We’re sponsoring tomorrow’s screening of Napoleon Dynamite this Thursday at 7:30 pm in Boundary Bay’s beautiful beer garden,complete with delicious food and even better locally brewed adult beverages. For more info, check out The Travelling Pickford Show’s Summer Schedule here.
All the cool kids will be there - will you?
July mean Independence Day in America and Bastille Day in France, and to honor both of these holidays, we’re featuring some of our favorite films from both sides of the Atlantic!
Representing America are : High Noon, Bull Durham, The Godfather, The Big Lebowski, cool Hand Luke, Star Wars, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance kid, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, West Side Story, Midnight Cowboy, Easy Rider, and There Will Be Blood.
And in the French Corner: Breathless, Jules and Jim, Shoot The Piano Player, Le Samourai, The Battle of Algiers, The Brotherhood of the Wolf, Paris, Je t’amie, La Vie en Rose, Amelie, The 400 Blow, Persepolis, La Cage Aux Folles and La Femme Nikita.
Anything we’ve left out? We’d love to hear your suggestions! Leave your comments, suggestions, chastisements, etc. below and maybe we can make some real diplomatic progresson this rivalry for once!
Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson star in In Bruges, the feature film debut from Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, who won an Academy Award in 2005 for his short film Six Shooter.
If you missed it’s run at The Pickford, this is your chance to check out one of the funniest and darkest buddy comedies to come along in recent memory.
Colin Farrell plays Ray, a rookie hitman whose botched first job finds he and his older, more experienced partner, Ken, (Brendan Gleeson) cooling their heels in Belgium’s most picturesque tourist destination, the city of Bruges. While Ken enjoys himself taking in the sights of the town and kicking back, Ray feels trapped by the city and is haunted by the mistake that got he and Ken sent into exile. But when it turns out the job might not be over after all, Ken and Ray end up having a much more exciting time in the laid back town than they expected to.
Though he comes from a stage directing background, McDonagh is a natural behind the camera, and his directorial sense translates beautifully to the more expansive, full city setting of the film. Through long panning shots and an obvious love of the city’s medieval architecture, McDonagh makes viewers feel like gawking tourists in a strange place. And as we watch another film being shot in the town’s ancient square as a plot piece, the sensation of being bystanders to this sordid, violent and immensely entertaining debacle is unmistakable. While his eye for direction has adapted to the fit the screen, McDonagh’s sharp screenwriting carries over directly from his award winning stage pieces such as The Pillowman, which played at Bellingham’s own Idiom Theater earlier this year.
Owing much to acclaimed playwright Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, which also features a pair of hitmen bickering in exile following a job gone sour, In Bruges is replete with sudden violence, dark humor, deadly misunderstandings and slapstick comedy, along with a heaping helping of midget humor thrown in for good measure. By turns unflinchingly stark and comically surreal, it also features a phenomenal chase scene through the city’s canals, the most civil and considerate shootout ever put to film and a great third act performance by Ralph Fiennes as the two killers distinctly unhappy employer.
Click here to listen to an interview with McDonagh, and be sure to watch the official trailer here. Or just come on down this week and pick up a copy for yourself!
I spent a good chunk of my weekend watching commercials, and realizing that it is completely unfair to the rest of us just how much talent Errol Morris has. Seriously, the guy is ridiculous.
To make a painfully long story exceedingly short, after having a discussion with some co-workers on Friday about whether there was any shame in directing TV commercials, I sat down at a barbecue with some friends and rewatched a selection of Morris’ commercials for Miller High Life. My fellow football fans will remember these exceedingly strange little slices of commercialism, as they are some of the strangest ads ever to grace a Sunday afternoon television screen.
The poet Robert Creeley once described the work of his contemporary Richard Brautigan as “weirdly delicious bullets of ineffable wisdom.” It’s an odd description, but it fits these bizarre and charming TV spots. Each features very simple footage of doing “manly” things - fixing a refrigerator with duct tape, baiting a fish hook, making deer sausage, or deciding whether or not to eat the last devilled egg. The accompanying voice over extolls the virtues of living ‘The High Life’ as the High Life Logo fades in to dominate the screen. The spots range from hilarious to subversive to slightly offensive to downright bizarre, but remain consistently entertaining and slightly askew throughout. Their take on masculinity is just shy of satiric, and works wonderfully within the football fan beer commercial context.
To have the best time you’ll ever have being sold something, check out these and other ads for Hewlett Packard, Nike, Quaker Oats and other companies Morris has done work for at his website, here. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t give you a taste of what’s in store, so submitted for your approval is the Franco-phobic gem that garnered Friday night’s unanimous ‘Best in Show’ from a group of guys who know a thing or two about beer commercials. Dear reader, I give you - Mayo.
Enjoy.
If you’re like me, and you enjoy animation for grown ups, you owe it to yourself to check out the breathtaking, surreal and groundbreaking work of Bay Area underground animation giant Larry Jordan, the greatest cartoonist you’ve probably never heard of.
I didn’t know a thing about Jordan’s work until seeing a smattering of reels a few years back, including Sophie’s Place, which you can check out a fairly low quality print of on YouTube here. ( A caution here - though animated, Jordan’s works are not for kids. Consider yourself duly warned.) I was hooked. Jordan’s stop motion collage animation, culled in large part frm paintings, etchings and engravings, was mesmerizing, a kaleidoscopic array of colors, shapes and themes that collide, fade, vanish and transform, only to return later as something entirely new. It was bizarre, yes, and calling it inscrutable is probably being a bit generous, but Jordan’s work transcends a need to entirely understand it. Comparable to Cocteau in his imagery and symbolism and Rauschenberg in his sense of color design, the films of Lawrence Jordan defy simple explanation. They are by turns challenging and carefree, mystical and lurid and always supremely rewarding.
After my brush with Jordan’s work, I found myself trying to hunt down copies of his other films with at best marginal success, occasionally lucking into a third generation copy or sub-par internet clip. Luckily, the fine folks at San Francisco’s Canyon Cinema have released a new boxed set representing the entirety of Jordan’s 40 year filmmaking career. Whether they know it yet or not, animation fans everywhere are in their debt.
Culled from archives across the nation, many of these works are seeing the public eye for the first time in years, bringing new and deserved attention to animated classics like the Orson Welles narrated Rime of the Ancient Mariner or the magical documentary The Sacred Art of Tibet. Also included is Jordan’s live action work, including the only existing footage of reclusive surrealist assemblage artist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell, for whom Jordan worked as an assistant for a brief period. If you’re interested in surrealist art, avant garde cinema, the history of animation, or just having your mind blown, I cannot reccomend this collection highly enough. And of course, you can find The Films of Larry Jordan in our New Arrivals section this week here at Film is Truth.
That’s right, free tickets! As sponsors of Conservation Northwest’s Grizzly Awareness Week, we’ve got a free pair of tickets to the Groovin’ with Grizzlies fundraiser show this Friday at the Boundary Bay Beer Garden, featuring Wisconsin Slim, Lucky Brown and Yogoman’s Wild Rumpus. And we’ve decided to pass those tickets on to our blog reading public. Hey, that’s you!
What’s the catch? Well, it’s in the beer garden, so you have to be 21, but other than that, there is none! All you have to do is come in, mention this blog post, and ask nicely for your free pair of tickets. It’s a first come, first served deal, though, and we’ve only got one set of tix to go around, so the this is winner take all time!
Thanks for reading the blog and supporting your Friendly Neighborhood Video Store, and good luck!
One of old Hollywood’s most overlooked lions and a hero of film noir fans left us this week when Richard Widmark passed away at age 93.
Though he claimed to find the filmmaking process “irritating” towards the end of his life, Widmark appeared in more than 70 films between 1947 and 1991. In that time, he worked alongside directors like Elia Kazan, Jules Dassin and Samuel Fuller, crafting memorable and nuanced characters in mostly supporting roles for decades. His debut as demented murderer Tommy Udo in the film noir masterpiece Kiss of Death earned him his only Oscar nod, though his performance in Judgement at Nuremberg is thought by many to be his finest.
For this fan’s money, though, Widmark’s work doesn’t get any better than his turn as Harry Fabian in Jules Dassin’s classic noir Night and the City, released just before the director was blacklisted in 1952. Featuring an absolutely stellar performance by Widmark as as small time con man running a scam that’s out of his depth, it’s arguably Dassin’s finest work, and one that no cinema buff should miss out on.
There are so many well known strikes against the Fox Network that I don’t feel obliged to go into them here. You can insert you own gripe if you feel the need. Or if you’re feeling low on ammo, just come in and rent Outfoxed, a terrific documentary that will give you a whole new list of reasons not to like Rupert Murdoch. But no matter what you have to say about Fox, there’s one thing they’ve always done pretty well – cartoons. For all its warts, this is the network that nursed The Simpsons from a bit of rough time filler between psychiatrist jokes on the Tracey Ullman show to a pop culture leviathan that will surely one day devour us all. They had the good sense to swallow their pride and bow to popular demand, bringing back Family Guy after an early cancellation and letting the show become a short attention span classic in its own right. And despite their short runs, Fox shows like Futurama late Fox pick up The Critic have cemented their own places as cult classics of prime time animation.
And naturally, much of Fox’s best animation work was geared toward kids. They debuted the fondly remembered Animaniacs, a cartoon series that featured both a children’s song that named every single country in the world and a healthy dose of classic Warner Brothers cartoon violence. It also managed to simultaneously parody The Day the Clown Cried and Apocalypse Now in one episode, earning the show’s creators movie nerd points to the end of time. Also making its small screen debut on Fox was the film noir inspired Batman: The Animated Series. Moving swiftly from weekday afternoons to primetime, the show garnered a string of Emmys for its sharp writing and groundbreaking visual style. But what about Saturday mornings, the traditional bastion of sugar coated breakfast cereal and brightly colored moving pictures?
During the mid to late 90’s, Fox had some clever bunny executive working for them whose job it apparently was to buy the rights to some of the best and little known comics being produced and develop them into absolutely brilliant pieces of Saturday morning animation. I’d like to shake this person’s hand, because they’re responsible for some of the smartest, funniest and most subversive cartoon series ever created, like super hero parody The Tick and The Adventures of Sam and Max: Freelance Police, the entire series of which hit rental shelves this week. (more…)