MOVIES ::: screenings 12.11.2011

starting at h.19:00

City of Men (Cidade dos Homens) / Kátia LUND, Fernando MEIRELLES
City of God tells the story about the origins of organized drug dealing in the hillside communities in Rio de Janeiro. The drug dealers here are the theme of the movie, in the background we see the communities learning to deal with this new “order”. City of Men could be thought of as being the other side of his story. It is the story about the different aspects of living in one of these communities, in this case the issue being paternity or the breaking up of the family cell, and drug dealing lies in the background.


Umshini Wam (Bring me my machine gun) / Harmony KORINE
Big dreams, big blunts, big rims, and big guns. It’s time to get gangsta gangsta. Ninja and Yo Landi are wheelchair-bound lovers and real gangstas. They live in the outskirts of civilization, they shoot guns for fun, smoke massive joints and sleep in the woods. They don’t have any bling to show for their gangsta cred but the world deserves to know who they are. They’re tramps, and their wheels are starting to fall off.
Ninja become despondent over their vagabond existence but Yo Landi won’t let him give up. What ensues is straight up gangsta mayhem, the realist of the real, true gangsta shit.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMVNjMF1Suo


Play time / Jacques TATI
The capitalist society’s obsession with material goods, superficial societial relations, and the cold, impractical nature of technology and design: Playtime is a humorous and lucid comment on global International Style architecture.
“Play Time is a film justly celebrated for its amazing sets. Every scene is shot in a specially constructed mock-up of a hyper-modern Paris, all flat surfaces, gleaming floors and comfortless furniture. Much of this is realised using forced perspective (to make nearby buildings seem further away and thus larger) and photographed façades standing in for the fronts of some structures (and thus offering no reflections in their mirrored panels. The cast of extras is filled out with 2D cut-outs of large photographs of people. All of this artifice contributes to the sense of a city designed for aesthetic power and ill-suited for its human inhabitants. People are reduced to little atoms in a vast network of cubicles, box-shaped apartments, glass walls, elevators, pavements and identikit walkways.” Dan North http://drnorth.wordpress.com/2008/11/12/jacques-tatis-playtime-modern-life-is-noisy/