future. The film starts in the year 2035, when people must live underground after a viral outbreak in 1997 annihilated all but one percent of the human population. Bruce Willis is sent into the past to try to gather information concerning the virus he has contracted, leaving him as a patient in a mental hospital. There, he meets a psychiatrist (Madeline Stowe) and fellow patient (Brad Pitt, who gives a terrific performance). With their help, he manages to escape and uncover the mysteries of the future holocaust and encounters them repeatedly throughout the film as he travels further into the past, and to the future. Interestingly, “12 Monkeys” shares “La Jetée’s” tribute to Hitchcock’s masterpiece “Vertigo,” also about the restructuring of the past in an often-perplexing, dizzying spiral of style and narrative twists. Both “12 Monkeys” and “La Jetée” stand on their own as potently stirring films, and watching them back to back should be quite a stimulating experience.
“Taste of Cherry”
(Iran, D.: Abbas Kiarostami. 1997)
Thursday, Nov. 30, 8 p.m. FREE!
Acclaimed Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami shared the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1997 for this simple yet poignant film about a man traveling through Tehran in search of some one willing to bury his dead body after he commits suicide. I know: how utterly depressing. But this is not a film about the morbidity of death but about the choice every person has to live. Shot in a minimalist style, with extensive periods of silence and long takes, Kiarostami presents his images like a dream, letting them linger on screen so his viewers can bring their own meaning to the film. This film gives its viewer the space to contemplate the seemingly insignificant yet truly wondrous details of everyday life.
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