Hudson Valley Crucial Viewing: August 16- 29

Greetings fellow cinephiles, and welcome to the second half of August! Wonderful to see you at our La Cienaga and Crumb Catcher screenings. It’s been a great year for repertory film and this edition is no different. A broad variety of repertory options here which Bel is going to tell you about in…

Hayao Miyazaki’s MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO
ArtBuoy, Kingston – Friday, August 16, 7:00pm

Hayao Miyazaki’s films epitomize the feeling of late summer for me. His lovingly detailed worlds and career-spanning obsession with the natural world and its conservation result in so many verdant, sprawling landscapes. My Neighbor Totoro is his most innocent work, straying as far from the darkness of the director as any of his films get. There’s the looming threat of the mother’s illness, but the themes of the film remind us to embrace innocence and wonder. There’s a reason of course that this is one of his more ubiquitous films and it's mostly due to the titular Totoro and his little friends. It’s almost too cute, but it’s his deft ability to focus on human nature that makes it entertaining no matter the age group. In some ways you could almost argue that it’s a character study of Satsuki, ruminating on the strangeness between childhood and young adulthood, the things we take with us and what we sacrifice to mature into the world. (1988, 86min)

Michael Goorjian's ILLUSION
Congregation Emanuel, Kingston – Saturday, August 17, 7:00pm

Have you seen 2004’s Illusion? I hadn’t until Brian sent me the list for this week and I’ll tell you what, just watch the charmingly early 2000s trailer on director and co-star Michael Goorjian’s Youtube channel. This movie is goofy, and I can’t stress that enough. Where PTA takes melodrama and elevates it in Magnolia, Illusion wades through it, stuck in the mire of self-seriousness. At the same time though, I’ve always been a sucker for movies about movies, and I feel like this falls right in line. It’s a film about acting, about the roles we take on in our life, and it all plays out (maybe a little too obviously) in the projected film reels that show the life of Kirk Douglas’s estranged son. Imagine if you could watch the life of someone you never knew on your deathbed? The film has a spiritual, moral lesson it wants to teach you but I think if we step away from that there’s an underlying question about imagination and regret. How do we reconcile the choices that we made when everything is over? Definitely a fun one to go see with friends. (2004, 106min)

Jean Luc Godard's ALPHAVILLE
TSL, Hudson – Saturday, August 17, 5:15pm; Sunday, August 18, 4:30pm

Speaking of outlier films, how about Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville, right? It’s hard to say that Godard ever made a film that didn’t fit his type as a director, mostly because he’s made more films than I can keep track of. Alphaville is special though. It’s not that strange compared to other pulpy, neo noirs of the 60s, but it has the classic Godard flair. At times it feels like everyone is speaking in verse, but they’re all reading from different volumes. It has Godard’s classic cool eroticism and detached sensuality. It’s also predictably experimental visually, repeatedly cutting to disconnected lights and black screens. It plays at its genres but also wants to poke fun at them, and its philosophy of the world is never fully fleshed out. You’re never entirely sure what exactly it wants you to think, except that the anxiety around the fascist supercomputer is a real and looming threat. There’s so much to say about this movie I don’t even totally know where to start. It’s easy to write about it (like all Godard films) with extreme self-seriousness and an academic lens. But it’s just as easy to write about Alphaville with nothing but entertainment in mind. It really is one of the best sci-fi films of the 20th century, but half the nerds of the world probably don’t even know about it. (1965, 99min)

Haskell Wexler's MEDIUM COOL
with editor Paul Golding and film scholar Paul Cronin
Starr, Rhinebeck – Sunday, August 18, 8:00pm

I need you all to go see Medium Cool, okay? I know I’m always telling you to go watch movies, that’s my job! I want you to see all the movies we highlight on this list most of the time, but I know you can’t go to all of them. But, seriously. I need you to go see Medium Cool this week. This movie is a synthesis of all the things I like most in film, and all the things I’ve probably written the most about in the last few months working with KFF. “New Hollywood” movement of the late 20th century? Yes. A movie about making movies? Yes. Deftly and expertly employing the cinema verite style? Yes. C’mon! This is my kind of movie. Beyond all that, though, this is a movie that is worth watching right now. Semi-scripted, Medium Cool follows TV journalist and cameraman John Cassellis during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Debut director Haskell Wexler uses real footage from the ‘68 riots spliced in with his narrative to give us a real sense of the political atmosphere of the moment. Wexler was previously known for his work as one of the best cinematographers in Hollywood, so you know at the very least this is going to be an amazing film to look at. I think Thomas Beard’s essay on Wexler puts it best – “Hollywood’s relationship to social life in America is often under­stood as one where our collective desires and anxieties enter the dream factory raw and return as a more refined, allegorically shaped product…But what if the reverse were true? What if the raw stuff of Hollywood was fed directly into the social machinery of American life? What if a riot doubled as a film set?” The slippage here between the real and the imagined, the documentary and the narrative, the meaning-making and the chaos, results in an incredibly realized portrait of the American people at our most vulnerable, in moments of political unrest when the system is failing us openly. Doesn’t that seem like something we should all watch right now? (1969, 110min)

Paul Thomas Anderson's MAGNOLIA
Orpheum, Saugerties – opens Wednesday, August 21, 7:00pm

If I’m being totally honest (and you can judge me for it if you want) I often forget that Magnolia is a Paul Thomas Anderson film. I don’t forget about Magnolia itself, but it feels so out of character for the PTA most of us consider when thinking of him. I saw someone refer to his mid-career filmmaking as “Masterpiece Theater-esque” and though I think that’s a bit of a dig, there is an austere sensibility to his later films, a haughtiness, a seriousness. Magnolia isn’t unserious but Anderson feels like he’s “at play” here in a way that’s entirely unique. I love this movie, but I’ve always had a soft spot for ensemble casts, and Magnolia does it like no other. It’s a treat to see so many actors playing against type, and though the plot threatens soap opera levels of melodrama at times it comes together into a series of interconnected vignettes that ruminate on human nature. Like most of his films it is asking big questions about the granular nature of living. What I love most about Magnolia is it doesn’t seem that interested in answering them, but we watch people move through the questions. Who deserves forgiveness? What does reconciliation actually mean? The mechanics of the miniscule San Fernando Valley of the film open up to reveal how big the world can be when we consider the intimate and glancing connections between random people. (1999, 188min)