GOODBYE SOLO
United States 2008
DIR Ramin Bahrani
SCR Bahareh Azimi, Ramin Bahrani
CAST Souleymane Sy Savane, Red West, Diana Franco Galindo

Dry the Rain —Western Edge Theatre: the New Waves Festival

Dry the Rain is great fun. You'll laugh, you'll cry. The performances are a delight. Great jokes and brisk pacing. Oh, and it's about some serious stuff. But you can't have much more fun pondering serious stuff.

Western Edge Theatre: the New Waves Festival featuring Dry the Rain

http://thehackery.ca presents more Habitat 76 footage. For more info go to http://habitat76.ca

CRÍA CUERVOS...
Spain 1976
DIR Carlos Saura
SCR Carlos Saura
CAST Geraldine Chaplin, Ana Torrent, Conchita Pérez, Maite Sánchez

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Alex Schafran The Rocky Road to Dublin reposted from thepolisblog.org.



In the merry month of June, when first from home I started,
And left the girls at home alone and broken hearted,
Shook hands with my father dear, kissed my darlin' mother,
Drank a pint of beer, my tears and grief to smother;
Then off to reap the corn, and leave where I was born.

ANOTHER YEAR
United Kingdom 2010
DIR Mike Leigh
SCR Mike Leigh
CAST Jim Broadbent, Lesley Manville, Ruth Sheen, Stuart McQuarrie, Martin Savage, David Bradley, Peter Wright, Imelda Staunton

Is there any other director who can make ordinary life, ordinary people, ordinary problems as compelling and meaningful as Mike Leigh (Happy-Go-Lucky, Secrets and Lies Very Drake, High Hopes)? In Another Year he takes us through the yearly seasons and the seasons of life with a happily married couple in their autumnal years and in their relationships to family and friends and especially to Mary, a needy, insecure colleague. British filmmakers deal frequently with class status, and inequality. In this fascination example, as A.O. Scott of the New York Times has noted, Leigh is dealing with the unequal distribution of happiness in life.

Extraordinary decision to run the film with the captions for the hearing impaired! Some of the delicate creatures in attendance apparently have complained of not catching all the dialogue in British films. These captions (large yellow on black) include things like [WIND RUSTLING] and [CHUCKLING]! The co-ordinator was sitting in front of me and I asked him if they were necessary. Oh yes says he some people have asked for them. It's like having the film vandalized. Anyway I'd seen it so left in a huff.

URBANIZED
United States, United Kingdom 2011
DIR Gary Hustwit
CAST Sir Norman Foster, Amanda Burden, Alejandro Aravena,Oscar Niemeyer, Rem Koolhaas

THE SKIN I LIVE IN

LA PIEL QUE HABITO

Spain 2011

DIR Pedro Almodóvar
SCR Pedro Almodóvar, Agustín Almodóvar, Thierry Jonquet
CAST Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, 

Prolific Pedro (All About My Mother, Broken Embraces, Volver) has done it again with a stylish  drama/thriller about appearance and reality, beauty and ugliness, this time focussing on plastic surgery. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas, returning to work with Almodóvar) is haunted by past tragedies, which propel him into developing a synthetic skin which can withstand any ageing or damage. He finds in Vera Cruz the perfect guinea pig for his experiment, a flawless beauty who may have the key to his past from which he is trying to escape and for which he is trying to compensate. A graphic and disturbing film, but with Almodóvar's unmistakable style and penetration of obsession. Skin is a major work not to be missed!

But it wasn't available so instead from film-maker favourites of Ron and Shirley, the Belgian Dardenne brothers The Kid With a Bike.

THE KID WITH A BIKE
LE GAMIN AU VÉLO
Belgium, France 2011
DIR Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
SCR Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne
CAST Cécile De France, Thomas Doret

Exhibition of Diane Arbus Photographs Opens at Fotomuseum Winterthur

Diane Arbus, A family on their lawn one Sunday in Westchester, N.Y. 1968© The Estate of Diane Arbus.

From ArtDaily.org: 

Exhibition of two hundred photographs by Diane Arbus opens at Fotomuseum Winterthur

WINTERTHUR.- Diane Arbus (New York, 1923–1971) revolutionized the art she practiced. Her bold subject matter and photographic approach produced a body of work that is often shocking in its purity, in its steadfast celebration of things as they are. Her gift for rendering strange those things we consider most familiar, and for uncovering the familiar within the exotic, enlarges our understanding of ourselves. Arbus found most of her subjects in New York City, a place that she explored as both a known geography and as a foreign land, photographing people she discovered during the 1950s and 1960s. She was committed to photography as a medium that tangles with the facts. Her contemporary anthropology—portraits of couples, children, carnival performers, nudists, middle-class families, transvestites, zealots, eccentrics, and celebrities—stands as an allegory of the human experience, an exploration of the relationship between appearance and identity, illusion and belief, theater and reality. 

DRIVE
United States 2011
DIR Nicolas Winding Refn
SCR Hossein Amini, James Sallis
CAST Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Ron Perlman, Albert Brooks

Danish-born and educated Refn, whose previous work has been in genre films and TV, surprises with this dramatic, violent, but highly artistic film, described as "a 1200 horsepower hybrid". Ryan Gosling, one of the best young actors working today, plays a Hollywood stunt driver who moonlights as a "wheelman" in a robbery to help a woman he loves. Quickly he realizes that the heist is a set-up and he is being targets by some pretty nasty individuals. A propulsive, streamlines independent film, Drive went on to win Best Director at Cannes and has garnered many other prizes for its stylistic retro thriller look and its rendering of the ambiguous anti-hero known as Driver.