The Illusion of Depth

 Welcome back, everyone! We are back for a few more weeks of film nights after our brief recess. I am happy to announce that we are also back upstairs in the Main Hall (or "Screen One" as I like to call it) now that the essential repairs have been completed. A great big thank you to everyone for your patience and understanding while we showed films in our "temporary accommodations" downstairs in the basement ("Screen Two"!). I plan to show three more films in December before we break for the holiday season, and we will then resume on the 12th of January with a brand-new film series (more about that in due course, so stay tuned!). For our first December screening (on Thursday, the 1st of December) I want to draw a line under our recently concluded series of Ordinary Ladies with a film that is, effectively, the antithesis of Ordinary Ladies. The Stepford Wives (1975) is based on Ira Levin's 1972 novel, and plays out like Betty Friedan's darkest in...

 I know I introduced last week's film as The Last Ordinary Lady (and those of you who saw the film will understand why) but we have time to squeeze one more "bonus" lady into the series before we move on to other topics. Those of you who know me at all will be aware of my love for all things stereoscopic, and I try to include at least one 3D film in each series. In this instance, the choices were surprisingly limited; something that tells you a lot about mainstream cinema's attitudes toward female characters. In fact, I was able to come up with exactly one film that fit the Ordinary Lady criteria, so, unsurprisingly, that is the film I will be showing next week! (Presumably that means there was actually  no choice, since you can't really choose between a single option. But I digress...) Fortunately, the film in question happens to be a lot of fun: Monsters Vs Aliens was released in 2009, at the very beginning of Hollywood's modern 3D era. Hollywood has actu...