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JULY 8
Featuring Favorite Film Selections From The Metro Area’s Best Critics
Bob Fosse's
ALL THAT JAZZ
Hosted by Ann Lewinson
Fairfield Weekly film critic
WEDNESDAY, JULY 8 – 7:30 PM
Carte Blanche – Free / Members - $6 / Students & Seniors - $7 / Nonmembers - $10 |
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ABOUT THE FILM: Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz is a semi-autobiographical fantasy based on aspects of the dancer, choreographer, and director’s life and career. Inspired by a tumultuous time during which Fosse attempted to complete his film Lenny, while staging his 1975 Broadway musical Chicago, the film stars Roy Scheider as Joe Gideon, a workaholic choreographer and theatre director who has a penchant for chain smoking and sex. Overworked and stressed, Gideon finds himself suffering from exhaustion and angina attacks, while in his imagination he flirts with the angel of death (named Angelique and played by Jessica Lange). As Gideon’s condition worsens, his new movie opens and flops, and his Broadway backers contemplate pulling out of his new show. The film culminates in Gideon’s final days and hours as a dazzling sequence of set pieces and musical numbers take him through the five phases of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. As death closes in, the film takes on an almost hallucinatory tone, as an extravagant, final variety show tribute to Gideon is staged by everyone from his past. Often compared favorably to Fellini’s 8 1/2, All That Jazz was critically appreciated upon its initial release, and has since been ranked #14 on the American Film Institute’s list of best musicals.
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| ABOUT THE HOST: Ann Lewinson is a film critic for the Fairfield Weekly and New Haven Advocate. She has written about movies, the performing arts and environmental issues for many publications including Andante, Biography, The Independent, Stagebill and the Sundance Daily Insider. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Agni, Eclipse, Glass Tesseract, Karamu, Out of Line, Pangolin Papers and P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center's Special Projects Writers' Series. A teacher in the English department of Kingsborough Community College, she was a managing editor of HBO.com and a sound editor on several films including Troma's Class of Nuke 'Em High Part II. |
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JULY 15
DOCUMENTARY NIGHT Presents
UNDER OUR SKIN
A Contemporary Investigation of Lyme Disease
Post-film Q&A with
Andy Abrahams Wilson, Director/Cinematographer
Dr. Charles Ray Jones, Pediatric Lyme Disease specialist
WEDNESDAY, JULY 15 - 7:30 PM
Carte Blanche – Free / Members - $6 / Students & Seniors - $7 / Nonmembers - $10
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ABOUT THE FILM: A dramatic tale of microbes, medicine and money, Under Our Skin plays like a taut thriller—but it is our own lives that may be at stake. This riveting film, a documentary with the propulsion of a narrative, investigates the untold story of Lyme disease, an emerging epidemic larger than AIDS. Each year thousands go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed, told that their symptoms are "all in their head." Following the stories of patients and physicians as they battle for their lives and livelihoods, the film brings into focus a haunting picture of our health care system and its ability to cope with a silent and growing terror, and the even more terrifying response the medical status quo has given it. |
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AUGUST 12
Z
Carte Blanche – Free / Members - $6 / Students & Seniors - $7 / Nonmembers - $10 |
ABOUT THE HOST: Joe Meyers writes about movies for the Connecticut Post. A native of Chicago, Joe did most of his schooling in Philadelphia and studied journalism at Penn State. The former editor of the (now sadly defunct) Delmarva News, he spent two wonderful years in the late 1970s running the first (and only) arthouse movie theater on the Delmarva Peninsula, where he learned many valuable lessons about the differences between commerce and art. A collection of Joe's pieces about film stars of the past - "Whatever Happened to..." - went through several printings.
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ABOUT THE FILM: (1969) Police general Pierre Dux (later head of the Comédie Française) lectures sunglassed-indoors cohorts on ideological mildew — “isms” — now “infecting” society; then, as Mikis Theodorakis’ music throbs, Dux’s helmeted and truncheoned police studiously look elsewhere as a raging, chanting mob fills the city square awaiting the emergence of charismatic deputy Yves Montand from his SRO ban-the-bomb address — but what are those two punks doing careening in on that three-wheeled kamikaze? “Just an accident” exhales legal honcho François Périer as he leaves it to tinted-eyeglassed magistrate Jean-Louis Trintignant (Best Actor, Cannes) to wrap things up nicely. But the crowds are painting big white Z’s in the street... Too much of a hot potato for French producers, Greek expat Costa-Gavras’s adaptation of Vassili Vassilikos’s novel of the real-life Lambrakis case was skillfully filmed on a shoestring in Algeria (doubling for Greece), and utilizing a pulsating score pieced together from previous Theodorakis works (with the composer’s blessing: he was under house arrest in Greece) and an incredible cast including Renato Salvatori (Rocco and his Brothers) and Marcel Bozzuffi (soon to be the shot-in-the-back poster boy for The French Connection) as the two punks; and the iconic Irene Papas, the only actual Greek in the cast, who’s told “He’s gone” by New Wave camera legend Raoul Coutard, cameoing in a break from his breakneck documentary-style shooting. All of which, combined with Costa-Gavras’ bullet-quick editing, gave Z an immediacy, authenticity, and excitement, that, along with perfect timing — premiering so soon after the right-wing colonels’ takeover in Greece — made it a worldwide smash and the winner of both the Cannes Jury Prize (awarded unanimously) and the Best Foreign Film Oscar (it was the official entry from Algeria).
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