The IPPL film series is presented in conjunction
with the North Valley Arts Council's Arts & Democracy project. For more
information on NOVAC and to see their arts calendar, click
here.
"Art & Democracy" Film Series
All films will
be followed by a discussion with the audience
about philosophical themes present in the movies.
All films are shows at the
Empire Arts Center 415 DeMers
Ave., Grand Forks, ND (701) 746-5500.
2010 Schedule
War Child Wednesday, January 27, 7:00 p.m.
Movie
type:
Documentary.
“Left home at the age of seven/one year later I’m carryin’ an
Ak-47.” For hip hop artist Emmanuel Jal, a former child soldier in
Sudan’s brutal civil war, these lyrics are hardly empty posturing.
They are the bitter reality of a young man who was “forced to sin”
but determined to “never give up and never give in.” Today, wounded
but still hopeful, he fights a new battle: bringing peace to his
beloved Sudan and building schools in Africa. This time, his weapon
is a microphone. See why audiences from New York to Berlin to London
rave about the award-winning film, War Child, and have embraced the
hip-hop artist with a terrifying past and a gentle soul.
Interspersing original interviews, live concerts, and rare footage
of Jal as a seven year-old boy, War Child will make viewers cry,
laugh, dance, and celebrate the power of hope.
American Splendor Wednesday, February 24, 7:00 p.m.
This movie is presented in
conjunction with the
UND
Writers Conference
It's based on a graphic novel by the same name.
Movie
type: Comedy/Drama.
One of the most acclaimed films of 2003,
American Splendor is also one of the most audaciously creative
biographical movies ever made. Blending fact, fiction, and personal
perspective from the comic books that inspired it, this marvelous
portrait of Harvey Pekar--scowling curmudgeon, brow-beaten everyman,
insightful chronicler of his own life, and frustrated file clerk at
a Cleveland V.A. hospital--is an inspired amalgam of the media
(comic books, TV, and film) that lifted Pekar from obscurity to the
status of a pop-cultural icon. As played by Paul Giamatti in a
master-stroke of casting, we see Pekar and his understanding wife
(played by Hope Davis) as underdogs in a world full of obstacles,
yet also infused with subtle hope and (gasp!) heartwarming
perseverance. We also see the real Pekar, and this
multifaceted commingling of "reel" and "real" turns American
Splendor into a uniquely cinematic celebration of Pekar's life
and, by extension, the tenacity of an unlikely American hero.
Slap Shot Wednesday, March 31, 7:00 p.m.
Movie
type: Sports/Comedy.
Paul Newman and his Butch Cassidy director, George Roy Hill,
made a very original comedy in this 1977 story of an over-the-hill
player/coach (Newman) for a lousy hockey team who gets results when
he teaches his players to get dirty. One of the most hilariously
profane movies ever to come out of Hollywood, this is the kind of
film that makes its own rules as it goes along. Newman is very good,
and while Hill goes for the gusto in terms of capturing the violence
of this world, his instinct for comedy has never been sharper.
Do The Right Thing Wednesday, April 28, 7:00 p.m.
Spike
Lee's incendiary look at race relations in America, circa 1989, is so
colorful and exuberant for its first three-quarters that you can almost
forget the terrible confrontation that the movie inexorably builds
toward. Do the Right Thing is a joyful, tumultuous
masterpiece--maybe the best film ever made about race in America,
revealing racial prejudices and stereotypes in all their guises and
demonstrating how a deadly riot can erupt out of a series of small
misunderstandings. Set on one block in Bedford-Stuyvesant on the hottest
day of the summer, the movie shows the whole spectrum of life in this
neighborhood and then leaves it up to us to decide if, in the end,
anybody actually does the "right thing." Featuring Danny Aiello as Sal,
the pizza parlor owner; Lee himself as Mookie, the lazy pizza-delivery
guy; John Turturro and Richard Edson as Sal's sons; Lee's sister Joie as
Mookie's sister Jade; Rosie Perez as Mookie's girlfriend Tina; Ossie
Davis and Ruby Dee as the block elders, Da Mayor and Mother Sister;
Giancarlo Esposito as Mookie's hot-headed friend Buggin' Out; Bill Nunn
as the boom-box toting Radio Raheem; and Samuel L. Jackson as deejay
Mister Señor Love Daddy. A rich and nuanced film to watch, treasure, and
learn from--over and over again.
One Flew Over The
Cuckoo's Nest Wednesday, May 26, 7:00 p.m.
One of the key movies of the 1970s, when exciting,
groundbreaking, personal films were still being made in Hollywood, Milos
Forman's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest emphasized the
humanistic story at the heart of Ken Kesey's more hallucinogenic novel.
Jack Nicholson was born to play the part of Randle Patrick McMurphy, the
rebellious inmate of a psychiatric hospital who fights back against the
authorities' cold attitudes of institutional superiority, as personified
by Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). It's the classic antiestablishment
tale of one man asserting his individuality in the face of a repressive,
conformist system--and it works on every level. Forman populates his
film with memorably eccentric faces, and gets such freshly detailed and
spontaneous work from his ensemble that the picture sometimes feels like
a documentary. Unlike a lot of films pitched at the "youth culture" of
the 1970s, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest really hasn't dated a
bit, because the qualities of human nature that Forman
captures--playfulness, courage, inspiration, pride, stubbornness--are
universal and timeless. The film swept the Academy Awards for 1976,
winning in all the major categories (picture, director, actor, actress,
screenplay) for the first time since Frank Capra's It Happened One
Night in 1931.
On The Waterfront Wednesday, June 30, 7:00 p.m.
Marlon
Brando's famous "I coulda been a contenda" speech is such a warhorse by
now that a lot of people probably feel they've seen this picture
already, even if they haven't. And many of those who have seen it may
have forgotten how flat-out thrilling it is. For all its great dramatic
and cinematic qualities, and its fiery social criticism, Elia Kazan's
On the Waterfront is also one of the most gripping melodramas of
political corruption and individual heroism ever made in the United
States, a five-star gut-grabber. Shot on location around the docks of
Hoboken, New Jersey, in the mid-1950s, it tells the fact-based story of
a longshoreman (Brando's Terry Malloy) who is blackballed and savagely
beaten for informing against the mobsters who have taken over his union
and sold it out to the bosses. (Karl Malden has a more conventional
stalwart-hero role, as an idealistic priest who nurtures Terry's pangs
of conscience.) Lee J. Cobb, who created the role of Willy Loman in
Death of Salesman under Kazan's direction on Broadway, makes a
formidable foe as a greedy union leader.
To Kill a
Mockingbird Wednesday, July 28, 7:00 p.m.
Ranked
34 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest American
Films, To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) is quite simply one of the
finest family-oriented dramas ever made. A beautiful and deeply
affecting adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee,
the film retains a timeless quality that transcends its historically
dated subject matter (racism in the Depression-era South) and remains
powerfully resonant in present-day America with its advocacy of
tolerance, justice, integrity, and loving, responsible parenthood. It's
tempting to call this an important "message" movie that should be
required viewing for children and adults alike, but this riveting
courtroom drama is anything but stodgy or pedantic. As Atticus Finch,
the small-town Alabama lawyer and widower father of two, Gregory Peck
gives one of his finest performances with his impassioned defense of a
black man (Brock Peters) wrongfully accused of the rape and assault of a
young white woman. While his children, Scout (Mary Badham) and Jem
(Philip Alford), learn the realities of racial prejudice and irrational
hatred, they also learn to overcome their fear of the unknown as
personified by their mysterious, mostly unseen neighbor Boo Radley
(Robert Duvall, in his brilliant, almost completely nonverbal screen
debut). What emerges from this evocative, exquisitely filmed drama is a
pure distillation of the themes of Harper Lee's enduring novel, a
showcase for some of the finest American acting ever assembled in one
film, and a rare quality of humanitarian artistry (including Horton
Foote's splendid screenplay and Elmer Bernstein's outstanding score)
that seems all but lost in the chaotic morass of modern cinema.
Modern Times Wednesday, August 25, 7:00 p.m.
Man
vs. machine! And the winner is every comedy fan when Charlie Chaplin's
Tramp confronts assembly-line woes in this classic chosen in 1998 as one
of the American Film Institute's Top-100 American Films. The Little
Tramp punches in and wigs out inside a factory where gizmos like an
employee-feeding machine may someday make the lunch hour last just 15
minutes. Bounced into the ranks of the unemployed he teams with a street
waif (Paulette Goddard) to pursue bliss and a paycheck finding
misadventures as a roller-skating night watchman a singing waiter whose
hilarious song is gibberish a jailbird and more. In the end as Tramp and
waif walk arm and arm into an insecure future we know they've found
neitherbliss nor a paycheck but more importantly each other. The times
and satire remain timeless in Modern Times
Saturday Night Fever Wednesday, September 29, 7:00 p.m.
aturday
Night Fever is one of those movies that comes along and seems to
change the cultural temperature in a flash. After the movie's release in
1977, disco ruled the dance floors, and a blow-dried member of a
TV-sitcom ensemble became the hottest star in the U.S. For all that, the
story is conventional: a 19-year-old Italian American from Brooklyn,
Tony Manero (John Travolta), works in a humble paint store and lives
with his family. After dark, he becomes the polyester-clad stallion of
the local nightclub; Tony's brother, a priest, observes that when Tony
hits the dance floor, the crowd parts like the Red Sea before Moses.
Director John Badham captures the electric connection between music and
dance, and also the desperation that lies beneath Tony's ambitions to
break out of his limited world. The soundtrack, which spawned a
massively successful album, is dominated by the disco classics of the
Bee Gees, including "Staying Alive" (Travolta's theme during the
strutting opening) and "Night Fever." The Oscar®-nominated
Travolta, plucked from the cast of Welcome Back, Kotter, for his
first starring role, is incandescent and unbelievably confident, and his
dancing is terrific. Oh, and the white suit rules.
Night of the Living
Dead Wednesday, October 27, 7:00 p.m.
We can hardly imagine how shocking this film was when it
first broke into the film scene in 1968. There's never been anything
quite like it again, though there have been numerous pale imitations.
Part of the terror lies in the fact that it is shot in such a raw and
unadorned fashion that it feels like a home movie, and is all the more
authentic because of that. It draws us into its world gradually, content
to establish a merely spooky atmosphere before leading us through a
horrifically logical progression that we hardly could have anticipated.
The story is simple: Radiation from a fallen satellite has caused the
dead to walk, and hunger for human flesh. Once bitten, you become one of
them. And the only way to kill one is by a shot or blow to the head. We
follow a group holed up in a small farmhouse who are trying to fend off
the inevitable onslaught of the dead. The tension between the members of
this unstable, makeshift community drives the film. Night of the
Living Dead establishes savagery as a necessary condition of life.
Marked by fatality and a grim humor, the film gnaws through to the bone,
then proceeds on to the marrow.
Sullivan's Travels Wednesday, November 24, 7:00 p.m.
Writer-director Preston Sturges's third feature, 1941's Sullivan's
Travels, remains the antic auteur's most ambitious screen effort.
Having added the producer's stripe to his duties, Sturges combines
breezy romantic comedy, arch Hollywood satire, and social essay into a
single, screwball story line.
The titular pilgrim is John L. Sullivan
(Joel McCrea), an Ivy League grad who's enjoyed a meteoric rise as the
director behind escapist movies like Ants in Your Pants of 1938,
but is now determined to raise his sights toward more exalted,
serious-minded cinematic art. His proposed breakthrough, portentously
titled O Brother, Where Art Thou?, elicits a studio response
closer to "Oh, brother," given the director's utter lack of first-hand
experience on the wrong side of the tracks.
Instead of capitulating, Sullivan sets off disguised as a tramp,
ready to meet life's crueler lessons face-to-face--albeit followed at a
discreet distance by a motor home filled with studio handlers and
reporters. His ludicrous odyssey may give the boy director no real
insight, but it gives Sturges the chance to inject some reliably fine
gags and a romantic subplot featuring the luminous Veronica Lake. It's
at this juncture that Sturges the writer's darker objective throws a
jolting shift in tone. Suffice it to say that just when a comic, upbeat
denouement seems imminent, Sullivan travels instead from the sunlit
California of the comedy's early reels toward a darker, relentlessly
downbeat world influenced more by the social realism of the movies the
hero desperately wants to make. By the final reel, Sturges has flirted
with real tragedy, turning his conclusion into a meditation on his own
seemingly carefree, dizzily comic art.
Movie
type:
Documentary.
Movie
type: Comedy/Drama.
Spike
Lee's incendiary look at race relations in America, circa 1989, is so
colorful and exuberant for its first three-quarters that you can almost
forget the terrible confrontation that the movie inexorably builds
toward. Do the Right Thing is a joyful, tumultuous
masterpiece--maybe the best film ever made about race in America,
revealing racial prejudices and stereotypes in all their guises and
demonstrating how a deadly riot can erupt out of a series of small
misunderstandings. Set on one block in Bedford-Stuyvesant on the hottest
day of the summer, the movie shows the whole spectrum of life in this
neighborhood and then leaves it up to us to decide if, in the end,
anybody actually does the "right thing." Featuring Danny Aiello as Sal,
the pizza parlor owner; Lee himself as Mookie, the lazy pizza-delivery
guy; John Turturro and Richard Edson as Sal's sons; Lee's sister Joie as
Mookie's sister Jade; Rosie Perez as Mookie's girlfriend Tina; Ossie
Davis and Ruby Dee as the block elders, Da Mayor and Mother Sister;
Giancarlo Esposito as Mookie's hot-headed friend Buggin' Out; Bill Nunn
as the boom-box toting Radio Raheem; and Samuel L. Jackson as deejay
Mister Señor Love Daddy. A rich and nuanced film to watch, treasure, and
learn from--over and over again.
Marlon
Brando's famous "I coulda been a contenda" speech is such a warhorse by
now that a lot of people probably feel they've seen this picture
already, even if they haven't. And many of those who have seen it may
have forgotten how flat-out thrilling it is. For all its great dramatic
and cinematic qualities, and its fiery social criticism, Elia Kazan's
On the Waterfront is also one of the most gripping melodramas of
political corruption and individual heroism ever made in the United
States, a five-star gut-grabber. Shot on location around the docks of
Hoboken, New Jersey, in the mid-1950s, it tells the fact-based story of
a longshoreman (Brando's Terry Malloy) who is blackballed and savagely
beaten for informing against the mobsters who have taken over his union
and sold it out to the bosses. (Karl Malden has a more conventional
stalwart-hero role, as an idealistic priest who nurtures Terry's pangs
of conscience.) Lee J. Cobb, who created the role of Willy Loman in
Death of Salesman under Kazan's direction on Broadway, makes a
formidable foe as a greedy union leader.
Ranked
34 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 Greatest American
Films, To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) is quite simply one of the
finest family-oriented dramas ever made. A beautiful and deeply
affecting adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee,
the film retains a timeless quality that transcends its historically
dated subject matter (racism in the Depression-era South) and remains
powerfully resonant in present-day America with its advocacy of
tolerance, justice, integrity, and loving, responsible parenthood. It's
tempting to call this an important "message" movie that should be
required viewing for children and adults alike, but this riveting
courtroom drama is anything but stodgy or pedantic. As Atticus Finch,
the small-town Alabama lawyer and widower father of two, Gregory Peck
gives one of his finest performances with his impassioned defense of a
black man (Brock Peters) wrongfully accused of the rape and assault of a
young white woman. While his children, Scout (Mary Badham) and Jem
(Philip Alford), learn the realities of racial prejudice and irrational
hatred, they also learn to overcome their fear of the unknown as
personified by their mysterious, mostly unseen neighbor Boo Radley
(Robert Duvall, in his brilliant, almost completely nonverbal screen
debut). What emerges from this evocative, exquisitely filmed drama is a
pure distillation of the themes of Harper Lee's enduring novel, a
showcase for some of the finest American acting ever assembled in one
film, and a rare quality of humanitarian artistry (including Horton
Foote's splendid screenplay and Elmer Bernstein's outstanding score)
that seems all but lost in the chaotic morass of modern cinema.
Man
vs. machine! And the winner is every comedy fan when Charlie Chaplin's
Tramp confronts assembly-line woes in this classic chosen in 1998 as one
of the American Film Institute's Top-100 American Films. The Little
Tramp punches in and wigs out inside a factory where gizmos like an
employee-feeding machine may someday make the lunch hour last just 15
minutes. Bounced into the ranks of the unemployed he teams with a street
waif (Paulette Goddard) to pursue bliss and a paycheck finding
misadventures as a roller-skating night watchman a singing waiter whose
hilarious song is gibberish a jailbird and more. In the end as Tramp and
waif walk arm and arm into an insecure future we know they've found
neitherbliss nor a paycheck but more importantly each other. The times
and satire remain timeless in Modern Times
aturday
Night Fever is one of those movies that comes along and seems to
change the cultural temperature in a flash. After the movie's release in
1977, disco ruled the dance floors, and a blow-dried member of a
TV-sitcom ensemble became the hottest star in the U.S. For all that, the
story is conventional: a 19-year-old Italian American from Brooklyn,
Tony Manero (John Travolta), works in a humble paint store and lives
with his family. After dark, he becomes the polyester-clad stallion of
the local nightclub; Tony's brother, a priest, observes that when Tony
hits the dance floor, the crowd parts like the Red Sea before Moses.
Director John Badham captures the electric connection between music and
dance, and also the desperation that lies beneath Tony's ambitions to
break out of his limited world. The soundtrack, which spawned a
massively successful album, is dominated by the disco classics of the
Bee Gees, including "Staying Alive" (Travolta's theme during the
strutting opening) and "Night Fever." The Oscar®-nominated
Travolta, plucked from the cast of Welcome Back, Kotter, for his
first starring role, is incandescent and unbelievably confident, and his
dancing is terrific. Oh, and the white suit rules.
