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FILM CLUB: Postponed to January

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So, I was alerted that football is still happening this year? TIL! Which means that Thursday is Thursday night football. I think we should be good for Saturday, because they’re not doing college football. Or at least most places aren’t. So I’m going to leave Saturdays. But I am going to put up a poll about moving Thursday to another weekday. Check all that apply to you, please. And I’ll try to schedule from there. 

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https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5423825182?pwd=T1VuUmJ5OVB1ZjRNQmNHRVpDQ3lkUT09
 

The room is alive. I’m gonna update this post with pretty video essays after.

 

Cheryl Dunye's The Watermelon Women

 

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A young black lesbian filmmaker probes into the life of The Watermelon Woman, a 1930s black actress who played 'mammy' archetypes. (IMDb)

 

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

 

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Cheryl Dunye

1966 –
 
 

A significant figure in independent and gay cinema, writer-director Cheryl Dunye examined the perception of her lesbian and African-American identity through a series of thought-provoking and frequently humorous features. She grew up in Philadelphia and received a master’s degree from Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts. Dunye began her film career with a series of short films that freely mixed documentary elements with fiction – a format she dubbed “dunyementaries” – as they addressed issues relating to her experience as a woman filmmaker and an African-American lesbian.

 

Her unique style also informed her feature film debut, The Watermelon Woman (1996). A critical hit as well as a recipient of the Best Feature Film Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, it was briefly the source of controversy when a Michigan Republican senator spoke out against the National Endowment for the Arts funding for what he perceived as “pornographic material”. Her follow up, Stranger Inside (2001) was a made-for-cable drama that proved a hit on the festival circuit. Duyne continued to address issues of sexuality and identity with humor in Mommy is Coming (2012) and has directed numerous episodes of television shows. As of 2020, she is in pre-production on a new film.

 

 

 

 -->> ALSO.  Cheryl Dunye just directed the latest episode of Lovecraft County, so you should ABSOLUTELY go watch that if you have HBO/HBO Max. <<---

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Lotte Reiniger's The Adventure of Prince Achmed

 

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A handsome prince rides a flying horse to faraway lands and embarks on magical adventures, which include befriending a witch, meeting Aladdin, battling demons and falling in love with a princess. (IMDb)


Run Time: 1hr 06 minutes

 

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Lotte Reiniger

1899 – 1981
 

Lotte Reiniger was creating beautiful hand-cut silhouette animation films a full 10 years before Walt Disney entered motion pictures. Reiniger learned the art of scherenschnitte (cutting designs with scissors) as a child and used her first cutout figures to stage Shakespeare. That changed after a lecture by actor-director Paul Wegener on an animation film. Reiniger joined the Max Reinhardt School of Acting where Wegener taught and impressed him with her silhouettes. Wegener asked Reiniger to animate wooden rats for his film Pied Piper of Hamelin (1918), and the following year she made her first short, The Ornament of the Heart in Love (1919). Impressed, a banker with a film company loaned his studio for her first feature The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), which took three years and 250,000 frames to create. 

 

She emigrated to England in 1936 with her husband Carl Koch (who shot her animations), where she made short fantasy films for the BBC until Koch’s death in 1963. In 1972, she received The Golden Reel Award at the Berlin Film Festival, which led to a revival of her films and a lecture tour of North America. Reiniger returned to filmmaking, making her final film The Four Seasons a year before her death in 1980.

 

A Documentary on Her Process:

 

 

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Cabin In The Sky

 

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A compulsive gambler dies during a shooting, but he'll receive a second chance to reform himself and to make up with his worried wife. (IMDb)

 

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

CW/TW: 1940s Cultural Stereotypes

 

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While watching Cheryl Duyne's The Watermelon Women last weekend, I was struck at how her movie star Faye Richards, really reminded me of Lena Horne.  So we made the switch to either Stormy Weather or Cabin In The Sky, and the group picked this Vincente Minnelli film from 1943.

 

 
In 1942, Louis B. Mayer wooed Vincente Minnelli out from Broadway with an MGM contract.  Minnelli, who had never made a film before, actually was paid to shadow MGM directors for a year before settling on his first project.  He settled Cabin In The Sky, an adaptation of a 1940 musical of the same name with music by Vernon Duke, lyrics by John Latouche, and book by Lynn Root.  The movie features notably the standard "Happiness Is A Thing Called Joe", Louis Armstrong in a supporting role, and a captivating performance from Ethel Waters that gives real weight to the picture that otherwise, by today's standards, could come off a hokum morality play centered on African-American stereotypes. The film also stars Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson (who took over from the Dooley Wilson, of Casablanca fame, who played Joe on stage.)
 
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Ethel Waters was a noted blues singer and pioneer of the stage. She was the first woman to integrate Broadway's theater district and the highest-paid woman on Broadway in the 1940's.  Her version of Stormy Weather is the National Recording Registry/Library of Congress.  In fact, when Lena Horne was asked to perform the song for her movie, she was a ball of nerves.  The director came over to her, and simply whispered: "Ethel Waters".  Lena was able to do it on the next take.
 
 
 
Lena Horne, like Duyne's Faye Richards, had a terrible time at MGM due to racism, and the studio execs not knowing how to really package her.  Most of all of her "films" at MGM use her as a "featured player" -- meaning her musical numbers were not integrated into the plot, so they could be easily removed when the movie was shown in The South.
 
[Sidebar: This happened with 20th Century Fox and The Nicholas Brothers as well.  The only time they ever danced with a white actor was Gene Kelly in The Pirate... which was directed by Vincente Minnelli.]
 
I think the absolute worst explain of this is the Til The Clouds Roll By/Showboat sham.  If 1946, MGM produced a whitewashed and sterilized bio-pic of Jerome Kern, who wrote Show Boat.  For Clouds, they cast Horne as Showboat's Julie, who is a light-skinned Black woman, passing as White, who is married to Steve, a White man.  
 
AND THEN, in 1951, when MGM decided to actually adapt Show Boat, guess what?  They refused to cast Lena Horne as Julie.  Nope. They cast Ava Gardiner, and I kid you not: sent her albums of Lena Horne singing and told her to do it as she does. 🙃
 
 
By the mid-1950s, much like Duyne's Faye, she said she was "tired of being typecast as a Negro who stands against a pillar singing a song. I did that 20 times too often."  She left MGM for a very successful nightclub and musical career, appeared as guests throughout early Variety Shows, and became the first African-American woman nominated for a Tony for "Best Leading Actress in a Musical".  She would return to film in the 1970s, most notability playing Glinda in The Wiz. 
 
 
On a personal note, this woman is an ICON. She worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to pass anti-lynching laws.  After seeing that the US Army was treating its Germen POWs to better seats at USO shows than their own African American soldiers, she quit the USO in 1945.  And then she financed tours of military camps herself.  She was blacklisted during the 1950s for her affiliations in the 1940s with communist-backed groups. (She wasn't a communist, but any Democrat/Socialist/Reformer in the 1950s was labeled a communist.). She was part of the 1963 March On Washington. 
 
She was an amazing performer that never really reached her full potential at MGM -- like so many actors of color.  Cabin In The Sky is her favorite film, and I'm really excited to watch it with everyone.
 
 
And here's a clip that was cut from the film cause it was too risque:
 
 
 
 
 
 
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OCTOBER SCREENINGS

 

October, traditionally, is the month for all things horrific and spooooky.  But it's 2020.  The entire year is a horror movie.  This month's schedule reflects my general anxieties, fears, and dread as we count down to November:

 

 

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September 30

Dark Victory (1939)

1 hour 44 mins

Directed by Edmund Goulding; Starring Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart

 

Our transitional movie is Betty Davis in Dark Victory, where she plays a wealthy, hedonistic heiress, who gets diagnosed with brain cancer and falls for her doctor. It also is famous for featuring a supporting role by the devil himself, Ronald Reagan. I can’t think of anything more horrific.

 

 

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October 03

The Haunting (1962)

1 hr 54 minutes

Directed by Robert Wise; Starring Julie Harris, Claire Bloom

 

Based on Shirley Jackson's classic horror story about a haunted house, and repressed lesbians, this is my favorite horror movie.  "Hill House has stood for about 90 years and appears haunted: its inhabitants have always met strange, tragic ends.  Now Dr. John Markway has assembled a team of people who he thinks will prove whether or not the house is haunted."

 

 

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October 07

Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)

1 hr 55 minutes

Directed by Peter Weir; Starring Rachael Roberts, Anne-Louise Lambert, Vivean Gray

 

Peter Weir's adaptation of Joan Lindsay's novel of the same name; "during a rural summer picnic, a few students and a teacher from an Australian girls' school vanish without a trace.  Their absence frustrates and haunts the people left behind." A rare horror movie shot in the light, this film mixes elements of supernatural and horror to a chilling effect.

 

 

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October 10

Gaslight (1944)

1 hr 54 mins

Directed by George Cukor; Starring Ingrid Bergman

 

A woman's husband manipulates her into thinking she's insane.  I mean:

 

Season 5 Whatever GIF by CBS All Access

 

 

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October 14

Tod Browning Double Feature

Freaks (1932) / The Devil-Doll (1936)

1 hour 6 mins / 1 hr 20 minutes

 

Tod Browning is an early silent and sound filmmaker, best known for directing Dracula.  But some of his best work are these two short "horror" movies.  Freaks tells the story of a trapeze artist who agrees to marry a fellow circus performer, but his friends discover she only wants him for his inheritance.  The film -- only clocking in at an hour -- lost a reel after MGM saw the film and hated it; it's since taken on a cult classic feel.  The Devil-Doll is just, look, it's straight up the most bizarre film I've ever seen.  It's got a revenge plot from Count of Monte Cristo mixed with Mad Scientists and early movie special effects.  Lionel Barrymore spends half the film in drag.  It's a trip.

 

 

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October 17

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

2 hrs 6 mins

Directed by John Frankenheimer; Starring Frank Sinatra, Janet Leigh, and Angela Lansbury

 

You've probably heard the term, and seen the Denzel version.  Here is the original, classic political horror show thriller: "A former POW is brainwashed as an unwitting assassin for an international Communist conspiracy."

 

 

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October 21

Double Feature

 

The Pit and The Pendulum (1961)

1 hr 25 mins

Directed by Roger Corman; Starring Vincent Price

 

Really can't beat a film directed by the Pope of Pop Cinema, staring the iconic Vincent Price.  This is based on Edgar Allan's Poe's short story, in this version: "In the sixteenth century, Francis Barnard travels to Spain to clarify the strange circumstances of his sister's death after she had married the song of a cruel Spanish Inquisitor."  The film's written by Richard Matheson, who wrote sixteen episodes of what we have next:

 

It's A Good Life (1961)

25 minutes

Directed by James Sheldon; Written by Rod Sterling

 

Both of the films this week are only an hour and a half, so I decided to sneak on two episodes of Rod Sterling's The Twilight Zone.  We think of the Twilight Zone for its brilliant social commentary and sci-fiction stories, but Rod Sterling could write a horror story, and this week we have two.  The first is It's A Good Life.  "On an isolated family farm, a young boy with vast mental powers, but lacking emotional development, holds his terrified family in thrall to his every juvenile wish."

 

 

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October 24 

Double Feature

 

The Blob (1958)

1 hr 26 mins

Directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr; Starring Steve McQueen

 

Yes!  That Steve McQueen!  In this 1950's B-Horror Movie classic, a too old to play a High Schooler Steve McQueen fights off a mindless, all-consuming Blob trying to devour his small town.  

 

The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street (1960)

25 mins

Directed by Ronald Winston; Written by Rod Sterling

 

From Season 1 from The Twilight Zone, this episode centers "on a peaceful suburban street where paranoia reigns supreme."  Often ranked as the #1 or #2 greatest episode of the series.  If you haven't seen either of these Twilight Zone episodes, I would HIGHLY RECOMMEND you go in blind.  Do NOT look into them before you watch them.

 

 

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October 28

Ace In The Hole (1951)

1 hour 52 mins

Directed by Billy Wilder; Starring Kirk Douglas and Jan Sterling

 

Next, we follow the unwritten rule of this entire endeavor: if there is a Billy Wilder movie available, show the Billy Wilder movie.  Considered one of his finest, though a commercial flop during its initial release, Ace In The Hole is about "Chuck Tatum (Douglas), an ambitious newspaperman more concerned with his own glory and profits than with reporting the truth."

 

 

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October 31

Singin' In The Rain (1952)

1 hr 42 mins

Directed By Gene Kelly and Stanley Doren; Starring Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O'Connor

 

And finally, after all of that dread, and fear, and horror, we're going to let everything go and watch my Ultimate Comfort Movie.  I want nothing more than to have two hours of peace and share in the glory of Gene Kelly's ass magna opus.  (Also: I'm working the polls for my town.  We actually might be counting ballots, depending on the volume we receive and what the Clerk says, that weekend.  So I want something I can easily cancel if I have to.)

 

General Disclaimer:

TImes and Pictures are Subject to Change.

 

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Quick programming update! We’re going to switch out Gaslight and picnic at hanging rock. So we’re gonna do Gaslight this week, With picnic on the weekend.

 

Wednesday is the debate, so we’re going to have to schedule around that. I put up a poll for whatever folks want to do. I’ll probably close it on like Monday night

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On 10/17/2020 at 10:18 AM, Cap said:

The Manchurian candidate got pushed back to Monday at 10 PM. Thank you

The idea offa  US President being the tool of a hostile foreign power is more revelent today then ever.

 

it slso gives Angela Lansbury a chance to be REALLY evil.

 

The remake  is not worth seeing.

Edited by dudalb
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