Chester Film Society

Chester Film Society Message

2008-04-24T19:53:13Z

CHESTER FILM SOCIETY eNEWSLETTER 24th April 2008

A final mailshot this season to thank you for your support of Chester Film Society during the 2007-8 season. Our last film, The Taste of Others, scored 6.64.Your highest rated film was Little Miss Sunshine with 8.94, followed by Tsotsi with8.60 and Volver with 8.03. Full details can be found by visiting www.chesterfilmfans.co.uk. Many thanks for your feedback and comments on the films during the season. Chester Film Society belongs to you after all. We'll soon begin the process of selecting films for the new season. Please contact us with any films you've seen which you think we'd like - we'll do our best to get them for you. Sometimes we can't book a film due to copyright or distribution rights. Even though a film may be on sale that does not mean it has rights for viewing to a non-theatrical audience. We are always on the lookout for members who would like a go helping out with the running of the society, why not you? So all's that left is to wish you a great summer - we'll contact you again with details of the 2008-9 season in due course. Thanks again, Mike, on behalf of the committee.

This newsletter is produced by Mike Graham for Chester Film Society. Please visit www.chesterfilmfans.co.uk regularly for programme information.

Subscribe to Chester Film Society via email by entering your email address below:

Chester Film Society Message

2008-04-20T14:27:19Z

CHESTER FILM SOCIETY eNEWSLETTER
20th April 2008

Our next film takes place on:
Tuesday 22nd April
Little Theatre
7.45pm

The Taste of Others

Agnes Jaoui/Canada-France/2000/112mins

Review
Is there room in this world for the �well-made' film? The French film �The Taste of Others,� like a wonderful novel, is a seamlessly crafted work of warm observation and witty moments. Without tricks or gimmicks or stylistic flourishes it sweeps us up into its world, opening us to the deliciously observed lives of its very real people. Set in Rouen, it's the story of a successful businessman, M. Castella (Jean-Pierre Bacri, who cowrote the script with his wife Agnès Jaoui, who also directed). Castella is the kind of well-meaning boor who makes homophobic jokes to an obviously gay man, who has never heard poetry spoken on stage (a performance of a Racine play induces a crush on Clara, the leading actress. In fact he hires her to give him English lessons so that he might see more of her.) Clara (Anne Alvaro), at forty caught in the throes of insecurity about her acting career, hangs out at the bar of Manie (Jaoui in an enchanting performance), who has always made and left a series of casual relationships, and who also sells marijuana for some extra money. Manie in turn is attracted to Moreno, Castella's bodyguard, who is as casual as she about commitment. Castella is saddled with his controlling wife Angelique and her dog Flucky � one of the great dog names of all time � and the film, more or less, is the story of how he comes to stand up for himself; or rather for the best of himself. The story is told with delicacy and wit, and leaves no one out. We are as interested in Manie and Clara and Moreno � and a few others � as we are in Castella. The film is charming, which I mean as a compliment, and is enriched because it has the underpinning of a script that lets us come to know its people at the same time as they come to know themselves. It pulls together the softly braided strands of lives that touch each other in newly fresh ways, and lets us experience those moments along with the people on screen. This is Jaoui's first film as director, though she has a career as actress, playwright and screenwriter, and she handles her cast and camera with unobtrusive skill. Robert Glatzer This is our last film of the season, and will be preceded by our Annual General Meeting.
Trivia
In the final scene of the movie Bruno (Alain Chabat) plays the theme of Edith Piaf's "Je ne regrette rien".

Please visit http://www.chesterfilmfans.co.uk/mailing_list/news_080420.htm for an online version of this issue.

This newsletter is produced by Mike Graham for Chester Film Society. Please visit www.chesterfilmfans.co.uk regularly for programme information.

Subscribe to Chester Film Society via email by entering your email address below:

Chester Film Society Message

2008-04-13T15:38:35Z

CHESTER FILM SOCIETY eNEWSLETTER
13th April 2008

Our next film takes place on:
Tuesday 15th April
Little Theatre
7.45pm

Two Stage Sisters

Xie Jin/China/1965/112mins

Review
Like a handsome Bollywood epic, Two Stage Sisters a film by Xie Jin has something for everyone -- sympathetic heroines, evil capitalists, great music, Hollywood-style melodrama, and revolutionary fervor. Set in pre-Revolutionary China, it is a tragic melodrama with strong political overtones. Though revolutionary in spirit, the film was banned after its debut for "bourgeois humanism", ostensibly making the reactionary sister seem too sympathetic. The director himself was imprisoned at the start of the Cultural Revolution. In Two Stage Sisters, a runaway peasant girl, Zhu Chunhua (Fang Xie), is taken in by an opera troupe and meets Xing Yuehong (Yindi Cao) and her kind father, Master Xing. When the father dies, the two actresses go to Shanghai and perform in the Shaoxing Opera, displacing the former singer, Miss Shang (Yunzhu Shangguan) who grows bitter and resentful towards the manager, Master Tang. Yuehong and Chunhua become close friends but it is obvious they are moving in different directions. Chunhua meets a revolutionary cadre who points out how women are exploited and oppressed, making sure to point out that its not just the fault of the bosses but their bosses and beyond that, the Americans. Chunhua attends political meetings and becomes involved in the Revolution while Yuehong marries Master Tang and lives in style - wearing Western clothes, high heels, elaborate headdresses, and makeup. When Chunhua refuses to stop a play objected to by the bosses, she is assaulted and comes face to face in court with Yuehong who is forced to testify against her, setting the stage for a dramatic climax. Powerful and involving, Two Stage Sisters is an important film and a rare treat to watch and listen to. Howard Schumann Please note this is a change to our advertised programme due to distribution issues with Blind Shaft. Please accept our apologies.
Trivia
Movie-making in general stopped in 1964 as the Cultural Revolution began its 10 years of destruction.

Please visit http://www.chesterfilmfans.co.uk/mailing_list/news_080413.htm for an online version of this issue.

This newsletter is produced by Mike Graham for Chester Film Society. Please visit www.chesterfilmfans.co.uk regularly for programme information.

Subscribe to Chester Film Society via email by entering your email address below:

Chester Film Society Message

2008-03-30T11:20:05Z

CHESTER FILM SOCIETY eNEWSLETTER
30th March 2008

Our next film takes place on:
Tuesday 1st April
Little Theatre
7.45pm

Little Miss Sunshine

Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris/
USA/2006/95mins

Review
It's a rare family road trip comedy that's consistently hilarious, engaging and resonant. An especially sharp cast, knowing direction and a biting script make this a must-see. The Hoover family is a rat's nest of expectations and awkwardness. Richard (Kinnear) can't get anyone to notice his nine-step Refuse to Lose programme, while Sheryl (Collette) can't get her family to be honest with each other. Nietzsche-obsessed 15-year-old Dwayne (Dano) has taken a vow of silence until he escapes to the Air Force, and too-normal 7-year-old Olive (Breslin) is determined to win a beauty contest in Los Angeles. Add Richard's foul-mouthed dad (Arkin), evicted from his nursing home for using heroin, and Sheryl's Proust-scholar brother (Carell), recovering from a suicide attempt. It's a long drive to L.A. There are a couple of contrived missteps in the story, but the film otherwise treats its quirky characters as real people. The opening dinner table sequence is a brilliant jumble of everyday humour and sarcasm tinged with uncomfortable silences and barely submerged misery. We quickly understand these people's desires and loathings, their private vices and deep-rooted affection, and the way they get on each others' nerves. In other words, it's a bracingly recognisable family. The actors dive headlong into their roles. These are messy, obsessive people who know each other far too well. Collette holds the family together with a brilliantly detailed performance, while Kinnear plays to his strengths as a severely compromised good buy. Arkin has the scene-stealing foul-mouthed grandpa role, but avoids cliches at every turn. Carell plays effectively against type as a guy trying to rediscover the will to live. And both Dano and Breslin are simply perfect. Even the small side characters resonate. Despite some corny plot turns, the film remains firmly grounded, finding humour in honest interaction and authentic personalities. We can identify with each person in the story--especially the way they all have dreams far bigger than they are. And directors Dayton and Faris mine the comedy and emotion in each scene without ever going for the obvious. Family comedies aimed at grown-ups just don't get better than this. Rich Cline, Shadows on the Wall
Trivia
The movie took five years to make, mostly due to financial reasons. Following its success at Sundance, Fox snapped up the distribution rights for $10.5million.

NW Film Society News
Keswick Film Club has it's annual film festival this year on 10-13th April. Full details are available by visiting www.keswickfilmfestival.org.
Odeon News - Action Needed - Last Chance
2 related planning applications have now been lodged for the Odeon building in Northgate Street. Please see: http://www.ukplanning.com/chester/search/index.htm Then enter the following application numbers in the search box. 08/00175/LBC 08/00176/FUL Now the applications are there for you to see. A number of objections have been lodged, mainly around the uncertainty around what the building is going to be used for. Because of Easter, the closing date has been pushed back to 1st April. You can do your bit by visiting the planning application site and considering whether you would like to object as well. It only takes a minute to log an objection. Do you want a cinema in the centre of Chester?
Please visit http://www.chesterfilmfans.co.uk/mailing_list/news_080330.htm for an online version of this issue.

This newsletter is produced by Mike Graham for Chester Film Society. Please visit www.chesterfilmfans.co.uk regularly for programme information.

Subscribe to Chester Film Society via email by entering your email address below:

Chester Film Society Message

2008-03-09T07:38:53Z

CHESTER FILM SOCIETY eNEWSLETTER
9th March 2008

Our next film takes place on:
Tuesday 11th March
Steam Mill
7.45pm

Those Who Love Me Can Take The Train

Patrice Chereau/Belguim-France/1998/120mins

Review
Part of the Chester International Film Festival. Preceded by a short. Please note this performance takes place at the Steam Mill Patrice Chéreau's Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train is a rarity�a near perfect match of feeling and form wedded by an intellect that's both caustic and compassionate. Chéreau, one of the great theater and opera directors of our time, relishes the aspects of film that distinguish it from the stage�the close-up, the moving camera, and the cut. He deploys them not only to heighten what's happening in the narrative, but for the excitement they generate in the abstract. Those Who Love Me has a superabundance of plot, characters, and relationships, but even when you lose track of who's done what to whom, you can feel the film the way you feel a piece of music. It's a roller-coaster ride for cinephiles with a taste for grand opera. About a dozen lovers, friends, and students of a famous artist travel from Paris to his hometown of Limoges for his funeral. Limoges, a bastion of bourgeois complacency, boasts the largest cemetery in Europe; the 185,000 dead exceed the live population of the town by 40,000. What better setting for a film that's about how mortality conditions desire? But Those Who Love Me is not a Kane-like portrait of a dead man; it focuses on the mourners, thrown into crisis by the loss of a father figure who seems to have held them in thrall by making them compete for his affection. The desire released by the death of this mythic figure is mostly male and homoerotic. Chéreau has made a gay, contemporary Rules of the Game (although you wouldn't know that from the poster, which shows what seems to be two women in a hot embrace, but in fact portrays a woman and a transvestite having a heart-to-heart talk). The film's governing conscience is François (Pascal Greggory), who may have loved the dead man more than did anyone else but who also has a steady boyfriend, Louis (Bruno Todeschini), and a secret lover, Bruno (Sylvain Jacques), an exquisite, fragile boy who hangs out in railroad stations picking up tricks. Louis and Bruno are seized by an attack of love at first sight in the lavatory of the train on the way to the funeral. Louis confesses to François that he's in love with another, and François retaliates by telling him that Bruno was his lover for a year and that Bruno is HIV-positive. The scene is extraordinary for its mix of hilarity and anguish, and because the three men are so beautiful it almost hurts to look at them. There's another scene much later in the film involving the transvestite (Vincent Perez), the dead man's shoe-magnate brother (Jean-Louis Trintignant), and a pair of red spike-heel pumps that's just as rich in cross purposes and inchoate emotions. Chéreau loves his actors (although perhaps the women less than the men) and they all deliver for him, but none more so than Greggory and Trintignant. Those Who Love Me is shot in handheld Cinemascope (a trip in itself) by the agile Eric Gauthier. The camera movement would be excessively romantic if it wasn't so wittily undercut (dissected, to be more exact) by François Gediger's editing. On a second or third viewing, bits of camera movement emerge and echo in the way motifs do in classical music, tying the parts into a whole. And speaking of music, there's too much of it and some of the choices are too obvious, although it's hard to quibble about a score that includes Mahler and "Save the Last Dance for Me." DVD Beaver
Trivia
Catalan actor Sergi López, who appears briefly as Marie's trade-unionist husband, has had lead roles in the acclaimed Harry, He's Here To Help and Une Liaison Pornographique.

Tech News
SORRY! I couldn't issue a newsletter last week. This was because my server was 'upgraded' - I believe that's the technical term for being trashed - and it took me a couple of days to repiece the code to get the mailing list working again. Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused. THANKS! Our first website was launched in 2000, and I'm delighted to see that we have now passed the 20,000 unique visits mark. Chesterfilmfans uses unique visits to measure how many people access the site. Each unique visit comes from a separate computer web address that has made at least one visit to the site during our measurement period. So for example if this visitor makes more than one visit during this period of time, it is counted only once as a unique visit. This makes for a more accurate representation of how many people visit the site.
Odeon News - Action Needed
2 related planning applications have now been lodged for the Odeon building in Northgate Street. Please see: http://www.ukplanning.com/chester/search/index.htm Then enter the following application numbers in the search box. 08/00175/LBC 08/00176/FUL Now the applications are there for you to see. I for one am going to object on 2 grounds, firstly, demolition of part of a grade II listed building, and secondly, unclear use of the finished building. You can do your bit by visiting the planning application site and considering whether you would like to object as well. Objections need to be lodged by 23rd March.
Please visit http://www.chesterfilmfans.co.uk/mailing_list/news_080609.htm for an online version of this issue.

This newsletter is produced by Mike Graham for Chester Film Society. Please visit www.chesterfilmfans.co.uk regularly for programme information.

Subscribe to Chester Film Society via email by entering your email address below:

Chester Film Society Message

2008-03-04T19:47:37Z

CHESTER FILM SOCIETY eNEWSLETTER 4th March 2008

Film Festival News
We are delighted to announce our programme for this year's International Film Festival. All performances take place at the Steam Mill. The programme can be downloaded here. Tues 4th March - For Your Consideration (Christopher Guest 2006, USA 98 minutes) Actress Marilyn Hack has seen better days, but rumours begin that her role in a terrible indie Melodrama could reap an Oscar nomination. Oscar-fever begins and the race towards nominations starts. Supported by a fantastic ensemble cast, this is a genuinely funny satire from Christopher Guest, master of the mockumentary genre. Amongst the talented cast, Fred Willard is hilarious as a TV presenter so dumb he thinks subtitles are breaking news. Thur 6th March - The Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni 1964, Italy/France 120 minutes) A milestone in the history of cinema, Antonioni’s masterpiece of expressionistic colour is a work of glorious and troubling splendour. A quintessential Antonioni study of modern-day alienation, the film features Monica Vitti as a neurotic woman searching for meaning in an industrial wasteland. In the aftermath of a suicide attempt, she begins a brief affair with the factory owner who employs her engineer husband. A must see on the big screen. Fri 7th March - The Page Turner (Denis Dercourt 2006, France 85 minutes) Melanie, much-loved daughter of a provincial butcher, is preparing to sit for a scholarship to the Paris Conservatoire. Years after she fails the entrance exam because of the jury’s offhand attitude, she has a chance at revenge. The result is a devastating, subtly reticent thriller that matches Hitchcock twist by twist. This film is is a treat for lovers of intelligent cinema. Sat 8th March - Double Bill The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman 1957, Sweden 96 minutes) A knight returning from the Crusades finds a church still open in the midst of the Black Death, and goes to confession there. Speaking to a hooded figure half-seen through an iron grill, he pours out his heart. The figure turns, and is revealed as Death, who has been following the knight on his homeward journey. Bergman’s breakthrough masterpiece. This film will be followed by an interval of approximately 30 minutes, during which time refreshments will be available. Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman 1957, Sweden 91 minutes) Professor Isak Borg reflects upon his life and the choices he has made throughout his life. As he travels to Lund to receive an honorary award after 50 years of medical practice, he finds himself repeatedly affected by intrusive dreams and hallucinations that expose his darkest fears. Scripted while Bergman was being treated in hospital for two months whilst suffering gastric ulcers, this film emerges as one of the Swedish director’s most satisfying and humane films. Tue 11th March - Those Who Love Me Can Take The Train (Patrice Chereau 1998, Belgium/France 120 minutes) A strange assortment of odd friends together with dysfunctional family members travel to Limoges for the funeral of misanthropic promiscuous Parisian artist Jean-Baptiste Emmerich. Throughout the long journey riverting reverlations are revealed. An eclectic soundtrack, superb cinematography and vivid performances from an exceptional cast combine fantastically in this endearing film. This year our programme includes homage to master directors Michelangelo Antionioni and Ingmar Bergman, who both died in 2007. Each performance of the festival programme will be preceded by a short film on Artists in Cinema, in conjunction with the Arts Council and Independent Cinema Office. Ticket prices are the usual £3.50 per night, and £6.00 on Saturday for the double bill. Film Society members can attend 4th and 11th March at no extra cost as these already form part of the season programme.

This newsletter is produced by Mike Graham for Chester Film Society. Please visit www.chesterfilmfans.co.uk regularly for programme information.

Subscribe to Chester Film Society via email by entering your email address below:

Chester Film Society Message

2008-01-27T15:58:55Z