July 6th: Five Element Ninjas/The Mystery of Chess Boxing (Roxie Theatre)

Nope, not missing the chance to see one of my favorite villains of all time, Ghostface Killer, on a theatre screen in the Shaw Brothers‘ martial arts classic, The Mystery of Chess Boxing.  Nobody – especially fans of fist-to-face action flicks – will want to miss this chance to see a vicious head-snatching baddie sling about his flying guillotine.  As for Five Element Ninjas, don’t know how I missed this one when going through my kung-fu phase a few years back, but I’m looking forward to it nonetheless.

July 6th: Beasts of The Southern Wild (Embarcadero)

Newcomer Benh Zeitlin‘s feature-length debut has quickly moved into my most anticipated films of the year radar.  It has already snatched up 4 major awards at Cannes and 2 from Sundance, including the Grand Jury prize.  The plot as IMDB describes it is about a girl who faced with her father’s fading health and environmental changes that release an army of prehistoric creatures called aurochs, leaves her Delta-community home in search of her mother.  Not to take anything away from the plot, because it does sound intriguing, but I’m more interested in seeing what all the hype is about surrounding the cinematography and acting that have been buzzing around this film.

July 6th: Savages (Major)

Olive Stone‘s return to fast-paced genre filmmaking like U-Turn and Natural Born Killers?  Let’s just say it’s the first time in a long time that I’ve been anticipating a new Oliver Stone picture.

July 7th – 11th: The Man From London/The Turin Horse (Roxie Theatre)

I still haven’t seen anything by film auteur, Bela Tarr, but with two of them coming to the Roxie hopefully now I can at long last become acquainted with a piece of this man’s filmography, if for no other reason than to have some of my film snobby friends stop harassing me; “How can you call yourself a film buff, yet you still haven’t seen anything by Bela Tarr?”

Here’s what the Roxie has to say about this upcoming week-long program “Béla Tarr, the Hungarian master of the measured-pace, real-time dramas that penetrate the murk of human existence has announced he has finished with film. Bad news for us who have already clocked in countless hours shadowing the desperate lives of his proletariat protagonists as they negotiate their beautifully bleak, black & white environs. As we incredulously bid Béla bye-bye, the Roxie proposes two, little-seen titles from this titan of long-form minimalism and his longtime collaborator, the novelist László Krasznahorkai, both presented in 35mm.” Read More…

Though made for German television, The Dreileben Trilogy, or as I like to call it, “Six Degrees Of Nature Boy”, is definitely a cinematic event.  Three directors, each with their own visual voice, take turns guiding their narratives across the picturesque Forest of Dreileben.  All three films are set during the same time period, and all three films deal with a different protagonist who in some way is connected to Molesch, a local escaped convict.

What impressed me most about these three films was the multilevel depth to which each of these scripts reach.  There’s Christian Petzold‘s Beats Being Dead, a turbulent coming-of-age romantic tragedy, Dominik Graf‘s Don’t Follow Me Around; a chatty character study of a young couple, their detective friend/houseguest and the complex relationship between the three of them, and Christoph Hochhäusler‘s One Minute of Darkness, which I like to think of as the German version of the Coen Brothers‘ No Country For Old Men (in story alone, not visual style), where, when we’re not following the survival skills of coo-coo for co-co puffs killer, we’re following an old deaf dog of a detective.

Because each film follows the same time line, those who decide to see all three will be treated to seeing events take place from other character’s perspectives.  So, while it is not necessary, or even essential to watch these movies in succession, those who do will be glad they did, and not just because they have given into their completest tendencies. Read More…