Update; December, 2022: To anyone reading this page now, the roof work is now complete and the building is fully re-opened. Our film nights are back in the main hall, and we can use the entrance on Grove Road. We have witnessed a number of truly cataclysmic events in the past year or so: a Global Pandemic; an attempt to overthrow the Government in the US; the catastrophic but entirely foreseeable fallout from Brexit. And then the Church Roof Collapsed. Okay, I suppose a leaking roof isn't the worst problem most of us have had to face this year (the horrors never stop: all the local grocery stores are completely out of grapefruit juice ; truly we are living through Armageddon) but (a) it is symptomatic of the kind of year this has been, and (b) it does mean that we won't be organising these film evenings in the usual Church Hall. While the fearless roofers and scaffolders tirelessly wage their battles against the Forces of Entropy ...
Please note that this week's film has been rated 18 in the UK. Funny thing about "Dark Cinema". It doesn't stay dark forever. Film Noir was the result of a specific set of elements that happened to coalesce in the post-war years: the influx of European film-makers trying to adjust to the American system; the highly restrictive Hollywood production codes; the appetite of a war-weary audience for complex stories with a little meat, etc. etc. If you pull too hard on any one of those threads, the whole "noir" tapestry can unravel, and that's more or less what happened as the 1940s gave way to the 1950s. Time passed. Society changed. The Government began cracking down on "subversive" elements in the film industry, the Baby Boom led to a drastically different movie-going demographic, and there was an explicit push to undo many of the social freedoms that women had enjoyed during the war years. (Remember all those juicy femmes fatale of the 1940...
Although very few historians know this about me, I spent the first twelve years of my life in a different country. True, I then spent the next four decades living in Great Britain, but there are still moments when life in the UK feels... odd. My childhood was spent in a mysterious and magical Kingdom known as Atlanta , which Billy Wilder once described as "Siberia, with mint julips." In fairness, I don't believe I ever personally witnessed a julip, but there was nevertheless a certain degree of culture shock involved when I transitioned to British. There were of course some obvious cultural differences, like the traffic on the wrong side of the road (you generally figure that one out pretty quickly) or the lack of school shootings, but I don't think I will ever get used to certain other aspects of British life; like the extreme difference between Summer and Winter. What kind of a crazy country is it where it gets dark at 2.30 in the afternoon in some months, while t...
Our current series (as you probably know by now) has been showcasing films that are re-workings of classic works of literature and drama. Some of these films have been very well-known ( Forbidden Planet; O Brother, Where Art Thou? ); some, possibly less so ( In the Bleak Midwinter; All Night Long ). There is one film, however, which almost inevitably must be included in a series like this. If we are really going to explore films that take classic stories and translate them into completely new contexts and environments, then we can't really let the series conclude without showing Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now - which takes Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and transports it to the Vietnam War. I'm just kidding. I have no plans to show Apocalypse Now . I have no plans to show Apocalypse Ever . Yes, it's based on Heart of Darkness , but... it's truly awful. No, the film I do mean is of course West Side Story . As is very well documented by now, West Si...
Thursday, the 15th of December marks the final film night of the year at the Victoria Park Baptist Church (we will be starting up again on the 12th of January) and for our final film of the year, I plan to break the habit of a lifetime. That's right, folks. This Thursday, for the first time ever, I will be showing... a Christmas film . The Christmas Movie is basically a film genre in its own right. There have been more Christmas Movies (by orders of magnitude) than, say, Easter movies, Yom Kippur movies etc. (I did briefly consider showing Chanukah at Bubbe's , but I'm not going to...) In fairness, there are many, many Diwali movies, but we can save those for some future film series devoted to the magic of Bollywood. When it comes to classic and beloved Christmas Movies, there is one film that emerges time and again as THE Christmas Movie; the one that everyone comes back to without fail; the one that is guaranteed to bring joy to the hearts of everyone who sees it (and no...
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