To be honest, school is wearing me down. It’s not the work or the lack of sleep or the sun that goes down at 5 in the afternoon. It’s the food. Thoughts of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, pies, pies, and pies keep running through my head and over my tastebuds. Lately, even Star & Crescent has failed to stave off my desire for homemade confections. Only the film series can keep my mind from the coming feast. Fortunately, this week promises to be as distracting as they come.
THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD
2008. South Korea. Dir: Kim Ji-woon. With Lee Byung-hun. 130 minutes. Tomorrow, Nov. 17, 8 p.m., $5.
Honestly, the title says it all. This spaghetti Eastern out of South Korea’s once budding and now booming film industry follows three crooks in 1940s Manchuria as they race to a big old pile of treasure. A bizarre but flat-out hilarious fusion of Ratrace and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, it’s a film that never stops moving.
**Pick of the week!**
The Sopranos and Mad Men
Approximately 100 minutes.
Thursday, Nov. 18, 8 p.m., FREE.
Director and cinematographer extraordinaire Phil Abraham continues our Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Behind the Scenes Speaker Series (say it ten times fast) and brings American television to the Goldsmith for the first time I can remember. A critical member of the creative team behind The Sopranos and Mad Men as well as an alumnus, Phil is, in the parlance of our times, a gentleman and a baller. Come for his thoughts on Tony and Don, but also for the once in a lifetime chance to see episodes from the two most cinematic shows in television projected onto a screen that’s bigger than your whole living room.
SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD
2010. USA. Dir: Edgar Wright. With Michael Cera, Alison Pill. 112 minutes.
Friday, Nov. 19, 8 p.m., $5.
Lampoonster Edgar Wright, who directed the satirically minded Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, takes on something altogether different in this rocking, socking story of a kid whose lady friend has an interesting and potentially dangerous romantic past. True to Wright’s style, it takes a genre, here the blockbuster, and takes that mode to the extreme, bringing out all the things we love about it and making fun of all the things we know are overdone, so that we can love those parts all the more—and so we have Scott Pilgrim, a movie based on a comic book that feels like a videogame and is better than any combination of the three has any right to be. The best part: even people like myself who are absolutely sick of the disease formally known as Michael Cera can forget who he is in this film, and enjoy it for what it is…a damn good time.
THE SCARLET EMPRESS
1934. USA. Dir: Josef von Sternberg. With Marlene Dietrich. 104 minutes. Saturday, Nov. 20, 8 p.m., FREE.
The savant of soft-focus brings cinema’s most statuesque star into sultry and stunning, simmering, glimmering backlight, eye light, limelight in this black and white story of Catherine the Great, Russia’s greatest seductress. This newly restored 35mm print of von Sternberg’s masterpiece will get under your skin and stay there, and every time you close your eyes, you’ll see Dietrich’s, shining like diamonds, staring right back at you with a gaze that burns through to your heart.
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