Tuesday, 3/9: The Triplets of Belleville 6:30; 21 Grams 8:15
Wednesday, 3/10: 21 Grams 6:15; The Triplets of Belleville 8:30
Thursday, 3/11: 21 Grams 6:15; The Triplets of Belleville 8:30
Last Shows for 21 Grams!
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The Triplets of Belleville, Red Betsy, & Duck Soup
--Coming Soon
Calendar Girls – Opens Friday, March 19th – One Week Only!
Girl with a Pearl Earring – Opens Friday, March 26th
The Fog of War – Opens Friday, April 2nd
The Company – Opens Friday, April 23rd
Monster – Late April/ Early May
Red Betsy One Week Only!
“3 Stars. 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. 98 min., Rated PG.
Friday at 8:15PM, Saturday at 2PM & 6:30PM, Sunday at 2PM, Monday at 8:30, Tuesday at 8:15PM, Wednesday at 6:30PM, Thursday at 6:30PM
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 6:30PM, Saturday at 4:00 & 8:30PM, 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 General Admission, $2 Students, Seniors & Members
Duck Soup 7:00PM March 15, 2004
The Marx Brothers’ greatest and funniest masterpiece, “Duck Soup” skewers authoritarianism, dictators and Fascism – just as the Great Depression was strangling America and Adolph Hitler was rising to the world’s attention. A critical and commercial failure when it was released, it has since been embraced as the quintessential satire of autocracy. The mythical Balkan state of Freedonia has gone bankrupt and Mrs. Teasdale (the long-suffering Margaret Dumont) will bail it out, but only if Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx) will assume the presidency. Rivals, spies and insults fly in pure Marx Brothers’ style. “Duck Soup” was the brothers’ last film for Paramount and the last film that included Zeppo Marx.
USA; 1933; 70 min.; Unrated
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. Rated PG. 98 min., Rated PG.
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.