thursday cuban fest film at st anthony: Lisanka

The Cuban Film Festival continues with its second screening Thursday night at St Anthony.  This week they're showing the 2010 film, Lisanka:

Lisanka's central plot revolves around a love triangle that later evolves into a love square involving three Cubans (two men and a woman) and a Soviet soldier. Set in a fictitious rural village near a Soviet military base in central Cuba, their amorous adventures, or misadventures, unravel against the backdrop of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

Try as I might, I can't find the start time to save my life.  My guess it's a 7 or 7:15 start time.  Discussion follows the film at the bar/cafe next door.

Hope you all understand Spanish (the actual screening will have subtitles):

thursday night icon theater screenings: Z Systems Film Fest

Tomorrow night is the 2nd annual Z Systems' Film Festival:

The purpose of this film festival is to help support the local independent film/video production market. Our goal as a company is to enhance our relationship with our existing client base and reach out to the community and share all the products and services we provide to Minnesota producers.

The St. Louis Park media service company sponsored this competition, where teams had 9 days to shoot and edit a 5-7 minute short.  The show begins at 7:00pm at the ICON in St. Louis Park this Thursday.  You can watch last year's films here.

thursday night st anthony showing: A Film Unfinished

The Film Society brings you a documentary about found footage the Nazis made near the beginning of the war.  You can see A Film Unfinished Thursday night 7:15, with a discussion afterwards:

At the end of WWII, 60 minutes of raw film, having sat undisturbed in an East German archive, was discovered. Shot by the Nazis in Warsaw in May 1942, and labeled simply "Ghetto," this footage quickly became a resource for historians seeking an authentic record of the Warsaw Ghetto. However, the later discovery of a long-missing reel, inclusive of multiple takes and cameraman staging scenes, complicated earlier readings of the footage.

Showtime: Special screening March 3 at 7:15 followed by a question and answer session with Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies Director Bruno Chaouat.

After the Thursday night screening the film will be showing at St Anthony for the next week.

thursday night casket cinema: FLicKeR and the Dream Machine

Well this is a new one on this blog.  Casket Cinema is a microcinema showing works monthly in an art loft.  The screenings give you the chance to see something out of the ordinary; something that you might not know about otherwise.  FLicKeR is not any different:

"This award-winning documentary about poet, artist, calligrapher and mystic Brion Gysin, portrays the life and legacy of an artist who believed art could revolutionize human consciousness. FLicKeR chronicles Gison’s complex ideas, friendships and influence with some of the 20th century’s key counterculture figures, such as William Burroughs, Kurt Corbain and Marianne Faithful. Taking the dream machine as the basis of its explorations, FLicKeR asks crucial questions about the nature of art and consciousness, and imagines humanity liberated to explore its creativity in complete freedom." 

The film also features Iggy Pop and Kenneth Anger.  Maybe more importantly, the theater only asks for a donation to charity for cover charge.  That's pretty danged cool.


Watch more free documentaries

loring vintage cinema this thursday: From Here To Eternity

The Loring Theater's been around for a long time, so they're going to be showing you some flicks that show a similar number of years.  Or maybe the "Loring Vintage Cinema" series is a chance to transport you to the time when they showed these films the first time around.  Whatever the case may be, they're showing From Here To Eternity at 7pm tomorrow night:

In 1941 Hawaii, a private is cruelly punished for not boxing on his unit's team, while his captain's wife and second in command are falling in love. 

I can't remember if I had to watch this for a class or if I watched it on my own in an attempt to fulfill this teenage fantasy I had of watching all the films on the first AFI 100 list.  I don't really remember much except Burt Lancaster seemed pretty good in it.  However, Sinatra and Donna Reed were the ones who got Oscars.  In any case AFI made a new list and apparently it wasn't good enough the second time around.  Well you know what I say?  Don't let those AFI snobs tell you what's good or not!  Decide for yourself and go see the movie.

a review: Some Days Are Better Than Others

Tonight at 7:30 you can catch Some Days Are Better Than Others at the Trylon. Here are my thoughts on the fiim:

The plot of Some Days Are Better Than Others isn’t an easy one to summarize.  For the most part we follow three people feeling the effects of depression, both financial and mental, who are loosely tied together by despair.  Eli (James Mercer) can’t find work, Katrina (Carrie Brownstein) can’t get over a breakup, and Camille (Renee Roman Nose) can’t find anyone that’ll claim an urn she happened upon at work.  And they go about their days with only that for motivation until the movie stops sometime later.

The plot doesn’t drive the film as much as its desire to portray decay in America during this great recession: people are dying, buildings are being knocked down, relationships are ending, stuffed animals are ripped apart, dreams are crushed, emotional states are deteriorating, material items are sold, donated or trashed.  The film isn’t a story of these characters as much as it is an ode to a dying country.

Keep that perspective to get the most out of your viewing.  Beyond that, the acting, characters and script are all pretty bland.  The slow, contemplative nature of the film gives you plenty of time to realize there’s nothing intriguing about these people.  But if you pull back and view everything from a distance, it’ll be a more rewarding experience.

If we’re to believe the title, this is just a bad day.  Well, a lengthy stretch of bad days, to be more precise.  Yet hope is just around the corner.  I’m not sure if any of these characters believe that, though, or if the film does for that matter.

wednesday night native american screening at augsburg: Club Native

Augsburg College is presenting the "Native American Film Series," which features pieces by indigenous filmmakers throughout the early part of the year.  This Wednesday sees the screening of the 2008 documentary Club Native, by First Nations director Tracey Deer:

In Club Native, filmmaker Tracey Deer uses Kahnawake, her hometown, as a lens to probe deeply into the history and contemporary reality of Aboriginal identity. Following the stories of four women, she reveals the exclusionary attitudes that divide the community and many others like it across Canada. Deer traces the roots of the problem, from the advent of the highly discriminatory Indian Act through the controversy of Bill C31, up to the present day, where membership on the reserve is determined by a council of Mohawk elders, whose rulings often appear inconsistent. And with her own home as a poignant case study, she raises a difficult question faced by people of many ethnicities across the world: What roles do bloodline and culture play in determining identity?

The event is free and the film starts at 7pm, with a reception taking place before at 6:30.

wednesday sound unseen show at trylon: Some Days Are Better Than Others

You thought you liked Carrie Brownstein in Portlandia, did ya?  Well check her out this flick of a film:

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Sound Unseen Some Days Are Better Than Others The Trylon Wed Mar 02 7:30  (2010, Matt McCormick, BD, 93m) A poetic, character-driven feature-length film featuring musicians Carrie Brownstein (of Sleater-Kinney) and James Mercer (The Shins and Broken Bells) that asks why the good times slip by so fast while the hard times always seem so sticky. Some Days are Better Than Others is a sad valentine to the forgotten discards of a throwaway society, and a story about knowing when to hold on, and when to let go. The film premiered at South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW) and was a hit at Sound Unseen Int'l Duluth this past June.

I'm gonna keep my thoughts to myself for a little bit on this, as I've got a review of the movie in the works.  Should be up here tomorrow- Probably minutes before the screening starts.

wednesday screening at bryant lake bowl: Mystery Science Theater 3000

Classic MST3K for y'all at Bryant Lake, 10PM this Wednesday:

Space Mutiny--few titles in the pantheon of world cinema are so discouraging. And in the adjoining pantheon of beefy, low-watt protagonists, few names echo as loudly as David Ryder. Gizmonic Institute offers this famed MST3k episode to you, with good beer and cushy seats to ease away the agony.

I'm just gonna assume that you all watched hours of this as a kid on Comedy Central, and that for me to say anything about it would just be preaching to the choir so to speak.  If you want more info, though, you could always check out the Gizmonic Institute.

recapping last saturday's walker event: Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then

Saturday was the final night in the Walker’s “Expanding The Frame” series, which saw a combination of live music and sound effects supplementing the viewing experience of Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then.  The movie tells the true story of one man’s attempt to save the life of his terminally ill wife, by building a house to God.  It was shot as a live-action stop motion movie, with an original score composed by the filmmaker, Brent Green.

To expand the cinema experience, the audio track was removed (except for the dialogue), and the film was presented with live sounds.  Green himself performed live narration throughout the movie, as well as sang and played guitar in the 6-member band.  The accompaniment was a type of folksy americana music; fitting of a movie set in Tennessee.  It wasn’t a perfect set, as the narration and the music were occasionally out-of-sync with the story.  While it’s not often one experiences this type of imperfection at the movies, it made the cinematic environment feel less manufactured than most other film experiences, which was refreshing.

Most exciting to watch was the foley artist providing real-time sound effects for the movie.  Footsteps on dirt, brushstrokes on glass, and other usually unnoticed sounds were all made more pronounced, making for a more immersive experience.  The sound effects were slightly cartoonish in their excessiveness, which worked well in conjunction with the quasi animated style of the picture.

There were unfortunately a few hiccups in the showing.  The blu-ray was damaged and initially wouldn’t play the climax of the film, resulting in 10 additional minutes of song and story from the band while staff attended to the problem.  For a frontman who doesn’t do Q&A’s and keeps his back to the audience for the entirety of the performance, Green handled the delay well enough.  This kind of misfire could be disheartening, especially if one’s not accustomed to the non-traditional cinema experience, but having a live band present only helped in this instance.

Due to this mishap, the audience was treated to an extra song, an extra story, and, after the film, we were treated to another movie, this time a short stop motion animation piece about Santa Claus.  I had a harder time following this story (maybe cause I couldn’t tell the difference between the scarecrow character and Santa Claus), but it was a nice surprise, as the low-budget animation fit well with this less manufactured, more organic feel to the evening.  All in all, these mishaps are certainly unintentional consequences of expanding the frame, but they enhance the experience in ways happy accidents do.