Films & Schedules - Wednesday, February 24, 2010

This quirky tale pits a scamming hustler and his wrestler sidekick against the inhabitants of a small Uruguayan town.

A combination of quirky dark drama and deadpan satire plays out in this stylish tale of a washed-up wrestler and a smooth conman in a sleepy village in South America. “Prince” Orsini, an impresario, arrives in a small town with his protégé, a one-time German wrestling champion named Jacob Van Oppen. Orsini’s scheme is to use Jacob’s status to lure locals into duels with him, promising a large cash sum to anybody who can pin him in three minutes. In reality, the matches are fixed to protect Jacob’s reputation—and Orsini’s income. The pair’s plan is threatened when an opponent is too drunk to wrestle, and femme fatale Adriana, eying the non-existent $1,000 prize, offers up her muscular husband as the replacement opponent. Jacob, nursing sore muscles, a nasty cough, and an even nastier alcohol habit, is in trouble. “Brechner’s ambitious debut is something like a retro The Wrestler by way of the Coen brothers.”—Variety.

First Feature Film.

This year’s Uruguayan submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

110 Minutes    

Interests: New Directors, Oscar Submissions, Narrative Feature, Spanish Language, Latino.

Ward No. 6 is the modern update of Chekhov’s tale of a psych-ward doctor turned patient in his own asylum.

A major box office and critical hit in Russia, and this year’s submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Ward No. 6 is a bold, modern update of Chekhov’s tale of a psych-ward doctor turned patient in his own asylum. Filming in an actual mental hospital, the directors interview real patients with actors only incidentally wandering in and out of the frame. Used by Chekhov as a metaphor for a man’s disappointment with the promises of science, the story now reconsiders that disappointment as a loss of faith in the nation’s future.

Gornovsky Filmography: Son (04), 20 Cigarettes (07).

Shakhnazarov Filmography: Jazzmen (83), Dreams (93), The Rider Named Death (04).

In May the Film Center will be presenting “Celebrating Chekhov on the Russian Screen."

83 Minutes    

Interests: Oscar Submissions, Narrative Feature.

Videocracy offers a look at the media empire of Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and how his reality TV shows beguiled a nation.

A jolly, Mussolini-loving agent, an aspiring martial artist/singer, a paparazzi wrangler-cum-outlaw, and Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, are just a few of the outlandish personalities in this documentary that explores the mad world of Italian television. In a country obsessed with game shows and reality television, whose leader owns a controlling stake in much of its media, what sort of life is worth living and what sort of example is worth following? Videocracy quietly asks these questions while casually observing its subjects go to auditions, attend lavish parties, and get thrown into jail, yielding jaw-dropping answers.

Filmography: Sacrifiico: Who Betrayed Che Guevara? (01), Gitmo—The New Rules of War (05).

In English and Italian.

Sponsored by Nel Centro.

80 Minutes     Digital    

Interests: Documentary Views.

In this quirky road movie about two bickering brothers traveling to Los Angeles, various encounters with local flora, fauna, and inevitable oddballs contribute to the tender, hilarious panorama of these men and their lives.

The setting of this quirky, comic road movie is the greater county of Los Angeles, from the city to the surrounding desert. Along for the ride are two estranged siblings: overbearing older brother Michael (Adam Scott), a failed novelist, and Tobey (Joel Bissonnette), an actor, whom Michael has reluctantly agreed to ferry to various destinations and errands. But it’s Michael’s birthday and this isn’t exactly how he’d planned to celebrate. As events unfold, it becomes clear that the agenda of the trip isn’t what it seemed and issues of trust resurface just when the brothers are forging a new bond. Various mysterious encounters with off-the-radar oddballs prove, in the film’s final moments, to be tightly woven threads in the real, underlying story.

Filmography: Looking For Leonard (02), Who Loves the Sun (06).

Sponsored by Ace Hotel.

85 Minutes    

Interests: Narrative Feature.

A suspenseful psychological thriller, Chameleon centers on a clever con man who targets lonely, disillusioned women, playing on their romantic fantasies. But can the con man be conned if love gets in the way?

Gábor cleans offices. Working nights, he rarely has any contact with his employers, yet he learns everything about them by thoroughly analyzing their garbage. Nobody suspects that Gábor is in fact a con man who carefully chooses his victims by the trash they leave behind, and usually targets disillusioned, lonely women. In a few months he destroys all their romantic illusions by taking all of their savings. When he gets a job at a psychologist’s office, Gábor meets Hanna, an injured dancer from a wealthy family. Insecure and vulnerable, Hanna seems to be the perfect victim. Gábor pretends to be a doctor who can cure her body and her soul. Everything goes according to plan until Gábor falls in love, and must choose between his beloved and her money. A suspenseful psychological thriller, Chameleon is this year’s Hungarian submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

Filmography: Just Sex and Nothing Else (05), Children of Glory (06).

104 Minutes    

Interests: Oscar Submissions, Narrative Feature, Comedy.

Hong Sang-soo's latest wry, comic bulletin from the sex-war centers on a middle-aged man who encounters two married women—and has two very different experiences.

Celebrated art film director Ku Kyung-Nam, invited to a small Korean film festival, runs into old colleague Bu. Invited to dinner, Ku gets drunk, carries on with Bu’s wife, and enrages his friend. A couple of weeks later, Ku meets one of his ex-students, now a famous artist who is surprisingly married to a woman Ku once dated and rejected—a small fact unrevealed to his former student. Ku’s two very different encounters with two very different married women provide a wry, wincing examination of sexual confusion as the oblivious Ku propels himself from one embarrassing situation to another. In true Woody Allen fashion, Sang-soo’s alter-ego offers a comedic take on the pretensions of the world of indy film and filmmakers while deconstructing the paradoxes, ironies, and existential angst of male vanity and insecurity.

Selected Filmography: The Day a Pig Fell into the Well (96), Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (00), Woman Is the Future of Man (04), Woman on the Beach (06).

Sponsored by Oregon Korea Foundation.

126 Minutes    

Interests: Narrative Feature, Asian, Comedy.

A shocking crime brings together a frightened girl and a battle-hardened cop in this drama from writer and director Ryoichi Kimizuka.

When two children are found murdered, an 18-year-old high school student becomes the prime suspect and the case quickly becomes a media sensation. As both the press and an angry public descend on the home of the accused, the family finds itself at the mercy of strangers. A veteran police detective is assigned to look after Saori, the 15-year-old sister of the accused. While he initially regards the assignment as frivolous, it isn’t long before he sees what kind of toll the attention has taken on the family. When the detective feels Saori is no longer safe in Tokyo, he takes her to the country to escape, but they soon discover that no place is safe from the prying eyes of the tabloid press and the people who read it.

Filmography: The Suspect: Muroi Shinji (05).

This year’s Japanese submission for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

118 Minutes    

Interests: Oscar Submissions, Narrative Feature.

Dawson, Isla 10 focuses on the imprisonment of advisors close to the deposed socialist government of president Salvador Allende. The men were jailed and endured hellish conditions on the island, the world's southernmost concentration camp, for more than a year.

After the military coup in 1973, deposed President Salvador Allende’s closest collaborators and ministers were locked up in a concentration camp on Dawson Island, lying at the western entrance to the Strait of Magellan. They are assigned numbers instead of names. Their lives are spared thanks to pressure from the International Red Cross, but they are not spared from torture and forced labor. Thirty years later, some survivors return to the island and rediscover the place where they learned to survive in such extreme conditions. Miguel Littin, who spent many years living in exile and to whom writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez dedicated his book “Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin,” took inspiration for his drama from the autobiography by Sergio Bitar, one of Allende’s ministers.

Filmography: The Promised Land (71), Letter From Marusia (76), Alsino and the Condor (82), The Shipwreck (94), The Last Man (05).

This year’s Chilean submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

117 Minutes    

Interests: Oscar Submissions, Narrative Feature, Spanish Language, History.

A darkly comic story of three generations of Polish women and the mysterious young man whose presence sparks a series of surprising events that change all of their lives.

Lankosz’s darkly comic film tells the story of three generations of women living together at the peak of Stalinist terror in 1950s Poland. In the middle of the capital, the foundations of the Palace of Culture are being raised. Sabina has just turned 30 and her mother is trying to find her a husband. Her grandmother has rated the candidates, yet Sabina isn’t interested in any of them. One day, under dramatic circumstances, she meets Bronislaw, a young man with the looks of a peasant movie star. Though Bronislaw is vulgar, Sabina can’t help but fall for him, and thus sets in motion a series of surprising events that will change the lives of all three women and reveal the darker side of their natures.

First Feature Film.

Winner of the Best Film and Audience Awards at the Gdynia Polish Film Festival and the FIPRESCI Critics Award at the Warsaw Film Festival. This year’s Polish submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

Sponsored by the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland, Los Angeles.

101 Minutes    

Interests: Oscar Submissions.