Wednesday, 1/14 Sylvia 6:30, The Station Agent 8:30
Thursday, 1/15 Sylvia 6:30, The Station Agent 8:30
Be sure to check out our website at http://www.cinemacenter.org/
Coming Soon – In America – Opens Friday, January 23
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Fort Wayne Cinema Center Movies for 1/16-1/22
Sylvia & The Station Agent (Last Shows for Both!)
Sylvia
"It is Plath's writing that represents ... her surest claim on our attention. The makers of Sylvia may, to some degree, have neglected this brilliant, unsettling and tragically foreshortened body of work, but they have not betrayed it." -- The New York Times. "An often painful, surprisingly illuminating and emotionally complex portrait of a woman who is ultimately as mysterious as her art."-- Detroit Free Press. "3 Stars"-- Roger Ebert. 110 min., Rated R (sexuality/nudity and language.)
Friday at 8:30PM, Saturday at 6:30PM, Sunday at 4PM, Monday at 8:30PM, Tuesday at 8:30PM, Wednesday at 6:30PM, Thursday at 6:30PM
The Station Agent
--3 Independent Spirit Award Nominations!--
--Number 3 on the National Board of Review’s Top Ten Films of the Year!--
“A movie with an intellectual existence both on and off the screen, as well as an emotional resonance that is difficult to shake."--Newsday. "A masterful film and a bracing movie experience."--Hollywood Reporter. "Yes, this is a comedy, but it's also sad, and finally it's simply a story about trying to figure out what you love to do and then trying to figure out how to do it."--Roger Ebert. "The best advice to filmgoers who appreciate smart, mature, humanist movies is, simply, Go."--Washington Post. "A delicate, thoughtful and often hilarious take on loneliness."—New York Times. "Dinklage's face and demeanor, his sense of solitude, ballasts some of the film's loonier episodes. There's always something on his mind, and you're always wondering what it is."—Boston Globe.
90 min., Rated R. (for language.)
Friday at 6:30PM, Saturday at 8:30PM, Sunday at 2PM, Monday at 6:30PM, Tuesday at 6:30PM, Wednesday at 8:30PM, Thursday at 8:30PM
Sylvia
As an unrelentingly somber take on the final seven years of arguably the most significant female voice in 20th-century American poetry, "Sylvia" is beautifully shot and awash with gray hues and settings that appropriately capture the suicidal disposition of the film’s subject. The film picks up Plath’s life in 1956, three years after the suicide attempt that she famously chronicled in the 1963 novel "The Bell Jar." In England as a Fulbright scholar, Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) meets upcoming poet Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig), who engages her in a whirlwind romance that, after just four months, leads to their marriage. An idyllic beginning marked by mutual encouragement for each other’s writing breaks down with the passing years, giving way to Plath's anger and jealousy--both at her husband's critical and commercial success, which overshadows her own poetic accomplishments, and his extramarital affair. Hughes' decision to leave his wife and their two children for another woman results in a period of intense creative output for Plath and what is generally considered her most electrifying poetry--as well as her eventual suicide. Meticulous attention to detail, from the '50s-era clothing to the perfect recreation of Plath's changing hairstyles, is evident throughout "Sylvia," and Paltrow is convincing in capturing the poet's emotional highs and lows. Moreover, Craig's restrained portrayal of Hughes and Blythe Danner’s (Gwyneth Paltrow’s real life mother) depiction of Aurelia Plath, who represent opposing forces in Sylvia's life, skillfully avoid the respective traps of domineering, villainous husband and overprotective parent, favorite caricatures among Plath's most sympathetic biographers. The film's bleakness remains appropriately overpowering, from the opening quote of Plath's late poem "Lady Lazarus" ("Dying/Is an art, like everything else. /I do it exceptionally well. /I do it so it feels like hell") to her last lonely moments preparing breakfast for her two infant children before her suicide.
The Station Agent
An unexpected favorite at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was snapped up for distribution by Miramax and captured acting, writing and audience awards, “The Station Agent” is the gentle portrait of a tentative friendship among three quite disparate people. At four feet, five inches, Finbar McBride (Peter Dinklage) has been the object of curiosity and derision for most of his life. He has dealt with it by shutting himself off from most of the rest of the world. When his only friend and business partner dies, he inherits an abandoned train depot in lushly shot rural New Jersey and jumps at the chance to live there in isolation. It is not to be. He is immediately accosted by Joe (an infections Bobby Cannavale), who is bored to tears running the coffee truck nearby while his dad is laid up at home, and literally run off the road by painter Olivia (once again, the uber-talented Patricia Clarkson), who, estranged from her husband, is grieving the death of her young son. These chance meetings lay the foundation for solid friendships. “If you guys do something later, can I join you?” Joe asks Fin when he observes his budding relationship with Olivia. “We’re not doing anything later,” Fin replies. “But if you do,” Joe insists. The exchange goes on for comedic effect but also to intimate Joe’s desperation to make a human connection and Fin’s aversion to it. For Dinklage, particularly, this is the role of a lifetime. He is pitch-perfect as the monosyllabic conversationalist who is wholly satisfied to read about trains, watch trains and walk “the right of way” (along the train tracks) by himself. Yet he doesn’t truly enjoy the pastime without Joe and Olivia’s help, when he can finally chase trains in a car with a video camera. Clarkson, too, grapples with the complicated emotions of being friends with a man for whom she can be neither mother nor girlfriend. And Cannavale brings humor and energy to a storyline that could plunge into melodrama but doesn’t. Rarely has friendship--honest, genuine friendship--been portrayed so truthfully, with the gentle humor that belies real intimacy. (“I wanted to live near Joe,” Fin quips as the reason he moved into a deserted train station with no plumbing or electricity; “Can you come up here and talk?” Joe whines from the balcony where he is preparing dinner--he’s a great cook--as Fin and Olivia converse below. “Seriously, this sucks.”) And while theirs is a unique arrangement that they struggle with throughout the film, ultimately Fin, Joe and Olivia come to quite comfortable terms with it--their own. Running time: 90 min., Rated R.
-Coming Soon-
In America
Golden Globe Nomination for Best Screenplay
Lyrical, life-affirming, lovely. In America is a wondrously emotional film, one that sneakily dismantles your defenses and purges grief you didn't realize you had. What happens onscreen to the characters happens offscreen to the audience: Walls erected to protect vulnerable hearts are taken down in order to make a human connection. Jim Sheridan's film is about an Irish family - father, mother and two young daughters - that tells the authorities it has come to the States on holiday when it is planning to immigrate, legally or otherwise. The year is 1982. The place is Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan. The narrator is 11-year-old Christy (Sarah Bolger), who frames the family's unsentimental journey through the viewfinder of her camcorder. (Literalists, please understand that this is a metaphorical 1982, as the classic-rock stations, family-friendly Times Square, and personal camcorder we see are anachronisms in service of a larger emotional truth.) There's something off about Sarah's folks. For when the customs agent at the U.S.-Canada border asks how many children they have, her dad answers "three" and her mom "two." There are two children in the backseat, Christy and Ariel (Emma Bolger, Sarah's sister). But the restless spirit of a third, Frankie, crowds the car and the memories of his kin. Although no longer with them, Frankie has become the family genie, giving Christy three wishes. At critical moments she uses them to ensure her family's safe passage. As directed by Sheridan (My Left Foot), who wrote the semiautobiographical screenplay with his now-grown daughters, In America is a ghost story in which the living are first haunted and ultimately helped by the dead. Both in its story and in its gritty scenery, vividly captured by cinematographer Declan Quinn, the film is a stirring work of magic realism. Soon after their arrival, Christy's father, a struggling actor named Johnny (Paddy Considine), finds a crummy loft in Hell's Kitchen encrusted in pigeon poop and possibility. Her mother, Sarah (that life force Samantha Morton, a melding of the ethereal and the earthy), finds a job in an ice cream parlor. It is a measure of the enormous achievement of In America that the Hell's Kitchen ice cream parlor is called Heaven and no one groans. And that the shaman is an African named Mateo ( Amistad 's Djimon Hounsou in majestic-mystic mode) whom Sheridan permits to create a character far more complex than the noble Negro of standard Hollywood fare. As Morton and Hounsou endow the film with a transcendent, catch-a-falling-star magic, those Bolger girls root it in recognizable reality. For Christy and Ariel, being in this strange land with mysterious climatic conditions such as humidity and secular customs such as Halloween is a magical adventure much like E.T.'s visit to Earth. Although each actor is uniquely powerful, the blessing of Sheridan's movie is seeing them work in ensemble. This is a story that sees the family as a system, attentive to how the pressures on one member cause explosions and implosions among the others. In part, In America is the story of immigrant hopes, of creating a new life from the ashes of the old. But more profoundly it serves as proof that tortured people can go through hell and come out the other side to find heaven in Hell's Kitchen. "In America is particularly adept at dealing with the immigrant experience, with lives lived on the knife edge of hope, poverty and despair that is in many ways this country's quintessential situation."—Los Angeles Times. "A classic story of losing and finding faith told with heart, humor and emotional heft."—USA Today. "Forceful, funny and impassioned."—Rolling Stone. “Four Stars!”—Roger Ebert. 104 min., Rated PG-13.