Film Club: September 2012-August 2013 Schedule

Carrie and I decided to go ahead and make a year long schedule. We're excited about these movies and hope you are, too! Please join us for discussion!

September 25, 2012--Japanese Story
Host: My Friend Amy

Toni Collette plays Sandy Edwards, an ambitious geologist who suddenly finds herself having to baby-sit Hiromitsu (Gotaro Tsunashima), a taciturn Japanese businessman. Hoping to strike up a business deal, she agrees to take him on a field trip around Western Australia's remote Pilbara Desert. Against the background of the outback, these two diametrically opposed strangers are to find themselves thrust together in a potentially life or death situation. As they journey further and further into the desert, they leave more and more of what they know about each other and themselves behind. Winner of Eight Australian Film Institute Awards including Best Actress (in a leading role), Best Cinematography and Best Film.

October 30, 2012--The Garden
Host: Books and Movies

Oscar-nominated for Best Documentary in 2008 The Garden has been hailed by critics as the most astute and powerful political film of the year. Filmmaker Scott Hamilton Kennedy's (award-winning director of OT: Our Town) brilliantly captures, in a series of explosive and wrenching turn of events, the ways greedy developers, inept politicians and self-serving community leaders can run rough shod over the lives of working class families fighting to save the 14-acre urban farm that has become the very source of survival. Equal parts The Wire & Harlan County, USA , The Garden, exposes the fault lines in American society and raises crucial and challenging questions about liberty, equality, and justice for the poorest and most vulnerable among us. As the battle lines are drawn between this group of low-income families struggling to protect a 14-acre urban farm against a backdrop of grey and hardened skyscrapers, their cause became an international sensation that drew the attention of numerous notable activists and politicians, including Dennis Kucinich, Joan Baez, Danny Glover, and Willie Nelson.

November 27, 2012--Perfect Sense
Host: My Friend Amy

Susan (Eva Green, Cracks, Casino Royale) is a scientist whose research has caused her to neglect virtually everything else in her life, including love. That is until she meets Michael (Ewan McGregor, The Ghost Writer, Angels & Demons), a talented chef, and suddenly everything starts to change not just in Susan s life, but in the entire world. While Susan and Michael are experiencing new and unforeseen depths of feeling, all around the globe a new epidemic is causing people to lose their sensory perceptions. Are Susan and Michael s increasingly intense feelings for each other in spite of the epidemic, or because of it? A life-affirming look at what it means to love and be loved in turbulent times, director David Mackenzie s PERFECT SENSE is equal parts touching romance and chilling thriller.

December 20, 2012 -- It Happened on Fifth Avenue
Host: Books and Movies

It Happened on Fifth Avenue (1947) is a motion picture comedy, directed by Roy Del Ruth and starring Victor Moore, Ann Harding, Don DeFore, and Gale Storm. The film received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Story.

January 29, 2013--Certified Copy
Host: My Friend Amy

Certified Copy (French: Copie conforme) is a 2010 film by Iranian writer and director Abbas Kiarostami, starring Juliette Binoche and the British opera singer William Shimell, in his first film role. The film is set in Tuscany, and focuses on a British writer and a French antiques dealer, whose relationship undergoes an odd transformation over the course of a day. The film was a French-majority production, with co-producers in Italy and Belgium. The dialogue is in French, English and Italian. The film premiered at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival, where Binoche won the Best Actress Award for her performance. Critics have been mostly positive and have compared the film to several others, notably Roberto Rosselini's 1954 film Journey to Italy.

February 26, 2013--Life is Beautiful
Host: Books and Movies

Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi. Benigni enchanted audiences around the world with this multi-Oscar-winning tale, in which the human spirit triumphs over adversity during the Holocaust. In Italian with English audio & subtitles.

March 26, 2013--In a Better World
Host: My Friend Amy

A provocative film that explores the difficult choices between revenge and forgiveness, In a Better World follows two Danish families and the unusual and dangerous friendship that develops between them. Bullied at school, Elias is defended by Christian, a boy greatly troubled over his mother’s death. So when the two become involved in an act of revenge with potentially tragic consequences, it’s their parents who are left to help them come to terms with the complexity of human emotions, pain and empathy in this 2010 Academy Award® and Golden Globe® winner for Best Foreign Film.

April 30, 2013--Cinema Paradiso
Host: Books and Movies

A famous Italian filmmaker, haunted by the memories of his first love, returns to his hometown after an absence of 30 years. Upon his return, he reconnects with the community and remembers the highlights and tragedies that shaped his life and inspired him to follow his dream of becoming a filmmaker. For those who have never seen it -- and those who have never forgotten it -- director Giuseppe Tornatore's (BAARIA, THE STAR MAKER) cherished Academy Award®-winning motion picture (1990, Best Foreign Language Film) is now in high definition, fully restored and digitally remastered.

May 28, 2012--Aftershock
Host: My Friend Amy

Tangshan, 1976. Two seven-year-old twins are buried under the rubble of the deadliest earthquake of the 20th century. The rescue team explains to their mother that freeing either child will almost certainly result in the death of the other. Forced to make the most difficult decision of her life, she finally chooses to save her son. Though left behind as dead, the little girl miraculously survives, unbeknownst to her brother and mother. AFTERSHOCK follows the family on their separate journeys over the course of the next 32 years, as they build lives forever shadowed by the traumatic experience of the earthquake, and eventually face each other and the decisions of the past.

The acclaimed epic that broke all box-office records in China, AFTERSHOCK Featuring an all-star cast including Jingchu Zhang (Rush Hour 3) and Daoming Chen (Hero), AFTERSHOCK shines with its powerful exploration of how one moment can change a family s life forever.

June 25 2013--Spitfire Grill
Host: Books and Movies

After five years in prison, Percy Talbot settles in the town of Gilead, Maine, where she finds acceptance and redemption at the Spitfire Grill.

July 30, 2013--The New World
Host: My Friend Amy

Powhatan tribal people stare in wonder as three ships approach shore. It’s a story every schoolchild knows. And as told by filmmaker Terrence Malick (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line) in this Extended Cut with over 30 minutes of footage unseen in theaters, it’s a story you never imagined. Working in part from first-hand histories and adding his extraordinary sense of image and human drama, Malick crafts a spellbinding tale of the Jamestown settlement, of cultures connecting and of deadly consequences when connections fray. Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell), Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher), John Rolfe (Christian Bale): you know the names. But you could never experience the visceral power of the stories behind those names until now.

August 27, 2013--Mao's Last Dancer
Host: Books and Movies

A delegation from Madame Mao's Beijing Dance Academy selects 11-year-old peasant villager Li Cunxin to study ballet in far-off Beijing, where he trains for seven grueling years to become one of China's greatest dancers. His efforts win him the opportunity to dance in America, opening his eyes to a new love and the possibility of a dramatic defection from China in this remarkable true story based on Cunxin's autobiography.

Please let me know if comments if you think you'll be interested in watching any or all of these with us. We hope you will!