Wednesday, 3/3: The Triplets of Belleville 6:30; 21 Grams 8:15
Thursday, 3/4: The Triplets of Belleville 7:00; 21 Grams 8:45
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Fort Wayne Cinema Center Movies for 3/5-3/11
The Triplets of Belleville, 21 Grams, To Be or Not to Be
& Sneak Preview of Red Betsy
--Coming Soon
Girl with a Pearl Earring – Opens Friday, March 26th
21 Grams
--2 Academy Award Nominations
Benicio Del Toro - Best Supporting Actor, Naomi Watts - Best Supporting Actress
--Number 4 on the National Board of Review's Top Ten Films of the Year
Friday at 6:15PM, Saturday at 4PM & 8:30PM, Sunday at 1:30PM, Tuesday at 8:15PM, Wednesday at 6:15PM, Thursday at 6:15PM
The Triplets of Belleville
-2 Academy Award Nominations– Best Animated Feature & Best Song
"A truly out-there piece of comic animation, the most outlandishly visual film of the year, this 80-minute French treat takes us into a world that can barely be described, a world unlike any we've seen before." – Los Angeles Times. "Comic, touching and a visual knockout." – Rolling Stone. "Impossible to describe, impossible to forget."—San Francisco Chronicle. "Most of the magic of this unusual movie comes from the freshness, imagination and sweet spirit of its animation, which is blissfully its own thing and does not show the influence of any of the reigning forces in the art form." – Seattle Post Intelligencer. 80 min., Rated PG-13.
Friday at 8:45PM, Saturday at 2:00 & 6:30PM, Sunday at 4PM, Monday at 5:15PM, Tuesday at 6:30PM, Wednesday at 8:30PM, Thursday at 8:30PM
Fort Wayne Cinema Center & the Fort Wayne Jewish Federation present:
Shtik: Jewish Humor in American Film
--Admission to this film is $4.00 General Admission, $2.00 Students, Seniors & Members
To Be Or Not To Be Monday, March 8 7:00PM
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, 1942’s “To Be Or Not To Be” is a masterpiece of satire and one of the most controversial films of its time. Jack Benny and Carole Lombard play vain Polish stage actors caught up in anti-Nazi spy games. The film lampoons the Nazis and the vanities of actors while raising serious issues of patriotism, loyalty and censorship. The film was also Fort Wayne native Lombard’s last -- and arguably her best – film. USA; 1942; 99 min.; Unrated
21 Grams
Like "Mystic River," "21 Grams" is a grim, compelling and exceedingly well-acted meditation on life, death, guilt and redemption, starring a superlative Sean Penn. Clint Eastwood's traditionalist masterwork dealt with three childhood friends haunted by a long-ago event; "21 Grams," directed by Mexico's Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, making his English-language debut, uses a radically different style to focus on three strangers brought together by a new and terrible act of fate. Penn plays Paul, a math professor dying of coronary disease who gets a new lease on life, thanks to a heart transplant from a man (Danny Huston) who was cut down with his two young daughters in an automobile accident. Paul's nagging sense of guilt compels him to track down and - without revealing their link - try to help the man's widow, Christina (Naomi Watts), a former party girl who has resumed her cocaine habit following the tragedy. They become lovers and together decide to seek vengeance against Jordan (Benicio del Toro), a born-again ex-convict whose determination to stay straight with God's help was challenged when his truck accidentally plowed into Christina's family. In less talented hands, the screenplay by "Amores Perros" writer Guillermo Arriaga might seem like a glorified soap opera - the borrowed-heart trope is especially well-worn - but with this cast and director, you won’t want to miss a moment. That's not only because it's solid adult drama, but because Inarritu has eschewed a straight-line narrative in favor of a challenging, non-linear structure that sketches the basic story in the first few minutes, then keeps going back and forth to fill in more and more key details. Penn, del Toro and Watts create some of the year's richest, most wrenching characters, ably supported by Charlotte Gainsborough as Penn's estranged wife and Melissa Leo as del Toro’s stricken spouse. Stunningly photographed, largely with a hand-held camera, by Rodrigo Prieto (another member of the "Amores Perros" team) on gritty locations in Memphis and Albuquerque, "21 Grams” is also a visual tour de force - and a rare Hollywood product depicting class differences with any kind of honesty. The title refers to the weight - perhaps the soul - the body is said to lose at the precise moment of death. But "21 Grams" has no shortage of soul, wit or intelligence. 125 min., Rated R (violence, profanity, sex).
The Triplets of Belleville
"The Triplets of Belleville" is a bizarre yet beautifully composed piece of nutty whimsy. Madame Souza lives with her dour grandson, Champion, on a hill in Paris where a train always goes rattling by. Since the one thing he enjoys is bicycles, she buys him one. By the time he's an adult, Champion becomes a cycling prodigy. While competing in the Tour de France, he's kidnapped by the local mafia, which leads Grandma and their melancholic hound, Bruno, on Champion's trail. The journey takes them across the sea towards the magical city of Belleville, where Madame Souza encounters a curious trio of '30s-era musical hall sisters that lend a hand in finding Champion. Director Sylvain Chomet is a wizard at letting his jokes quietly brew to the surface. His macabre wit combines the cartoons of Gahan Wilson with some of the playful jest of Jacques Tati and the enchanted drawings of Otto Messmer and Max Fleischer. In its pure originality and off-key sense of humor, "The Triplets of Belleville" is a captivating experience. "A truly out-there piece of comic animation, the most outlandishly visual film of the year, this 80-minute French treat takes us into a world that can barely be described, a world unlike any we've seen before." – Los Angeles Times. "Comic, touching and a visual knockout." – Rolling Stone. "Impossible to describe, impossible to forget."—San Francisco Chronicle. "Most of the magic of this unusual movie comes from the freshness, imagination and sweet spirit of its animation, which is blissfully its own thing and does not show the influence of any of the reigning forces in the art form." – Seattle Post Intelligencer. 80 min., Rated PG-13.
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Special preview of “Red Betsy.”
Director Chris Boebel and Charles Boebel will join us for this special preview.
Sunday, March 7th reception at 6PM. Film at 7PM. Q&A with the filmmakers after the screening.
Tickets are $10.00 general admission and $8.00 for Cinema Center members.
Cinema Center members can pre-buy tickets. Tickets will be available for sale in the Cinema Center office 10:30am-12:30pm Monday through Friday or during box office hours. The box office is open a half hour before show times.
Red Betsy will open at Cinema Center on Friday, March 12th.
Set in the rolling hills and farmlands of rural Wisconsin during the 1940’s, Red Betsy stars Alison Elliott (The Spitfire Grill, The Wings of the Dove), Leo Burmester (Lone Star, The Abyss), Lois Smith (Minority Report, Fried Green Tomatoes), Chad Lowe (Unfaithful), and William Wise (In the Bedroom, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing.)
“This is not the country postcard of Hollywood fantasies, but just a working farm in a district where there are few enough people that every personality seems back lighted."—Roger Ebert.
"Reminds us to treasure the not-so-distant past like it was a family heirloom." –Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The making of “Red Betsy” was a family project for Charles and Chris Boebel. Charles Boebel was born in Wisconsin, where “Red Betsy” was filmed. He recently retired from Manchester College where he was a professor of English. His son Chris adapted his father’s story for the screen and directed the film. Chris has directed short films, the Ted the Head series of shorts for Nickelodeon, and is also the director of a documentary feature Containment: Life After Three Mile Island. Red Betsy is his feature film debut.
Red Betsy
Not since "The Straight Story" has a film done as fine a job of capturing a Midwestern sensibility as "Red Betsy." Lots of movies are set in the "Midwest," which, as far as Hollywood is concerned, means they are shot somewhere outside of Toronto where there's grass and a hill or two and it's 40 percent cheaper to shoot than the actual Midwest, even though it looks completely different. But "Red Betsy," filmed north of Milwaukee, not only captures the look of the place but it also nails the outlook: that combination of pride, reserve, hopefulness and suspicion that is common to many of us small-town Midwesterners. What they're suspicious of in the modest, winter-pretty "Red Betsy" is, oddly, electricity. But what they're really afraid of is change. It's 1941, and a number of tragedies have brought together two people who aren't fond of each other: pregnant Winifred (Alison Elliott, "Wings of the Dove") and her father-in-law, Emmet (Leo Burmester). The movie is set over a span of 10 years, during which tragedies and misunderstanding push Emmet closer to his granddaughter and away from her mother, who embraces change in a way that alarms Emmet. There's a lesson to be learned, of course, and it takes 10 years to learn it and it gets learned on Christmas Eve, which sounds corny, but "Red Betsy" isn't. There's a spareness to the storytelling and a genuineness in the acting that give the story real emotion without sentimentality. Nothing is overdone in this modest film, but the details are perfect: the forced sense of community a party line gave telephones, the affection with which a farm wife steers her husband's crabbiness toward humor, the way objects help us recall the departed. What it all adds up to is a story about how time could drive a wedge between people and about what small steps might be required to bring them back together. 98 min., Rated PG.