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OPENING WEEK
T he opening week lineup is intended to pro
vide a taste of the kind of films Cine will
give Athenians an opportunity to see and talk
about: foreign gems, purposeful documentaries,
avant-garde cinematic experimentation, first runs
of films found at international festivals by the
theater's intrepid and cinematically voracious ad
visors, and independent masterpieces both new
and old, which only make it to the big screen
in places where an accountant's calculations
suggest a sufficient population of adventurous
moviegoers to justify it. The following four films
will be shown for the opening week festivities.
Cine cranks up its regular rotation on Friday, Apr.
6, so look for a preview in the Apr. 4 Flagpole.
Thereafter, keep your eyes on Flagpole’s Movie
Dope for show times and films to come.
Ma+uiay, Ap/ul 2
6:30 p.m. & 9:30 p.m.
ARMY OF SHADOWS (NR) 1969. Adapted
from Joseph Kessel's novel of the same name and
called the best film on the Resistance in numer
ous French periodicals. Army of Shadows, nearly
40 years after it debuted in its country of origin,
finally saw an official stateside release in a very
select coterie of theaters last year. The third and
final of director Jean-Pierre Melville's cinematic
ruminations on the Free French, a group who de
fied the Nazis and puppet Vichy regime during
the Second World War and counted among its
membership a still quite young Melville himself—
the veiled identities, intrepid escapes and brutal
comeuppances—all suggest seat-gripping thriller.
Yet Melville, perhaps best known for his gangster
movies, coats the Gestapo beatings and furtive
operations with a discomfiting veneer of the icy
tedium, bloody futility and moral ambiguity of
guerrilla warfare. Garnering numerous awards
over the past years, including the New York Film
Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Film in 2006,
the film follows a group of Resistance fight
ers as they progress through a series of arrests,
betrayals, revenge-killings, nick-of-time flights
and cunning plots, while always dreading the
uncertainty of the next knock at the door. Several
decades on, the film's statements on the harrow
ing personal cost of taking up arms against tyr
anny and the extent to which one man's freedom
fighter is another man's terrorist retain a chilling
relevance. Cine will screen a 35 mm print recently
restored under the direction of the film's cinema
tographer Pierre Lhomme. Dr. Richard Neupert,
a professor at the University of Georgia and the
author and translator of several books about the
cinematic arts, will give an introduction to Army
of Shadows before both screenings and lead dis
cussion about the film after the first screening.
Dr. Neupert is perhaps best known for his critical
and historical examinations of French New Wave,
an artistic movement that included Melville and
against which many of his later films are often
seen as a reaction.
^lue&ctcuf,, Apul 3
6:30 p.m. & 8:45 p.m.
SUm NABANA (NR) 2003. Though Suite
Habana features barely a word of actual dialogue
and almost no discernible plot in the traditional
sense, the movie and director Fernando Perez
are decorated with a general's cnest of awards
from both their native Cuba and esteemed film
festivals across the globe. Following a day in the
life of 10 ordinary citizens of the capitol, from a
mentally handicapped child to a septuagenarian
peanut vendor, the assiduously crafted film plays,
as its title suggests, like a kind of symphonic
poetry—a lyrical paean to a multifarious and oft-
ignored city of contradictions. Critics have called
this intricate tapestry of Cuban music and its ka
leidoscopic variety of life the best film from the
island nation in decades and a hopeful harbinger
of a new class of Cuban cinema. What is perhaps
most notable about the lovingly rendered por
traits is the film's utter refusal to devolve into
the populist political screed that Perez's methods
might suggest at first blush. Rather, the film
remains stalwartly defiant in its dedication to
a visually and aurally stunning rendering of the
scarred but resilient city and her inhabitants.
Dr. Jos£ Alvarez, a distinguished UGA professor
and the author of numerous books and articles
on modem Cuban life, literature and culture, will
provide an introduction to the film before both
screenings and lead discussion about it after the
early show.
WedtiPAdcuf,, Ap/ul 4
6:30 p.m. 8. 9:30 p.m.
THE PLAYER (R) 1992. Though he was nomi
nated for five Academy Awards, the only award
Robert Altman ever received from the Academy
was the honorary Oscar he took home shortly
before his death in 2006. Part of the reason for
the constant stream of near-misses was likely
the tense relationship be had with Hollywood
itself, which vacillated between shunning him
and respecting him for the critical darling he
often was, for most of his 50-year career in the
business. One of those nominations was for The
Player, a needling but wickedly funny satire of
the Hollywood movie business in which quality
is subjugated to the quantity of cash to be made
and artists are merely a commodity. Adapted by
Edgar Award-winner Michael Tolkin from his novel
of the same name, The Player tells the story of
a somehow not entirely repugnant movie execu
tive by the name of Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins)
who, in addition to trying to unload an unsuit
able lover, save his notoriously high-turnover
job from a grippy upstart, and avoid being killed
by a writer who he "never got back to," finds
himself at the center of a murder investigation
▲T CINE
and hopelessly infatuated with the dead man's
probably Icelandic girl. Shot in and around the
studios of Hollywood, the film also features cam
eos from no fewer than 60 major movie figures
including Harry Belafonte, John Cusack, Cher,
Jack Lemmon, Burt Reynolds and Julia Roberts.
Heralding Altman's return from what many critics
called his decade in the wilderness, The Player
uses the bloodless machinations and grinding
one-upmanship that constantly frustrated Altman
as sublime comedic fodder without ever straying
into vindictive harangue. The incisive and mas
terfully-crafted script, unobtrusive but astonish
ing camera work (the film opens with a single,
continuous eight-minute shot, paying homage
to the cinematography of Welles and Hitchcock,
both of whom are mentioned during it), and the
genial naturalism of the performances earned
him best directing plaudits at BAFTA and Cannes,
two Golden Globes, and a dozen other awards.
Head of the UGA Drama Department's Dramatic
Media Area, prolific film scholar, former Fulbright
lecturer and filmmaker in his own right, Charles
Eidsvik, will introduce the film before the early
and late show and guide the discussion that fol
lows the first screening.
A pul 5
6:30 p.m. & 8:45 p.m.
IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS (NR) 2006. Shot over
two years in Iraq with a handheld Panasonic HD
camcorder, Iraq in Fragments is a three-part opus
documenting the varying responses of ordinary
Iraqis to the American invasion and occupa
tion. The film laces together the story of an
11-year-old boy, who, after being left fatherless
by Hussein's regime, is forced to abandon school
ing to work in an auto-repair shop with striking
portraits of militant Shiite Sadrists clamoring to
institute Sharia law and rural Kurds finally able
to exercise a modicum of freedom over their
own lives. Narrated in part by the very people it
depicts, the film presents such a vivid portrait of
the successes and monumental failures of Iraqi
society under the constant threat of American
and insurgent guns that it was nominated for
in Oscar in 2006 and took home three awards
from its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival,
including Best Director for the film's mastermind
James Longley. Not only has the visually harrow
ing and emotionally wrenching film been nearly
unanimously dubbed the finest in the crowded
field of Iraq War documentaries, but some crit
ics have gone so far as to describe its "poetic
agitation" the finest in the history of documen
tary film. Even so, the film has unfortunately
been shown in no more than a few dozen cities
across the United States in the year-plus since
its debut. Sundance Fellow and Peabody Award
winning producer and director Senain Kheshgi
will introduce the film at both screenings and
guide discussion of the film after the early show
ing. Her upcoming documentary film Project
Kashmir will depict a pair of American expats
from Pakistan and India, Ms. Kheshgi being the
former, who visit Kashmir to capture the stories
of those who live in the disputed territory.
Brandon Waddell
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MARCH 28,2007-FLAGPOLE.COM 17