Cinephile’s Dream – April Calendar

Gust blogger Max Keller shares his picks for awesome films playing now through the end of April, throughout the greater LA area.

Here you can find the entire April Calendaras a pdf!   View all the Cinephile’s Dream calendars here.  You can sign up to receive the calendar by email, or Tweet with the author.

Picks for April

Hugo
and
The Adventures of Tintin
– The newest film from two of the greatest directors on Earth, and they’re both clearly labors of love.  Spielberg’s
Tintin
film is a project he’s wanted to make for over thirty years.  When
Raiders of the Lost Ark
was released in 1981, numerous European film critics wrote about how it felt like a live action Tintin story.  At the time, Spielberg had not even heard of
Tintin
, so he purchased several of the comics.  Though he could not understand the dialogue because they were still in French (apparently they had not been translated to English yet), he fell in love with the stories of madcap adventure and excitement.  He knew that he wanted to make them into a film, but eventually realized that creating a live action version would be incredibly difficult, so he ended up making the film using motion capture.  Written by a geek dream team of writers – Steven Moffat (the show runner of “
Doctor Who
” and BBC’s “
Sherlock
”), Edgar Wright (the co-writer and director of
Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, Shaun of the Dead,
and
Hot Fuzz
) and Joe Cornish (the director of
Attack the Block
) – and produced by another life-long fan of the Tintin comics, Peter Jackson, the film turned out to be as close to a modern day
Raiders of the Lost Ark
as possible.  For those of you wary of motion capture films (believe me, the characters in
The Polar Express
, with their unblinking eyes, still haunt my dreams), put your fears aside, there is no uncanny valley here, only some of the most realistic and vivid motion capture work ever created.

 

On the other half of the double bill is my favorite film of 2011:
Hugo
.  Like many of you, I had the same reaction upon seeing the trailer for the first time: What is this and why would Martin Scorsese make this movie?  Terrible trailer aside, I kept hearing how great it was, and somehow managed to avoid discovering what the film is really about until seeing it for the first time.  Needless to say, its message hit me straight in the chest, and it turned out to be one of Scorsese’s most deeply personal films ever.  Everything here is top notch on the technical side (how could it not be when you have Thelma as your editor, Dante as your production designer, Robert Richardson as your DP, the list goes on and on).  The acting is perfect, it is simply a wonderful film.  Because the New Beverly only plays films on 35mm, both films will be projected in 2D.  While the 3D didn’t really add much to
Tintin
, it adds quite a bit to
Hugo
.  Scorsese is like a kid in a candy store with the new technology and uses it in a very similar way to James Cameron in
Avatar
, using it to create a true depth to this world, as opposed to simply throwing things at you.  Though the film was initially a flop at the box office, it has managed to stay in theatres for several months, attracting larger crowds thanks to the numerous awards it was nominated for and won (it was nominated for more Oscars than any other film and tied with
The Artist
for the most wins).  If you consider yourself a fan of Scorsese or consider yourself a cinephile, this is a film you cannot afford to miss.

 

King Kong
– Speaking of Peter Jackson, here’s the film that made him want to become a filmmaker (and also a film he remade that ran nearly twice as long as the original, lest we forget).  Made by RKO Pictures in 1933, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, this is the first great monster/adventure movie.  We all know the story: a woman agrees to star in a film.  She, along with the rest of the crew get on a boat to sail off to their island location.  Once they arrive, they’re kidnapped by the natives, who decide to sacrifice her to Kong, a giant ape that lives on the island.  Some other others attempt to rescue her, and in doing so, they also manage to capture Kong, who they take back to New York City with them, and that’s when all Hell breaks loose.  At the time of its release, Kong was a technical marvel, and even by today’s standards, it is pretty amazing.  The stop motion work used to bring Kong to life is still astounding.  Though the story has been done numerous times since (not just remakes, but films that have taken various story elements and used them again as well), this is where it all began.  I believe that this is one of those films that you should see for the first time as a kid.  My first time seeing the film was only a couple of years ago, and while it still managed to make me feel like a child again, I later realized that the film would have probably wowed me even more if I saw it as a child.  I’ll be interested to see what the makeup of the audience is at the screening at the Egyptian on the 8
^th
.  My assumption is that there will be a fair amount of children there who have never seen the film before, being taken by either their parents or grandparents, in an attempt to show them one of those amazing movies they saw as a kid that managed to both frighten, thrill, and excite them.

 

Battle Royale
– Were you a fan of
The Hunger Games
?  Did you feel that it wasn’t violent enough?  If you did, then
Battle Royale
is the film for you!  The film takes place in the not too distant future in Japan, in which teenage hooliganism has become such a problem that the government passes the BR Act in an attempt to bring order back to society.  The film follows Shuya, a middle school student attempting to cope with his father’s recent suicide.  When his class takes a field trip, they are gassed and sent to a remote island, at which point they wake up to discover that each of them has been fitted with an electronic collar.  It turns out that the class has been chosen to participate in this year’s Battle Royale.  Over the next three days, the students must kill one another, for only one student can come out alive.  If a student decides to not participate or attempts to resist in any way, their collar will detonate, killing them instantly.  We watch in horror as these students do whatever it takes to survive.

 

The film’s violence is unbelievably graphic, but not to a comical point like in Tarantino’s
Kill Bill
(a film that owes quite a bit to
Battle Royale
).  The violence is meant to be as horrifying and realistic as humanly possible.  These are fourteen and fifteen year olds being forced to kill each other, and unlike
The Hunger Games
, which had to soften the violence in order to secure a PG-13 rating, director Kinji Fukasaku did not, and would not, cut down the violence in order to secure a lesser rating.  This is probably why the film has barely been shown in America.  It played for two consecutive weeks at Cinefamily a couple of months ago, and this was the first time it played in the U.S. for a paying audience (it had played at a couple of film festivals, but had never been released theatrically).  The only way the film would have ended up playing in American theatres would to have it be released unrated because there would be no way to cut enough material out to ensure the film receive an R rating.  It’s a film in the same vein as Kubrick’s
A Clockwork Orange
, though with not as much social commentary.  It is a film that has to be seen to believed, and luckily for those of us with the stomach to sit through it, it will be playing as a midnight movie in Long Beach in only a couple weeks’ time.

 

A Night to Remember
– This month marks the centennial of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, the supposedly unsinkable ship.  On the night of April 14
^th
, 1912, the ship struck and iceberg, and a few hours later, after splitting in half, the ship was completely submerged, sinking to the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.  There have been numerous documentaries and films about the Titanic, all of which are being shown again because of the centennial.  James Cameron’s epic film, released in 1997, is being re-released in 3D, and even The Criterion Collection is getting in on the act by releasing the film
A Night to Remember
on Blu-Ray for the first time.  The film, released in 1958, is still considered to be the most accurate portrayal of the events of that fateful night, although there are some things that have been proven incorrect since the film’s release.  Compared to Cameron’s film, the production values are not quite as high, but for what it was when it was released, it was a truly epic filmmaking venture, and it still shows on screen.  Unlike Cameron’s film,
A Night to Remember
tells the story in a straightforward fashion, focusing on the real people who were on the ship, as opposed to creating fiction characters and subplots.  Several men who worked on the ship and survived served as technical advisors to the film, which only adds to the authenticity to the film.

That’s all for now. 
Stay tuned to this category
for more!