Film Brockville
The Films
2008 Winter Schedule
| Jan 16 | Shake Hands with the Devil |
| Jan 23 | I'm Not There |
| Feb 13 | Emotional Arithmetic |
| Feb 27 | Lars and the Real Girl |
| Mar 05 | Eastern Promises |
| Mar 19 | Margot At The Wedding |
| Apr 09 | Atonement |
| Apr 23 | Caramel - (note: schedule change) |
| May 07 | Up the Yangtze |
| May 14 | L'Âge des Ténèbres |
| Jun 11 | The Year My Parents Went On Vacation |
Welcome!
For January - May, 2008 screening times are the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of the month, 7:30 p.m., Galaxy cinema, 1000 Islands Mall, Brockville, Ontario.
The box office opens at 6:50; ticket sales cease at 7:25; seating is limited (200) and is on a first-come first-served basis, so come early. We have been able to lower the ticket price for 2008 to only $8.00 (cash only, exact change appreciated [makes sales proceed quickly/smoothly], not equipped for debit/credit cards).
There is a draw each screening for a DVD. All ticket buyers are eligible.
Film Brockville needs your support to continue screening films. Please help support Film Brockville in bringing interesting Indie film to the city. Forward this message to friends, colleagues and relatives. Encourage people to join the Film Brockville mailing list.
Dale Chisamore (see "Contact" link above)
Film Brockville
424 King St. W.
Brockville K6V 3S6
The Films
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Shake Hands with the Devil
Wed. Jan. 16, 7:30 p.m., Galaxy Theatre
Note: rescheduled due to power failure at Galaxy cinema!
Shake Hands with the Devil is a familiar title to many Canadians. Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire's personal account of the 1994 Rwandan genocide has already seared itself into the collective conscience, first in print and then in Peter Raymont's compelling documentary. Now, director Roger Spottiswoode and writer-producer Michael Donovan deliver a new version that recreates events rather than recalls them; it is a dramatic denouement to Dallaire's remarkable story.
Roy Dupuis stars as General Dallaire, perfectly capturing the frustration of a military leader unable to stop the slaughter around him. Like its source material, the film follows Dallaire from his Canadian home to Rwanda, where the civil war is about to boil over. Shackled by an inadequate mandate and greatly short-handed, Dallaire is powerless to hold back the violence he knows is coming.
By filming on location in Kigali, Spottiswoode gives the film a realistic texture that allows the events to speak for themselves, particularly the global community's utter failure to respond ethically to the genocide. The film's stark and informed portrayal of the crisis excludes unnecessary melodrama but remains an emotionally devastating experience that enriches the story previously revealed in the book and documentary.
Undertaking one of the most high-profile roles of his career, Dupuis deftly portrays Dallaire, projecting his humanity and feelings of guilt with a precision that elevates the performance: you never doubt him for a moment. Deborah Kara Unger provides an emotional counterpoint as a journalist in the midst of the civil war, and one of the few Westerners to understand what Dallaire faces. Shake Hands with the Devil joins recent films like United 93, Omagh and A Mighty Heart as a chronicle of a human tragedy that the cameras missed. It preserves history in the hope that films like these won't be as vital in the future as they are now.
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I'm Not There
Wed. Jan. 23, 7:30 p.m., Galaxy Theatre
Bob Dylan - icon, musical genius, poet, voice of a generation - is the subject of a second major film in two years. Whereas Martin Scorsese's No Direction Home was a conventional - albeit monumental - documentary, Todd Haynes's remarkable revisiting of Dylan's career is a fictional re-imagining of the great troubadour's life. This dazzling and dizzying traversal of one of the most elusive and gifted songwriters of a generation follows Dylan's path from callow youth to superstar extraordinaire. Never comfortable playing one role in his life, Dylan assumed multiple personalities. Haynes fully understands the chameleon-like nature of his subject, and has made a lyrical, poetic, highly stylized portrait of a man determined to possess his own identity and not let anyone - media, public, industry - control that image.
The film begins with the famous motorcycle accident in 1966 and from this defining moment moves effortlessly backward and forward through the most seminal moments in Dylan's life. The film's great genius and its overarching conceit is having Dylan played by six different actors. As a young boy (Marcus Carl Franklin), Dylan is black, setting out under the name Woody Guthrie to meet the great folk artist as he lies sick in hospital. Already we are dealing with the conscious invention of a personality. Haynes goes on to highlight key episodes in the singer's fabled career, and Dylan assumes many personas and names: the endlessly touring, womanizing Robbie (Heath Ledger); the folk idol Jack (Christian Bale), who reinvents himself as an evangelist; Arthur (Ben Whishaw), the youthful, defiant, chain-smoking poet; Billy (Richard Gere), the famous Western outlaw; and Jude (the astonishing Cate Blanchett), the troubled, confused and androgynous rock star.
As these various strands are woven together, the film also calls upon such stellar performers as Charlotte Gainsbourg, Julianne Moore and David Cross to play wife, muse and a fellow poet respectively. I'm Not There succeeds brilliantly in portraying the kaleidoscopic complexity of this genius's world. Its recreations of the well-documented iconic moments - concerts, press conferences - are juxtaposed with the filmmaker's re-imagining of Dylan's interior and exterior universe. In Haynes's fabulous reshaping of his life, Dylan has found a fellow traveller.
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Emotional Arithmetic
Wed. Feb. 13, 7:30 p.m., Galaxy Theatre
Emotional Arithmetic tells the story of three people who formed a life-long bond while housed at a detention camp during World War II that are reunited some 35 years later after being separated from one another.
Jakob Bronski, a young Jewish man, took a shine to two youngsters, Melanie and Christopher, while they were interred, by the Nazis, at Drancy, a housing complex on the outskirts of Paris that was used as a detention camp for Jews. Drancy operated as a way station; once there, having your name put on the wrong list meant relocation to a death camp. Their separation inflicts deep emotional wounds that grossly impact their lives in differing ways in the years leading up to their life-altering reunion.
Now a beautiful woman in her 50's, Melanie Lansing Winters, wife of David Winters, balances her precarious emotional state with an innate sharp, deprecating wit. Jakob, now a senior citizen, is a heroic dissident and veteran of a Soviet psychiatric hospital. And her childhood friend, Christopher Lewis, a British novelist who has long carried a torch for Melanie, is haunted by the eternal question survivors ask themselves - "Why was I saved?"
Melanie invites Jakob to stay with her at her home in Canada. Christopher accompanies Jakob there. With Melanie's marriage to David in shambles due to his compulsive infidelity, the pair's presence in the Winters' home revitalizes Melanie, but arouses unexpected reserves of jealousy in David, who is estranged from his and Melanie's grown son, Benjamin, a father himself to a young son, Timmy.
On a balmy summer evening, the past explodes into the present in an unexpected and tender love story and its fatal consequences. The 'emotional arithmetic' of the title refers to the characters' struggle to face the past and move on.
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Lars and the Real Girl
Wed. Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m., Galaxy Theatre
Ryan Gosling gives another dazzling performance in Lars and the Real Girl, a gently naughty comic melodrama of love found and lost. The film is set in a Midwestern small town during a typically snowy winter. Lars Lindstrom (Gosling), an awkward young man, lives in the garage beside his deceased father's house. The main house is occupied by his recently returned brother, Gus (Paul Schneider), and pregnant sister-in-law, Karin (Emily Mortimer), who is delightfully overprotective of her oddball kid brother-in-law.
The town has a genuine affection for Lars; everyone would like to see him with a good wife, raising a family, especially after those tough years living under the shadow of his taciturn widower father. So they joyfully greet the news that Lars has found a special friend. People are concerned when they learn that Lars and Bianca met online but, hey, this is the modern age. Joy turns to panic, however, when his girlfriend arrives. Although lovely in her own way, the fact that Bianca is a realistic full-sized doll with an elaborate back story (charmingly recounted by a boisterously in-love Lars) presents a problem for the town.
At the urging of Dagmar (Patricia Clarkson), a kind but slightly loopy doctor, Gus, Karin and everyone else pretend that Lars's allegedly half-Brazilian, half-Danish lady friend is real in the hope of helping him work through his issues. So Bianca goes bowling, starts a modelling career and eats dinner with the family. There's no monkey business, however; both Lars and Bianca who used to be a missionary, of course believe nothing sexual should happen until after marriage.
So far so cute. But the film takes an unusually dark and riveting turn in its second half that asks real questions about how we confront death, loneliness and even abuse. Its sad and powerful ending is a marvel I will not spoil. Suffice it to say Gosling's astonishing performance and the deft, impressive direction of Craig Gillespie evoke overwhelming empathy for a tragic heroine made entirely of plastic.
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Eastern Promises
Wed. Mar. 05, 7:30 p.m., Galaxy Theatre
Legendary Canadian director David Cronenberg's (VIDEODROME, CRASH) film film, EASTERN PROMISES - a Gala Presentation at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival® - is a stunning companion piece to the remarkable A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE and one of the most unforgettable film experiences of the year.
Viggo Mortensen (THE LORD OF THE RINGS, A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE), continuing his inspired collaboration with Cronenberg, stars here as the mysterious Nikolai, who is the driver for Semyon (played with mesmerizing menace by Armin Mueller-Stahl, 12 ANGRY MEN, JAKOB THE LIAR), a Russian restaurateur in London who has deep ties to the underworld. Naomi Watts (KING KONG, THE PAINTED VEIL) shines as Anna, a midwife drawn into their dark world when she saves the newborn child of a young Russian woman who dies on the operating table, leaving only a diary as a hint to her identity. At first intrigued by the charming Semyon and the possibility of reconnecting with her own Russian roots, Anna is eventually lured into an ominous world of gangsters, grim tradition and stark violence that threatens both the baby's life and those of her own family.
EASTERN PROMISES is an intense and masterful crime thriller. Beautifully shot by long-time Cronenberg collaborator Peter Suschitzky, the film mixes threatening shadows and darkness with kinetic action sequences, including one of the most electrifying fight scenes in modern movie history. The atmospheric look dances perfectly with the riveting and smart script by Steve Knight (screenwriter of DIRTY PRETTY THINGS and last year's Closing Night Gala, AMAZING GRACE), who combines mob-movie conventions with ripped-from-the-headlines details of the vory v zakone, the Russian mafia. Mortensen delivers an amazing performance worthy of vintage Bogart, playing off the calm fury of Mueller-Stahl, the swagger of Vincent Cassel and the alluring innocence of Watts.
EASTERN PROMISES touches on themes familiar to Cronenberg, and particularly those of A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, which also examined the intersection of personal and social history and the malleable nature of identity. This new work is an incredible achievement and confirms Cronenberg's place as one of the world's most complex and compelling filmmakers.
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Margot At The Wedding
Wed.Mar. 19, 7:30 p.m., Galaxy Theatre
Maverick independent filmmaker Noah Baumbach has had a steady stream of art-house successes with films such as KICKING AND SCREAMING, HIGHBALL and MR. JEALOUSY. His 2005 film, the charming and pointed THE SQUID AND THE WHALE - which had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival® - was a critical success and winner of numerous awards; it was also nominated for a Best Writing (Original Screenplay) Academy Award® in 2005.
His new film, MARGOT AT THE WEDDING - a Special Presentation at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival® - promises to be equally entertaining. Like THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, the story is focused on a dysfunctional family and, once again, the subject matter is mined for all its humour and dramatic potential.
Nicole Kidman (THE HOURS, THE STEPFORD WIVES) heads a stellar cast that also includes Jack Black (KING KONG, THE HOLIDAY), Jennifer Jason Leigh (PALINDROMES, CHILDSTAR) and John Turturro (BARTON FINK, THE GOOD SHEPHERD). When she and her son pay a weekend visit to her sister's home, Margot (Kidman) and her relatives must face the history that has left the family in turmoil. Denial, grief, love and acceptance all come into play as each family member makes their way toward individual - if unsteady - resolutions.
Baumbach, who both wrote and directed the film, has a gift for canny, insightful dialogue. The performances, so integral to the creation of the delicate harmony of character interplay in the film, are stunning. Black, who has seemingly had one breakthrough role after another, truly shines here in an award-worthy performance. The film is perfectly paced, weaving effortlessly between funny moments and searing drama; the overall effect is almost operatic in its emotional intensity.
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Atonement
Wed. Apr. 09, 7:30 p.m., Galaxy Theatre
Ian McEwan's bestselling and critically praised novel ATONEMENT has been brought to the screen by the duo of director Joe Wright (whose debut film PRIDE AND PREJUDICE was a Gala presentation at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival®) and playwright Christopher Hampton (best known for LES LIAISONS DANGEREUSES). Fully mining the emotional terrain of the novel, the film, which was a Special Presentation at the 2007 Festival, also effectively visualizes both pre-and post-war British society, as well as the harrowing events of the 1940 Dunkirk evacuation. Hampton has also managed to find a structure in which to contain McEwan's extraordinary story of a young girl's indiscretion, which rips apart many lives and ultimately scars her own.
ATONEMENT spans several decades and captures its characters at different points in their lives. It begins in 1935 amid the rural beauty of a Britain unaware of future horrors. Still, uncertainty troubles this idyllic surface. The well-to-do Tallis family awaits the return of their eldest son to their country estate. Especially eager to see him is their youngest daughter, Briony (Saoirse Ronan, DEATH DEFYING ACTS), the precocious thirteen-year-old who centres the film. Meanwhile, Cecilia (Keira Knightley, SILK, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE), Briony's elder sister, wrestles with suppressed emotions she feels for Robbie (James McAvoy, BECOMING JANE, THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND), a man who does not belong to her social class. He is the son of one of the family's servants, and Mr. Tallis has paid for his Cambridge education. When events come to a dramatic head, the fallout profoundly changes the lives of everyone at the family mansion.
Briony finds herself in the midst of the drama that unfolds, but her childish involvement has long-term repercussions. While the drama of the war with Germany overshadows the characters' more private troubles, Briony, Cecilia and Robbie discover in their different ways that the past can never go away. As Robbie gets caught up in the horrors of the retreat to Dunkirk, the sisters must try to put their lives back together. Wright has done a superb job lifting prose from page to screen. He has also surrounded himself with a cast who relish the emotional complexities of McEwan's tale of youthful jealousy.
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Caramel (Sukkar banat)
Wed. Apr. 23, 7:30 p.m., Galaxy Theatre
Caramel is a Lebanese film with English subtitles.
"Heat the sugar." The command comes with the urgency of a surgeon, or a lover. And if the sweet, sticky substance is applied with a caress, it gets ripped away like a slap in the face. The women of Beirut will suffer for beauty. Pleasure has its price.
In her gorgeous and love-affirming feature debut - which was the sleeper hit of this year's Cannes Film Festival - Nadine Labaki finds gold in the hot goo used to strip body hair. Set in and around a Beirut beauty salon, Caramel stirs together the smooth and the crunchy of five women's lives. Nisrine (Yasmine Al Masri) is a spirited bombshell on the verge of marrying a conservative Muslim - but she is no longer a virgin. Jamale (Gisèle Aouad), an aging actress, goes to absurd lengths to hold back time. Rima (Joanna Moukarzel) suppresses her attraction to other women, until her own dream girl walks through the door. Seamstress Rose (Sihame Haddad) deflects the attentions of a gentleman suitor to care for her older sister. And Layale, the owner and lifeblood of the salon, carries on a hopeless - but very satisfying - affair with a married man. When her lover beeps his car horn outside the shop, the other women roll their eyes, but they let her go.
Labaki herself plays Layale, leading an ensemble cast that generates enormous warmth and wit onscreen. As director, Labaki gives the film a rich visual field, shooting the salon with a touch of Wong Kar-wai in her layered, burnished compositions.
There is a new kind of film coming from Lebanon, one that looks past war and politics to the eternal truths of love and passion. This is where the impressive women of Caramel find their strength. If Nisrine needs to be a virgin again, they will find a way. If Layale needs a man who is actually available, maybe he can appear right there in front of her. And when there’s a beauty problem to be solved, the women will heat the sugar.
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Up the Yangtze
Wed. May 07, 7:30 p.m., Galaxy Theatre
A luxury cruise boat motors up the Yangtze, navigating the mythic waterway known in China simply as "The River." In the biggest engineering endeavour since the Great Wall, China has set out to harness the Yangtze with the world's largest mega-dam.
Meanwhile at the river's edge Yu Shui says goodbye to her family and turns to face the future. From their small patch of land, her parents watch the young woman walk away, her belongings clutched in a plastic shopping bag. The waters are rising.
The Three Gorges Dam, gargantuan and hotly contested symbol of the Chinese economic miracle, provides the epic and unsettling backdrop for Up the Yangtze, a dramatic and disquieting feature documentary on life inside the 21st century Chinese dream.
Stunningly photographed and beautifully composed, Up the Yangtze juxtaposes the poignant and sharply observed details of Yu Shui's story against the monumental and ominous forces at work all around her.
Among the two million losing their livelihood to the dam, the Yu family must send their daughter off to work. In a bitter irony she's been hired by Farewell Cruises, part of the strange apocalyptic tourist trade that thrives along the river, offering a final glimpse of a legendary world before it disappears forever.
Life onboard mirrors the hierarchy of the wider world. Western passengers take in the spectral views, consuming entertainment on the spacious upper decks, while Yu Shui toils in the galley down below, vying with workmates for the few permanent positions. A shy country girl, she must compete with young show-offs like Chen Bo Yu, an urban kid with the over-confidence typical of single sons, the "little emperors" of China's one-child-only policy.
All the while the ship charts a course towards its controversial destination, travelling upriver through a landscape of unprecedented upheaval, as ancient and revered sites give way to the burgeoning candy-coloured towers of China's neon future. Back at the river's edge, far from the bright lights, Yu Shui's parents assemble their humble possessions as the floodwaters rise.
Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Yung Chang directs it all with insight and cinematic flair. Drawing inspiration from contemporary Asian cinema and post-war neo-realism, he crafts a compassionate account of peasant life and a powerful documentary narrative of contemporary China.
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L'Âge des Ténèbres
Wed. May 14, 7:30 p.m., Galaxy Theatre
The third film in the unofficial trilogy begun with LE DéCLIN DE L'EMPIRE AMéRICAIN (1986) and LES INVASIONS BARBARES (2003), L'Âges des Ténèbres is the newest feature from acclaimed Quebecois director Denis Arcand. The film - a Gala Presentation at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival® and the closing night offering at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival - features the signature blend of comedy, slapstick, tragedy and incisive social commentary that has unified Arcand's filmmaking and made him a favourite of cinephiles around the world.
Jean-Marc Leblanc (played by popular Quebec television star Marc Labrèche) is a civil servant desperately unsatisfied in his daily life. He has an indifferent wife, two daughters who ignore him and a terrifically frustrating job at the fictionalized bureaucracy of the Citizen's Rights Department - which sticks him at a desk in a relocated office inside a stadium. He is, however, an incurable dreamer and takes to disappearing into an elaborate fantasy life where he is free to be famous, suave and sought-after; he adopts the roles of mythic hero, successful author, famed actor and, above all, irresistible lover. Increasingly, however, his real life keeps losing out to the dream world and the possibility arises that Jean-Marc's reality will drift away completely. At the same time, his daydreams present their own problems, especially when his dream women begin to object to Jean-Marc's ineffectuality, and complain about always winding up in losers' fantasies.
Arcand's film owes much to the past masters of French cinema but, but Jean-Marc's ramblings through an indifferent social landscape have been brilliantly updated for the twenty-first century, a world of iPods, sweeping epidemics and mandatory motivational lectures. Featuring fabulous performances - including those by Diane Kruger and Emma de Caunes as the unruly temptresses of Jean-Marc's make-believe double life - L'Âges des Ténèbres is another stellar work of deadpan social criticism from a true master.
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The Year My Parents Went On Vacation
(Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias, O)
Wed. June 11, 7:30 p.m., Galaxy Theatre
The second feature film by emerging Brazilian filmmaker Cao Hamburger,
The Year My Parents Went on Vacation won immediate critical praise
upon its release. This touching coming-of-age story was nominated for
the top prize, the Golden Berlin Bear, at the 2007 Berlin International
Film Festival, and won the coveted Audience Award at the 2007 Rio de
Janeiro International Film Festival.
The story is set in Brazil in 1970, when military dictatorships were on the rise in South America – wreaking havoc on the political economies of the region – and the Vietnam War was raging. But none of this matters to twelve-year-old Mauro (newcomer Michel Joelsas), who – like so many others that volatile summer – is more interested in the World Cup of soccer. Mauro’s situation, however, is rather distinct from that of other sports-fanatic children: his parents, left-wing activists, have been forced to go into hiding in order to pursue their underground activities and, in haste, they leave Mauro with his grandfather.
However, the catch is that his grandfather isn’t actually around. Mauro is eventually and unwittingly put into the care of his grandfather’s neighbour, a surly older Jewish man, Shlomo (Germano Haiut), who works at the local synagogue and has few friends. Nearly alone, Mauro faces many obstacles adjusting to his new situation, but his days are punctuated with bursts of joy and discovery as he gets to know Shlomo; the feisty adolescent Hanna; Irene, an imaginative little girl; the community Rabbi, who happens to be a huge soccer fan; and a host of diverse characters. As Mauro begins to find his way, he discovers that life can be simultaneously bitter and sweet.
Joelsas is a revelation as the young Mauro, and the rest of the ensemble bring the denizens of this transitional era to vivid life. Equally poignant and humorous, The Year My Parents Went on Vacation is one of those rare films that taps into the personal, the social, the historical and the political while staying true to its essential subject matter: the trials of journeying into adulthood.
(Portuguese and Yiddish with English subtitles), 104 minutes
“Sensitive, delicate and involving, The Year My Parents Went on Vacation is a silky-smooth dramedy about a boy thrust into the alien environment of a Jewish community when his politicized parents are forced to flee the country.” – Deborah Young, Variety
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