New Year; New Film Season!

 Happy New Year to everyone!

I know that "time" is starting to lose its meaning after two years of this dystopian, apocalyptic nightmare we have all been enduring for the last two years, but who knows; maybe 2022 will be different.


What is clear, at least in the short term, is that our Thursday-night film evenings at the Victoria Park Baptist Church will be resuming on the 13th of January.

The Church's roof works are still ongoing, so we will still be gathering in the basement (the Crypt!) but the films will still be completely free and open to everyone.

Last year, I deliberately chose "classic" films that were explicitly uplifting and (dare I use the F-word) Fun. I felt that we all needed some quality time at the movies, losing ourselves in some truly great cinema, and enjoying the experience of being able to sit in a darkened theatre for a couple of hours, sharing a movie-going experience with like-minded people. 

That what cinema can do (at its best). It got a whole generation through the Great Depression, it can surely get us through the COVID/BREXIT years.

This year is going to be slightly different.

Although I plan to stick with films that are of the highest quality (I hope you will agree) I do not intend to avoid more serious and harder-hitting films, as I had been over the last few months. I also plan to introduce a bit of a "theme" to this year's series, and it's a theme that follows very naturally from our final film of 2021.

In The Band Wagon, theatre producer Jeffrey Cordova (Jack Buchanan) gets rather carried away with the musical he is staging on Broadway when he decides that the light and fluffy script his writers had provided for him is actually a modern retelling of Faust.


He pushes the Faust connection. And pushes, and pushes, and things do not go well at all.

In the real world of cinema, Jeffrey Cordova's modern Faust is by no means an isolated occurrence; many films have taken "The Classics" and re-worked them in surprising, unlikely, and sometimes downright weird ways - producing films that are often unusual, haunting and (usually) surprisingly fresh.

It is those "unlikely adaptations" that I hope to showcase over the next few months. Films inspired by Othello, by The Taming of the Shrew, by Jane Eyre, by The Scarlet Letter, by The Odyssey, even by Lysistrata (don't ask).

Our first film, this Thursday, will be an all time classic of Hollywood cinema, and a film which takes as its inspiration Shakespeare's final great masterpiece, The Tempest.

The film I mean of course is:


Forbidden Planet stands today as an iconic example of Science Fiction cinema, and one of the very few serious Science Fiction films of the 1950s (most of the others were about either giant insects or little green men - not necessarily in that order).


Forbidden Planet was also an important influence on Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek a decade later. But the story it tells, about a rescue mission that lands on an alien planet inhabited only by a bitter scientist and his daughter, is pilfered directly from The Tempest and its story of Prospero and Miranda, alone on their island with only the wood-sprite Ariel and the monstrous Caliban for company.


Forbidden Planet is just the first of a string of films I'll be showing this year which take their inspiration from some very unlikely sources. Do come along this Thursday, and let's make 2022 a year to remember!



Comments

  1. UnknownJanuary 9, 2022 at 10:02 PM

    The poster is A LIE !!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Shawm KreitzmanJanuary 9, 2022 at 10:43 PM

      You don't know that for sure! Maybe that's what the Doc wears on his days off!

      Delete

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