Monday, 11/24, Whale Rider 6:30, The Human Stain 8:30
Tuesday 11/25, The Human Stain 6:30, Whale Rider 8:30
Wednesday 11/26, The Human Stain 6:30, Whale Rider 8:30
Closed on Thanksgiving
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Cinema Center will be closed on Thanksgiving.
--Alien (The Director’s Cut), The Human Stain & Whale Rider
---be sure to check out our redesigned website at www.cinemacenter.org
Coming Soon –
Passionada, 12/5 (Cinema Center Party on 12/7!)
The Station Agent, 12/12
Alien – The Director’s Cut
"Twenty-four years later -- digitally spruced up, with some scenes shaved and others padded with previously cut material -- Scott's film still shreds nerves." – Los Angeles Times. "Turns out not to be one of those movies that improves in the memory, but actually is better than you remember, mostly because it puts its multitude of imitators to shame."—Detroit Free Press. "In space, the famous tagline went, no one can hear you scream. In Alien , you can hear lessons for the sci-fi future in a great milestone from the recent past."—Entertainment Weekly. “Four Stars!”—Roger Ebert.
117 min., Rated R.
Friday at 7:30PM & 9:45PM, Saturday at 6:30PM & 9PM, Sunday at 6:30PM, Monday at 8:30PM, Tuesday at 8:30PM, Wednesday at 8:30PM & Thursday at 8:30PM
The Human Stain
“3 & 1/2 Stars.”—Roger Ebert. "The movie is fully worthy of the book, and will reach many people who might not have enjoyed the delightful experience of gliding through Mr. Roth's trenchant and zestful prose on the human condition."-- Andrew Sarris, New York Observer.
106 min., Rated R (language & nudity.)
Saturday at 2PM, Sunday at 4:15PM, Tuesday at 6:30PM, Thursday at 6:30PM
Whale Rider
"A true crowd-pleaser that never panders to achieve its effects."-- Chicago Tribune. “3 & 1/2 Stars.” Roger Ebert. "A story that J.K. Rowling fans young and old will savor."—Minneapolis Star Tribune "A thoughtful, vivid spiritual coming-of-age story that transcends its particular cultural context."—Washington Post. 105 min., Rated PG-13.
Friday at 5:15PM, Saturday at 4:15PM, Sunday at 2PM, Monday at 6:30PM, Wednesday at 6:30PM
Alien – The Director’s Cut Opens Friday, November 28
"The perfect organism," the science officer coolly calls the beast stalking his spaceship. "Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility -- I admire its purity." Ash (Ian Holm) could be speaking of the movie that surrounds him. Ridley Scott's 1979 "Alien" is remembered as the film that not only fused the sci-fi of "Star Wars" with the splatter of "Halloween" but that helped launch the careers of Sigourney Weaver and, ultimately, directors James Cameron and David Fincher, who both oversaw controversial sequels. What's most unusual about the original 24 years later, though, is its elegant minimalism. Seven crew members, a rusting salvage ship 10 months from earth, and one ever-morphing, near-pornographic fiend -- that's all "Alien" has and all it needs to have. It's a movie that locates terror in silence and that has the unfashionable patience to wait good and long before it strikes. When it does -- in the now-famous dinner sequence in which crew member John Hurt suffers the worst case of indigestion in cinema history -- an hour has already elapsed and the audience's guard is down. That scene still has the power to shock in the director's cut of "Alien," which opens in area theaters today, even if you know what's coming and even if the larval monster that erupts from Hurt's chest looks a little rubbery in these days of digital effects. It's the randomness that's scary -- in seconds, the bickering, mundane world Scott and his cast have carefully established is shredded. For this re-release, the director has gone back to the edit bins and incorporated a number of scenes that were cut from the original "Alien." The most notable are a brief fight between crew members Ripley (Weaver) and Lambert (Veronica Cartwright) after the former balks at letting the infected Kane (Hurt) back onto the ship, and a climactic scene in which Ripley stumbles across the still-living Brett (Harry Dean Stanton) and Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt), who have been hung up for use as alien incubators. Those scenes were available as separate outtakes on the 20th anniversary DVD version of "Alien," but Scott has put them back where they belong, and the film is better for it. He has also quickened the pace by trimming the fat from some scenes; say what you like about messing with the Mona Lisa, but this "Alien" is a leaner, meaner animal. It's still "Ten Little Indians" in outer space, and it still somewhat loses its grip toward the end-- do we really believe Ripley would try to save the ship's cat with that H.R. Giger-designed hellbeast on her tail? -- but it looks more like a classic than ever. One of the real pleasures of revisiting "Alien" is to watch the emergence of both Ellen Ripley as a character and Sigourney Weaver as a star. Scott keeps Ripley in the background for the film's first third -- she's just an attractive extra visible behind the character actors and Skerritt, who in 1979 was the movie's only "name." By the end, of course, she's a quick-witted survivor and well on her way to becoming the warrior matriarch of the sequels. The climactic scenes have her running around in a T-shirt and a pair of itsy-bitsy panties, but Weaver just juts her jaw and gets on with the business of saving the galaxy. She stoops to babe-itude this once, as if knowing she'd never have to again.
The Human Stain
Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman play doomed, outcast lovers in director Robert Benton's "The Human Stain," and though they're an unlikely couple (even more so if you've read the Philip Roth novel), they're such superb actors that they pull you into the characters' private world, making you feel white-hot passion in New England winter. Hopkins portrays a famed 71-year-old New England classics professor and college dean Coleman Silk. Kidman plays his 34-year-old lover, Faunia Farley, a janitor at fictitious Athena College and the ex-wife of moody Vietnam vet Lester Farley (Ed Harris). The story is built around that odd triangle, but it's also about Coleman's unfair fall from grace and the world of lies finally revealed to the narrator, novelist Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise), a continuing character of Roth's. Nathan listens as Coleman reveals his woes: censured by his colleagues on a trumped-up charge of racism, widowed when his wife Iris (Phyllis Newman) suffers a heart attack, and condemned by his own rage, which leads him to self-exile. "Stain" soon becomes a scathing indictment of political correctness and various bigotries, as the magnitude and irony of the injustice against Coleman become crystal-clear. In the book they're even clearer, but the movie sharply reduces the role of Coleman's French feminist nemesis, professor Delphine Roux (Mimi Kuzyk), the woman who gets him fired. He's still a victim more of academic jealousy and intellectual fashion than morality or justice - a jealousy and fashion which, in his genteel academic world, he can't escape. Nathan's sympathy for the disgraced academic keeps growing as we learn, in flashback sections, how Coleman got to Athena, and of his past as "Silky" Silk, '40s college student, lothario and pro boxer. When the August-December romance with Faunia starts, spurred by social isolation and Viagra, threatened by gossip and Lester's stalking, it's a sensual consolation for this embittered man. But the film has another heart as well: Coleman's old secret, which is crucial but unrevealable for this review. Benton, who wrote "Bonnie and Clyde," is a master of bedrock Americana and a sympathetic observer of rebels and outlaws. Like his best work as director ("Kramer vs. Kramer," "Places in the Heart," "Nobody's Fool"), "The Human Stain" is superbly crafted in all departments. It's the sort of movie - intelligent, humane, well-acted and based on rich source material - that we don't get often enough and therefore sometimes don't appreciate enough. But if the main complaints you can make about a movie are that Kidman and Hopkins may be too beautiful or too British, respectively, we're perhaps guilty of critical bigotry. What matters here is that the filmmaking is so good and the issues and themes - from public racism to private brutality - so compelling. What about casting? The choice of Hopkins seems questionable if you know Coleman's secret, but with his brooding Shakespearean presence, deep sadness and eloquence, he triumphs anyway. Faunia, a beleaguered, tough, unschooled woman, is played by Kidman with no false noses, and she seems so lovely that it's hard to accept her as a janitor, or not to imagine all of Athena lining up at her door. But is that really a defect? Movie actors are almost always better-looking than their real-life counterparts, never more so than in the Ingmar Bergman films that seem to have inspired Benton here. And Kidman's rare beauty and shining empathy take us inside Coleman's head. Empathy is essential here; Hopkins and Sinise have plenty as well. Harris has more, though his character has none. Alone among the lead quartet, he's perfectly cast - and so brilliant, he chills you to the bone. "The Human Stain" has those qualities we often want but rarely see in our films: intelligence and ambition, decency and humanity, poetry and pity, fire and ice. Watch it and weep. 106 min., Rated R (language & nudity.)
Whale Rider
When Pai (Keisha Castle-Hughes, in a remarkable debut performance) is born, her mother and twin brother--the heir to the chiefdom of her tribal people--die in childbirth. Her father flees in grief, and her grandfather, Koro (Rawiri Paratene), never forgives her. When Pai is an adolescent, it becomes clear that her still-absent father will never be the son her grandfather needs him to be, and he gathers the first-born sons of the New Zealand coastal village to school them in the ways of their ancestors. Curious and with a natural propensity for the skills he is teaching, Pai wants to sit in on the lessons, but--a suffragette in her own right--she refuses to sit quietly in the back, and Koro kicks her out. When his mission fails, he is forced to reconsider who might be destined to take his place. Writer/director Niki Caro's "Whale Rider" is an exquisite film that sensitively captures the noble spirit of these people--and their humor. (When Pai advises her grandmother's friends that they are endangering their childbearing properties by smoking, they quip, "You'd have to smoke in a pretty funny place.") At first the rituals in which Koro instructs the boys seem goofy--slapping their bare chests, for example, and sticking out their tongues--but, when Koro demonstrates, the gestures become truly frightening and grand. Also hauntingly beautiful are the songs, especially when sung by Pai in her thin, adolescent voice. Pai's people believe that their ancestors came to be in this place by migrating across the sea on the backs of whales. Ultimately it is these same creatures who sacrifice themselves to open the villagers' eyes to their destiny. Their connection to these beasts is poignantly portrayed in a heart-breaking scene as they desperately try to keep them alive and push them back to sea. Running time: 105 min.