FILMS AT
THE I.M.U. 2006
Rivers
and Tides Monday,
Sept 10 2006
In the timeless tradition of Winged Migration and Koyaanisqatsi,
the theatrical phenomenon Rivers and Tides depicts the magical
relationship between art and nature while painting a visually
intoxicating portrait of famed artist Andy Goldsworthy. Gorgeously
shot and masterfully edited, the film follows the bohemian
free spirit Goldsworthy all over the world as he demonstrates
and opens up about his unique creative process. From his long-winding
rock walls and icicle sculptures to his interlocking leaf
chains and multicolored pools of flowers, Goldsworthy’s
painstakingly intricate masterpieces are made entirely of
materials found in Mother Nature — who threatens and
often succeeds in destroying his art, sometimes before it
is even finished. With over ten four-star reviews from the
nation’s top critics, Rivers and Tides serenely captures
Goldsworthy in the midst of constructing his trademark ephemera
on-camera creating a mesmerizing cinematic experience that
helps us to appreciate nature in new and enchanting ways.
90 min
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Tibet-
cry of the snow lion
Monday,
Sept 17 2006
Ten years in the making, this award-winning documentary was
filmed during a remarkable nine journeys throughout Tibet,
India and Nepal. CRY OF THE SNOW LION brings audiences to
the long-forbidden "rooftop of the world" with an
unprecedented richness of imagery… from rarely-seen rituals
in remote monasteries, to horse races with Khamba warriors;
from brothels and slums in the holy city of Lhasa, to the
magnificent Himalayan peaks still traveled by nomadic yak
caravans. The dark secrets of Tibet’s recent past are
powerfully chronicled through riveting personal stories and
interviews, and a collection of undercover and archival images
never before assembled in one film. A definitive exploration
of a legendary subject, TIBET: CRY OF THE SNOW LION is an
epic story of courage and compassion.
104 min.
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Lust
for Life Monday,
Sept 24 2006
Vibrant orange sunflowers. Rippling yelow grain. Trees bursting
with white bloom. "The pictures come to me as in a dream,"
Vincent Van Gogh said. A dream that too often turned to life-shattering
nightmare. Winner of Golden Globe and New York Film Critics
Best Actor Awards, Kirk Douglas gives a fierce portrayal as
the artist torn between the joyous inspiration of his genius
and the dark desperation of his tormented mind. The obsessed
Van Gogh painted the way other men breathe, driving away family
and friends, including artist Paul Gauguin (1956 Best Supporting
Actor Academy Award winner Anthony Quinn). Directed by Vincente
Minnelli and saturated with the hues of Van Gogh's sea, field
and sky, Lust for Life captures the ecstasy of art. And the
agony of one man's life.
122 min.
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The House of Spirits Monday,
Oct 02 2006
"The House Of Spirits"
is a completely unforgettable film. The script is based
on work of the famous Chilean writer Isabel Allende, and
it is adapted by Bille August, an impeccable work, managing
to show the generations of a family, everybody at the same
marries, it focuses historical facts as the Chilean military
blow, beyond is clear of explore with a lot of efficiency
each defect, each dream, each characters' frustration. The
movie covers 3 generations and about 60 years. The father
(Irons) achieves his wealth, social, and political status
through hard work. He is a difficult man, and when his young
daughter (Winona Ryder) befriends a young peasant boy, she
is sent to school away. The mother (Streep) seems to have
some connection with the supernatural.
140 min.
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Black Robe Monday,
Oct 09 2006
An unusual and absorbing new film about North American Indians
and a French Jesuit missionary in the early seventeenth century.
It's a culture-clash drama in which the most important conflicts
take place in the realm of the spirit. The main characters
are an excruciatingly pious young priest called Father Laforgue
(Lothaire Bluteau) and an Algonquian chief named Chomina (August
Schellenberg). Their world views are so radically opposed
that at times the two men seem unable to acknowledge each
other as human. The screenwriter, Brian Moore, and the director,
Bruce Beresford, show extraordinary respect for the stubborn,
almost impenetrable otherness of their historical characters.
The film is an adventure story in the truest sense: the filmmakers
lead us into unknown territory, and keep pushing us farther
and farther on, until, by the end, we find ourselves deep
in the wilderness of the seventeenth-century consciousness.
101 min.
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Brother Sun, Sister Moon Monday,
Oct 16 2006
Brother Sun, Sister Moon is a movie about beauty, passion
for life and freedom, it shows a freedom that surpasses the
boundaries of money and into the hope and lives of people
in the real world, where love for each other and faith is
more precious than any jewel that you can shine.
The story is an excellent translation of St. Francis` life,
his awakening to a new fresh life. Zefferelli shows us this
in the strange and dreamy messages St. Francis` sees before
him in feverous state when he comes home from the war. We
see Francis wake from his dream...
121 min.
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American Beauty Monday,
Oct 23 2006
Meet Lester Burnham; a man who feels like he's completely
dead inside. His wife and daughter despise him and do not
show him any signs of respect. On the surface, the family
seems like a picture-perfect family that everybody dreams
about--but inside is a completely different matter. His
wife is obsessed with material possessions and doesn't care
for "petty" things like love or life, while his
daughter resents herself because she isn't "perfect."
Lester's mental coma is rudely interrupted when he meets
his daughter's friend and starts fantasizing about her.
The awakening might be due to a disturbing thought or feeling,
but the wake-up call changes Lester and allows him to realize
that there's always time to erase his "forced-image"
and be the person he really is.
122 min.
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March of the Penguins Monday,
Oct 30 2006
Each winter, alone in the pitiless ice deserts of Antarctica,
deep in the most inhospitable terrain on Earth, a truly remarkable
journey takes place as it has done for millennia. Emperor
penguins in their thousands abandon the deep blue security
of their ocean home and clamber onto the frozen ice to begin
their long journey into a region so bleak, so extreme, it
supports no other wildlife at this time of year. In single
file, the penguins march blinded by blizzards, buffeted by
gale force winds. Guided by instinct, by the otherworldly
radiance of the Southern Cross, they head unerringly for their
traditional breeding ground
80 min.
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| Monday. Nov 06: The House of Spirits
"The House Of Spirits"
is a completely unforgettable film. The script is based
on work of the famous Chilean writer Isabel Allende, and
it is adapted by Bille August, an impeccable work, managing
to show the generations of a family, everybody at the same
marries, it focuses historical facts as the Chilean military
blow, beyond is clear of explore with a lot of efficiency
each defect, each dream, each characters' frustration. The
movie covers 3 generations and about 60 years. The father
(Irons) achieves his wealth, social, and political status
through hard work. He is a difficult man, and when his young
daughter (Winona Ryder) befriends a young peasant boy, she
is sent to school away. The mother (Streep) seems to have
some connection with the supernatural.
140 min.
>>
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Monday.
Nov 13: 3-Iron
Tae-suk is homeless and lives like a phantom. His daily routine
involves temporarily staying in houses and apartments he knows
to be vacant. He never steals from nor damages his unknowing
hosts' homes; rather, he is like a kind ghost, sleeping in
other people's beds, eating a little food out of strangers'
refrigerators and repaying their unintended hospitality by
doing the laundry or making small repairs. Sun-hwa was once
a beautiful model, but she has become withered living under
the shadow of her abusive husband, who keeps her imprisoned
in their affluent, expensively decorated house. Tae-suk and
Sun-hwa are bound by fate to cross paths though their invisible
existences. They meet when Tae-suk breaks into Sun-hwa's house
and they instantly recognize the similarity of their souls.
As if bound by unseen ties, they find themselves unable to
separate and quietly accept their bizarre new destiny.
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Monday,
Nov 20 As it is in Heaven
In Kay Pollak's deeply affecting film
"As It Is in Heaven," those twin torments borne
of hope and fear drive the talented but haunted young musician
to become a celebrated conductor, Daniel Dareus (Michael Nyqvist).
He is a fierce maestro, willing to bleed
and excoriate his orchestra to achieve the musical heights
he strives for, and finally he pushes himself too far. When
a heart attack forces Dareus to give up the podium, he returns
to the tiny village where he grew up and, as the poet said,
discovers the place for the first time.
Filled with passion, humor and much sadness,
this Swedish-language film could do very well with global
audiences that enjoyed such films as "Mr. Holland's
Opus" and "Billy Elliott," with their appealing
mix of music and aspiration. The film is the Swedish entry
for the foreign-language Academy Award.
From a jet-set life, in which his agent
had him fully booked for the next eight years, Dareus finds
himself alone with an empty calendar. Hoping to remain unrecognized
in the snowbound village, having changed his name at the
outset of his career, the maestro buys the old village schoolhouse.
He seeks a quiet existence in order to take care of his
heart, which his doctor has described as completely worn
out.
His anonymity is soon breached, however,
and soon he is reluctantly coaching the local church choir.
He becomes cantor and spiritual leader of the mixed band
of choristers who include local businessmen, housewives
and village oddballs. There also are three women whose involvement
leads to both love and conflict.
Lena (Frida Hallgren) is fresh-faced,
blond and eager for life. Gabriella (noted singer Helen
Sjoholm) has a beautiful voice and a jealous wife-beater
for a husband. And Inger (Ingela Olsson) is married to the
guilt-ridden village priest, Stig (Niklas Falk).
Using original and unconventional methods,
Dareus leads the choir toward his dream of perfect, soaring
harmony, and many life lessons are encountered along the
way. By the time the choir is ready to compete in a major
festival, the internecine fears and squabbles and external
sniping place the group's fate, and the conductor's life,
in jeopardy.
Nyqvist makes a completely believable
near-genius whose human frailty gives greater anguish to
his driving musical passion. Hallgren is endearing as the
young woman who offers him the chance of love. The rest
of the cast offers sterling work as a range of characters
masterfully established by Pollak and his co-scriptors.
It's extraordinarily difficult to
capture on film the indescribable miracle that results in
musical creations of great wonder. This film, with an inspired
score by Stefan Nilsson, comes closer than most.
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Monday,
Nov 27: Forrest Gump
"Stupid is as stupid does," says Forrest Gump (played
by Tom Hanks in an Oscar-winning performance) as he discusses
his relative level of intelligence with a stranger while waiting
for a bus. Despite his sub-normal IQ, Gump leads a truly charmed
life, with a ringside seat for many of the most memorable
events of the second half of the 20th century. Entirely without
trying, Forrest teaches Elvis Presley to dance, becomes a
football star, meets John F. Kennedy, serves with honor in
Vietnam, meets Lyndon Johnson, speaks at an anti-war rally
at the Washington Monument, hangs out with the Yippies, defeats
the Chinese national team in table tennis, meets Richard Nixon,
discovers the break-in at the Watergate, opens a profitable
shrimping business, becomes an original investor in Apple
Computers, and decides to run back and forth across the country
for several years. Meanwhile, as the remarkable parade of
his life goes by, Forrest never forgets Jenny (Robin Wright
Penn), the girl he loved as a boy, who makes her own journey
through the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s that is far
more troubled than the path Forrest happens upon. Featured
alongside Tom Hanks are Sally Field as Forrest's mother; Gary
Sinise as his commanding officer in Vietnam; Mykelti Williamson
as his ill-fated Army buddy who is familiar with every recipe
that involves shrimp; and the special effects artists whose
digital magic place Forrest amidst a remarkable array of historical
events and people.
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NO FILM MONDAY DECMBER
4th.
FULL MOON MEDITATION
NIGHT
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Monday,
Dec 11:
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring
As the title suggests, the action takes
place in five distinct episodes, but sometimes many years
separate the seasons.
A Buddhist monk (Oh Young-soo) and his disciple, a young boy,
live in an enchanted setting-a temple set at the center of
a very still lake high in the mountains of Korea. The boy
grows up, makes mistakes, and receives punishments from his
master, but all is calm and orderly until a young woman enters
the scene-a disruption that leads to violence and, eventually,
to renewal. By the time the story reaches its final sections,
you realize you have witnessed the arc of existence--not one
person's life, but everyone's. Kim Ki-duk's movie has a formal
grace that is nearly intoxicating.
103 minutes
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Monday,
Dec 18: Nobody Knows
Four siblings live happily with their mother in a small apartment
in Tokyo. The children all have different fathers and have
never been to school. The very existence of three of them
has been hidden from the landlord. One day, the mother leaves
behind a little money and a note, charging her oldest boy
to look after the others. And so begins the children's odyssey,
a journey nobody knows. Though engulfed by the cruel fate
of abandonment, the four children do their best to survive
in their own little world, devising and following their own
set of rules. When they are forced to engage with the world
outside their cocooned universe, the fragile balance that
has sustained them collapses. Their innocent longing for their
mother, their wary fascination toward the outside world, their
anxiety over their increasingly desperate situation, their
inarticulate cries, their kindness to each other, their determination
to survive on wits and courage.
141 minutes
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