March 2010 Archives
March 19: A Serious Man (2009)
A Serious Man (2009)
Friday, March 19th - 7:00pm
Rotten Tomatoes: 87%
Metacritic: 79
"Rich and funny" - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
"The Coens have made their most personal, most intensely Jewish film, a pitch-perfect comedy of despair that, against some odds, turns out to be one of their most universal as well." - Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
"A wonderfully odd, bleakly comic and thoroughly engrossing film." - Claudia Puig, USA Today
"Earnestly engaged in the question of what constitutes a life well lived." - J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader
"It's about God, man's place in the world and the meaning of life, so naturally it's one of [the Coens] funnier movies…a metaphysical pie in the face." - Kirk Honeycutt, The Hollywood Reporter
"See this film immediately." - Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York
In celebration of and disagreement with the Oscars last weekend, the IAM Screening Series staff would like to present their winner for Best Picture of 2009, Academy Award-winning writer/directors Joel and Ethan Coen's black comedy, "A Serious Man."
It is 1970, and Larry Gopnik (Tony Award nominee Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous acquaintances, Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), who seems to her a more substantial person than the feckless Larry. An anonymous hostile letter-writer is trying to sabotage Larry's chances for tenure at the university, while a graduate student seems to be trying to bribe him for a passing grade while at the same time threatening to sue him for defamation. On top of all this, the beautiful woman next door torments him by sunbathing nude. Struggling for equilibrium, Larry seeks advice from three different rabbis. Can anyone help him cope with his afflictions and become a righteous person -- a mensch -- a serious man?
Nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards as well as Best Actor for Michael Stuhlbarg at the Golden Globes, and winner of Best Cinematography for Roger Deakins at the Independent Spirit Awards, A Serious Man is darkly funny and filled with thought provoking questions about faith, familial responsibility, delinquent behavior, dental phenomena, academia, mortality, and Judaism. Few films are so deadly serious and yet so funny at the same time; this sustained tone is pitch-perfect and makes A Serious Man required viewing.
Runtime: 106 minutes
April 16: Citizen Kane (1941)
Citizen Kane (1941)
Friday, April 16th - 7:00pm
Rotten Tomatoes: 100%
"Sparkles with originality and invention…a triumph" - John C. Flinn Sr., Variety
"A marvelous movie…that gets better with each renewed acquaintance." - Time Out
"To re-visit Citizen Kane is to experience the infinite possibilities of movies being realized right before your very eyes." - Empire Magazine
"The movie that taught [me] what movies were." - Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
"A picture of tremendous and overpowering scope, not in physical extent so much as in its rapid and graphic rotation of thoughts…comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood" - Bosley Crowther, The New York Times
"It would be nice to be able to buck the critical orthodoxy and say how tired and overrated Citizen Kane is; but the dull truth is, it's still, indisputably, one of the great masterpieces of cinema." - Robert Hanks, The Independent
Arguably the greatest of American films, Orson Welles's 1941 masterpiece, made when he was only 26, still unfurls like a dream and carries the viewer along the mysterious currents of time and memory to reach a mature (if ambiguous) conclusion: people are the sum of their contradictions, and cannot be easily known.
Welles plays the enormously wealthy media magnate Charles Foster Kane. Told from the often contradictory perspectives of his friends, coworkers, and romantic interests, the film charts Kanes's rise to power running a media empire, his pursuit of political office, and his eventual personal collapse. The film, based on a composite of eccentric aviator/recluse Howard Hughes and famed newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, bore a strong enough resemblance that Hearst tried to have the movie suppressed.
The film is the sum of Welles's awesome ambitions as an artist in Hollywood. He pushes the limits of then-available technology to create a true magic show, a visual and aural feast. Every aspect of the production marked an advance in film language: the deep focus and deeply shadowed cinematography (from Gregg Toland); the discontinuous narrative, relying heavily on flashbacks and newsreel footage (propelled by a script largely written by Herman Mankiewicz); the innovative use of sound and score (music composed by Bernard Herrmann); and the ensemble acting forged in the fires of Welles's Mercury Theatre (featuring the film debuts of, among others, Joseph Cotten, Everett Sloane, and Agnes Moorehead).
Nominated for nine Academy Awards, Citizen Kane is quite possibly the greatest film ever made and certainly the most influential. Every moment of the film, every shot, has been choreographed to perfection. This is truly a one-of-a-kind work, and in many ways is still the most modern of modern films from the 20th century.
Runtime: 119 minutes
May 21: M*A*S*H (1970)
M*A*S*H (1970)
Friday, May 21st - 7:00pm
Rotten Tomatoes: 89%
Metacritic: 79
"One of America's funniest films." - Time
"The best American war comedy since sound came in." - Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
"Perfectly expressed the anarchic, rebellious spirit of the 1970s." - Neil Smith, BBC
"Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland are two genuinely funny actors." - Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
"A cockeyed masterpiece -- see it twice." - Joe Morgenstern, Newsweek
A war movie without any battle scenes; a comedy we laugh at precisely because it shouldn't be funny. Director Robert Altman's thinly veiled Vietnam War satire M*A*S*H follows a group of Mobile Army Surgical Hospital officers stationed near the front lines of the Korean conflict. Led by sardonic captains "Hawkeye" Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and "Trapper" John McIntyre (Elliott Gould), they hatch screwball adventures as an antidote to the tragedies surrounding them. Surgical hijinks unfold as they fly off to Japan to play golf, rig a game of football against a rival army team, and subject their priggish superiors, Major Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) and Major "Hot Lips" Houlihan (Sally Kellerman), to all manner of hilarious indignities. Altman's decision to present his film as a series of loosely connected vignettes rather than a traditionally unfolding narrative perfectly captures the freewheeling spirit so unique to early-'70s cinema; the film has the feel of an absurd three-ring circus.
M*A*S*H features a huge ensemble cast all talking over each other (both Altman traits) and with its release a new form of comedy was born. Premier Magazine rated MASH one of the 50 Greatest Comedies of All Time and AFI (the American Film Institute) named it #54 on their list of Greatest Movies of All Time. It won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy) and the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, as well as the Palme d'Or for Director Robert Altman at the Cannes Film Festival. An essential part of film history and a real side-splitter to this day.
Runtime: 116 minutes
IAM Screening Series
The IAM Screening Series focuses on overlooked masterpieces, thought-provoking classics, and movies worth re-watching!