WINTER COLLECTION 2008

127 Campbell Street  Collingwood

8.45 Start with suprise short afterward

Lounge environment and bar service

Gold coin donation only 

 

 

17 April SKULJACI PERJA (Feather Gatherer)

Director Alexandra Petrovica,Yugoslavia 1968
A torrid tragicomedy about the Roma (Gypsies) which exposes the dark side of poverty, oppresion and religion. Bora trades in goose feathers in Serbia, as does Mirta, whose stepdaughter, Tisa, Bora craves despite being married. Mirta also desires Tisa and eventually tries to rape her. After struggle, disillusionment and murder Bora and Tisa finally flee as a couple, protected by the Roma. A lyrical movie encapsulating the heartaching beauty and transience of Romany existence.

24 April THE INNOCENTS

Director Jack Clayton, UK 1961
Based on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, this is a stunning low-key ghost story. A governess, Miss Giddens, is hired by the uncle of his orphaned nephew and niece to look after them, without bothering him. All the cast are strange but the smooth and creepy Miles is a stand out. The children are obsessed with the recently deceased valet and the late governess. Perversion, suicide and innuendo lace a subtle vision of secret communications with an evil underworld, or is it all in Miss Giddens head? A struggle with evil that leads to a devastating conclusion.

2 May THE STONE TAPE

Director Peter Sasdy, UK 1972
If these walls could talk… They do more than that when a group of corporate scientists clod hop into a country manor house to work on the next communications revolution. But crawling through the cracks of the Dr Who set and slinking beneath the blustery acting is an idea that can stop you in your tracks like a manor house rat. A typical serve of ingenuity and creepiness from writer Nigel Kneale.

9 May IDI I SMOTRI (Come and See)

Director Ellem Klimov, USSR 1985
Farm boy Florya tries to make it through each day intact as the blitzkrieg eviscerates the land and people around him. There are moments of fascination in the great Russian forests, even some eroticism, but these are fleeting as the nazi machine finds its way into every last quiet place. Still a teenager at the end of the flim, Florya seems to have aged a hundred years as he confronts an image of the cause of this hell on earth. A film that holds its anger like a newborn child.

16May SLACKER

Director Richard Linklater, USA 1991
Presents a day in the life in Austin, Texas among its younger social outcasts and misfits, using a series of linear vignettes which move from one point of physical contact to the next. The characters social disjunction melds with the seamless movement of life scenes. Highlights include a UFO buff who insists the US has been on the moon since the 1950s, a woman who produces a glass slide purportedly of Madonna’s pap smear and an old anarchist who sympathetically shares his philosophy of life with a robber.

23 May MARTIN

Director George A. Romero, USA 1978
Is Martin a vampire or just an awkward teenager? He does attack people for their blood but he also walks around in daylight delivering groceries. George Romero drained the ritual and eroticism from vampires just as he had removed the voodoo from the zombies in his landmark Night of the Living Dead. In both cases he used the horror genre as a starting point for bitter social commentary.

30 May SEDOTTA E ABBANDONATA
          (Seduced and Abandoned)

Director Pietro Germi, Italy 1964
Shotgun weddings, kidnapping, attempted murder, emergency dental work -the things Don Vincenzo will do to restore his family’s honor! Seduced and Abandoned was the follow-up to Germi’s Divorce Italian Style, and in many ways is even more audacious – a rollicking yet raw series of escalating comic calamities that ensue in a small village when sixteen-year-old Agnese loses her virginity at the hands of her sister’s lascivious fiance. Merciless and mirthful, Seduced and Abandoned skewers Sicilian social custom

6 June DESPERATE REMEDIES

Directors Stewart Main and Peter Wells, NZ 1993
A wonderfully camp and lusty production filmed in staged sets. In the 19th century New Zealand town of Hope elegant and attractive Dorothea has a sister, Rose, addicted to opium and her boyfiend/supplier. Dorothea hires a handsome immigrant, Lawrence, to lure Rose away from this relationship. But Dorothea and Lawrence grow attracted to each other. Dorothea already has a ‘suitor’ in Anne, who sensing a rival, pushes her into a marriage of convenience. A vivid and gay melodrama.

13 June KYUA (Cure)

Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan 1997
A series of baffling murders, a detective whose life is imploding from stress, and a softly spoken drifter who exudes a strange charisma are the ingredients of this troubling urban fable from Kyoshi (don’t call him Akira) Kurosawa. The cure of the title is as dreadful as it is subtle.

20 June WESELE (The Wedding)

Director Andrzej Wajda, Poland 1973
Set at the turn of the century during one night and based on the play by Stanislaw Wyspianski, the film concerns a Polish poet who has decided to marry a peasant girl. The wedding is attended by a heterogenous group of people from all strata of Polish society, who dance, get drunk and lament Poland’s division between Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The bridegroom, a painter friend and a journalist each in turn is confronted with spectres of Polish past. In the end a call to arms is called but turns out to be a farce. A confined, painterly satire on oppression.

27 June PHASE IV

Director Saul Bass, USA 1974
Saul Bass is best known for his movie poster work and title design for Alfred Hitchcock but his second and only major feature film is Phase IV, a wonderfully photographed and metaphorical film that lurches from B grade horror to profound metaphysics. Dealing with the nature of fascism, evolution and humanity it confronts an alien, elevated mass mind – in the form of altered ants. Transformed by cosmic bombardment they begin to etch mathematical patterns in the soil and freak their investigators out…

4 July DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE
        (Cemetary Man)

Director Michele Soavi, Italy 1994
The girl of Francesco’s (Rupert Everett) dreams is murdered after their consummation. Then it happens again. And again. Between that and dispatching the increasing parade of the living dead who are crawling out of their graves at the cemetery where he works life gets tough. Michele Soavi serves up comedy, creepiness, violence and even romance before slamming on the brakes for one of the horror genre’s strangest endings.