Events (1444)
Friday, June 21
Dita Von Teese "Burlesque: Strip Strip Hooray!" Variety Show
Dita Von Teese "Burlesque: Strip Strip Hooray!" Variety Show
Hour of the Wolf
Kubrick and Co.
1968/b&w/90 min./35mm | Scr/dir: Ingmar Bergman; w/ Liv Ullmann, Max von Sydow, Erland Josephson
An artist retreats with his wife to a forbidding and secluded location so that he can hone his craft. Instead, he is preyed upon by visions and waking nightmares. Are his suppressed memories beginning to surface? Or has the remote island where he’s sequestered cast a spell on him? Ingmar Bergman’s darkly surreal Hour of the Wolf is a fascinating precursor to Kubrick’s The Shining. Max Von Sydow plays the tortured painter, Johan Borg, with full-bodied angst. Co-star Liv Ullmann is his wife, blindsided by her husband’s weird and progressively murderous behavior. The writer/director’s most extreme depiction of the struggles an artist endures when giving birth to his art, Hour of the Wolf’ masterfully blends tenebrous atmospherics and clammy terror. Made between Persona and Shame, this film finds Bergman at ease with experimentation as he delves deeply into the haunting symbolism of the unconscious.
SEAN CARSWELL, JIM RULAND, and CHERYL KLEIN: MADHOUSE FOG
Sean Carswell, who PopMatters called the “J.D. Salinger for the Internet generation,” is the author of the novels Drinks for the Little Guy and Train Wreck Girl. He wrote the short story collections Barney’s Crew and Glue and Ink Rebellion. He co-founded the independent book publisher Gorsky Press and the music magazine Razorcake. He has been a regular contributor to Flipside, Ink 19, and Clamor. His writing has appeared in diverse places, including the skateboarding magazine Thrasher, tiny ‘zines like Zisk, and prestigious literary journals like The Southeastern Review and The Rattling Wall. He currently teaches writing and literature at California State University Channel Islands.
For the Madhouse Fog book release at Skylight Books, Jim Ruland and Cheryl Klein will join Carswell. Jim Ruland is a veteran of the Navy, author of the short story collection Big Lonesome, and curator of the irreverent reading series Vermin on the Mount. He is currently writing a book with Scott Campbell, Jr. of Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch called Giving the Finger, which will be published early next year. Cheryl Klein’s story collection The Commuters won City Works Press’s Ben Reitman Award and was published by that press in 2006. Her novel Lilac Mines was a Small Press Distribution monthly best seller. She directs the California office of Poets & Writers, Inc.
The Wrong Man
The Wrong Man shows off a lean, mean Hitchcock on the cold, hard streets of New York — it’s the ‘hood verisimilitude of Sidney Lumet and the gritty, near-documentary B&W approach of the Italian neo-realists, both coupled with surprising amounts of restraint and emotion, all rolled into one densely packed crime drama burrito. Hewing closely to the somber real-life story of Manny Balestrero — an innocent nightclub musician mistakenly identified as the creep responsible for an insurance office robbery — Hitch gives us his noir version of a CSI-style procedural. Henry Fonda is fantastic in the lead, thoroughly losing himself in the role of a quiet, humbled, scared-witless Italian-American everyman. And, as the grim tension ratchets up with every passing scene, we know our hero is completely screwed, yet we’re in awe of Hitch’s myriad maestro touches: every clanking footstep on linoleum, every damp concrete sidewalk, the white-noise roar of every passing subway train, and each terrifying, grimy baby step down the corridors of the archaic NYC justice system.
Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1956, 35mm, 105 min.
“Night And Fog” / MON ONCLE D'AMERIQUE
Alain Resnais' unforgettable Holocaust documentary screens along with one of his biggest critical and commercial successes, 1980's MON ONCLE D'AMERIQUE - illustrating the radical theories of human behavioral scientist Henri Laborit by comically studying the interwoven stories of a factory manager (Gerard Depardieu), an aspiring actress (Nicole Garcia) and a politician (Roger Pierre).
