A unique blend of movies, past and present, often with an emphasis on life in the west - which could mean the new west, the old west, or anything in between- and ‘movies that missed us’- films that are notable but never had a lot of publicity- the CineMatinee series is designed to show area residents that film is a form of art as well as entertainment! At least one film a month for this series has a ‘New Mexico Connection’, drawing from the vast pool of movies made in the state or perhaps featuring a star/story from New Mexico talent. Unless otherwise noted, screening time is 1.30 PM, and admission is $4 for everyone except film society members who are admitted for $1. The theatre is located one half block of the Mesilla Plaza. For more information, please call (575) 524-8287.

Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story

The classic board game that has been played by over a billion people in the last 75 years, Monopoly® is a worldwide cultural phenomenon. Under the Boardwalk: The Monopoly Story is a feature-length documentary that captures fascinating stories about the game and those who play it, with narration provided by Zachary Levi, star of NBC’s Chuck and Disney’s Tangled.

Under the Boardwalk focuses on the Monopoly national and world championships that are held around the world every four years. Leading up to the exciting coronation of a new champion at the most recent World Championship in Las Vegas, the filmmakers follow some of the most colorful players in the game.

In addition to the competitive arena, the game of Monopoly provides a wealth of other interesting stories. Few people realize that the game began as an anti-capitalist political platform thirty years before it evolved into a game about getting rich and took the world by storm in the depths of the Great Depression. This documentary looks at how Monopoly was transformed and why it has become so popular. The game is now sold in over 110 countries around the world in 40 different languages.

The filmmakers investigate the psychology of the game, and game experts let viewers in on the best strategies for winning.

As a cultural phenomenon, Monopoly has a colorful history, including secretly helping WWII POWs escape, influencing movies and television since its inception, and being part of all kinds of interesting world records and trivia. (The longest underwater game is over 72 hours, and the longest continuous game lasted 70 straight days.) And no film about this classic board game would be complete without meeting a few of the quirky collectors of all things Monopoly.  monopolydocumentary.com

Sponsored in part by Toucan Market, Julienne Jewelry, and Let It Go Massage Therapy - Nora Brown.

The Thin Red Line

One of the cinema’s great disappearing acts came to a close with the release of The Thin Red Line in late 1998.

Terrence Malick, the cryptic recluse who withdrew from Hollywood visibility after the release of his visually enthralling masterpiece Days of Heaven (1978), returned to the director’s chair after a 20-year coffee break. Malick’s comeback vehicle is a fascinating choice: a wide-ranging adaptation of a World War II novel by James Jones.

The battle for Guadalcanal Island gives Malick an opportunity to explore nothing less than the nature of life, death, God, and courage.

Let that be a warning to anyone expecting a conventional war flick; Malick proves himself quite capable of mounting an exciting action sequence, but he’s just as likely to meander into pure philosophical moments or simply let the camera contemplate the first steps of a newly birthed tropical bird, the sinister skulk of a crocodile.

This is not especially an actors’ movie—some faces go by so quickly they barely register—but the standouts are bold: Nick Nolte as a career-minded colonel, Elias Koteas as a deeply spiritual captain who tries to protect his men, Ben Chaplin as a G.I. haunted by lyrical memories of his wife. The backbone of the film is the ongoing discussion between a wry sergeant (Sean Penn) and an ethereal, almost holy private (Jim Caviezel). The picture’s sprawl may be a result of Malick’s method of "finding" a film during shooting and editing, and in some ways The Thin Red Line seems vaguely, intriguingly incomplete. Yet it casts a spell like almost nothing else of its time, and Malick’s visionary images are a challenge and a signpost to the rest of his filmmaking generation. amazon.com

Old Gringo

Harriet Winslow (New Mexico resident Jane Fonda) is a school teacher and spinster who lives a stifling and boring life with her widowed mother in 1913. She wants to leave it all behind for adventure in Mexico as governess for a wealthy family.

However, much to her surprise, she arrives to assume her new position and lands right in the middle of Pancho Villa’s revolution. She is used by General Tomas Arroyo (Jimmy Smits) to gain access to the government held mansion.  Meanwhile, the elderly American writer Ambrose Bierce (Gregory Peck) is also in the area. This world-weary author of tales such as "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" has come to Mexico to die. Together, this odd threesome must deal with the past, love, death and the ties that bind them together.

Most of the drama, based on an inventive novel by Carlos Fuentes, is set on the Miranda estate. The general in Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army decides to take a break from battle and ponder the tangled roots of his past as the bastard son of the landowner. Winslow, at first, doesn’t quite know what to make of the dangerous and mysterious circumstances she finds herself in. But she slowly warms to the debates with Arroyo and the friendship that blooms with the cantankerous American journalist, who is simply known as "the Gringo." The two men, the idealistic woman, and their clashing ideas are depicted in this fascinating cross-cultural drama.

Fonda does a fine job portraying the repressed Harriet Winslow, a woman whose yearning for adventure is certainly fulfilled beyond her wildest imaginings. She also comes to see that she cannot save anyone. Jimmy Smits has his moments as the soulful Arroyo who falls in love with the American. But Gregory Peck’s crusty and touching portrait of Ambrose Bierce overshadows these performances. In an especially poignant scene, he tells Harriet that he’s smitten with her and then gives her time to think about a response. The energy that propels The Old Gringo in its magic moments is to be found in the powerful yearning of these characters for some kind of resolution to their lives. spiritualityandpractice.com

NOTE- Immediately following Old Gringo, we will screen the 28 minute Oscar winning 1962 short film, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, based on a story by Ambrose Bierce.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Joyously unhinged and outrageously inventive, O Brother, Where Art Thou? is based roughly on Homer’s "Odyssey," it’s a Depression-era musical about three convicts who escape a prison farm and become overnight musical sensations at the same time they elude a bloodthirsty team of Mississippi lawmen.

George Clooney is the ringleader, a glib smoothie named Ulysses Everett McGill who uses the lure of a bogus hidden treasure to con two of his simple-minded chain-gang buddies (John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson) into escaping with him. On the lam, they encounter a series of obstacles and lucky breaks, bizarre characters and aberrations of nature.

But that just skims the surface. Joel Coen, who directed the film, and Ethan Coen, who produced and co-wrote it with him, are incapable of doing anything simply. They layer their films with references and allusions, crowd them with visual gags and musical cues, animate them with wiggy, cartoonish performances.

Using ‘Odyssey’ as a guideline, ‘Cyclops’ is Big Dan Teague, a one-eyed Bible salesman is played with grumbling menace by John Goodman; the Sirens emerge as mysterious beauties who wash their clothes by a river and seduce the boys with sex and moonshine; and Cassandra, the blind seer, is reborn as an old black man who travels endlessly down a railroad track and forecasts salvation and surprise for the harebrained fugitives.

And the whole thing is bleached with a wonderful soundtrack of bluegrass and country blues, including both vintage recordings and reproductions of period music with musicians like John Hartford, Emmylou Harris, Dr. Ralph Stanley, Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch.

O Brother is so alive with of antic business and cultural and literary winks that one almost misses one of its themes: that our nostalgic regard for a bygone rural Americana—that dreamy, benign world of grit and pluck and harmless eccentricity—is really a smoke screen for the racism and venality that in many ways defined that time and place.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? is great entertainment—a brilliantly goofy stunt with plenty of messages, fun and otherwise.  sfgate.com

Soylent Green

MVFS is pleased to welcome guest host, Charles Horak, the Creative Director of El Paso’s Plaza Classic Film Festival, programmer and host of El Paso’s Film Salon, and the host of ‘On Film’, a weekly radio show on KTEP, NPR of El Paso, as our special guest to introduce and discuss this classic sci-fi film.  Jean Paul Sartre’s phrase, “Hell is other people,” sums up Soylent Green’s main theme almost perfectly.  Soylent Green is a good, solid science-fiction movie, and a little more. It tells the story of New York in the year 2022, when the population has swollen to an unbelievable 80 million, and people live in the streets and line up for their rations of water and Soylent Green. That’s a high-protein foodstuff allegedly made from plankton cultivated in the seas. But is it?

Charlton Heston plays a gritty detective who gets called in when a top official of the Soylent Corp. (Joseph Cotten) is murdered. He gets on a trail that leads to a most unappetizing conclusion—but before he gets there, the movie paints a fascinating and scary picture of population growth run wild. The detective story is mostly just an excuse to keep us interested from one end of the movie to the other. "Soylent Green’s" real achievement is to create a 21st Century world that’s convincing as reality; we somehow don’t feel we’re in a s-f picture. 

There are futuristic details, of course, but even the lush apartments of the Soylent officials look like something you’ll find in Danish Modern the year after next. No, it’s the society itself that’s changed, as people turn into herds and riots are broken up by garbage scoops that toss people into giant trucks.

In the midst of this barbarism, a few people survive intact. Heston plays the dedicated cop who stubbornly refuses to quit investigating the murder. Edward G. Robinson, in his last movie role, is an ancient scholar who remembers how to read books and whose eyes light up when Heston presents him with the first apple, the first onion and the first slice of beef he’s seen in years. And Paula Kelly is the "furniture" in Joseph Cotten‘s apartment: She comes with the key, and with things as grim as they are outside, she’s happy for the air-conditioned splendor of the rich. But she still finds herself able to love, and she loves Heston.
 
The movie looks good. A lot of money apparently was spent on it and perhaps the most impressive scene is one of the last, when Robinson decides the time has come for him to die. He goes to "Home," a gigantic euthanasia center, where he gets 20 minutes of his favorite color (orange) and wraparound movies of the way life used to be on Earth. His acting here is tremendously dignified, and all the more poignant when we realize this death scene was his last. suntimes.com

Deaf Jam

Deaf Jam is a documentary you can’t take your eyes off of. If you do, you’re probably missing the point. American Sign Language (ASL) poetry must be seen, not heard. But instead of opening with an explanation of her film, and what ASL poetry even is, director Judy Lieff lets us figure it out for ourselves. At first, it’s pretty frustrating. Hints are thrown at us through shots of rapid sign language and animated subtitles that are difficult to follow. As the film progresses, the metaphor becomes clear. She’s demonstrating to the "hearing people," as we are called in the film, what it’s like to be thrown into a language we can’t understand. Her technique is effective, and it attaches the viewer to the cause in a way words could not. And once you catch onto the film’s rhythm, it all begins to fall into place.

ASL poetry is spoken word for the deaf. It’s a physical demonstration that combines facial expressions, hand gestures, and even dance to create stories, and those stories are what make Deaf Jam so powerful. In the film, a group of teachers at Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens, N.Y., are assembling an ASL poetry team to compete at poetry slams like Urban Word in New York City. Through poetry, the students reveal their struggles with deafness, their family life, and even their love lives. Lieff pays equal attention to those issues; she doesn’t just narrow in on the sad stories to tug on our heart strings.

And her honesty isn’t coincidental — it’s crucial to the film’s meaning. At their first competition, Lieff muffles and mutes the sound during a passionate spoken performance on stage. She cuts to a shot of the Deaf Jam team and we see one girl sign to her friend, "I’m bored." This candid moment is the first time we are able to understand the gravity of that communication barrier. Their peers at Lexington offer them a culture that they belong to, but outside the school walls, they’re shut out of the rhetoric.

 Aneta, a deaf ASL poet is the film’s protagonist later meets Tahani, a hearing spoken word poet. When the girls begin working together, Tahani reveals she is a Muslim from Palestine. Aneta, a Jewish immigrant, signs back, "Really? I’m from Israel." And that’s that. Though Lieff could have dramatized their relationship, she lets their final performance do the talking. The effect is powerfully symbolic and sets up a rather emotional ending to the film. In other words, keep your tissues nearby.  charlestoncitypaper.com

Sponsored in part by Toucan Market and Julienne Jewelry.

Young Guns

Dressing up in badges and holsters has often been an irresistible temptation for groups of photogenic young actors, and this film, in the tradition of The Long Riders, is happy to watch its cast play cowboy on an elaborate scale. However, Young Guns doesn’t make the mistake of taking itself too seriously. It’s a good-humored exercise, if also a transparent one and it sustains its spirit of fun right up to the point of a final shootout, in which the young heroes are badly outnumbered. Even so, the film manages to end on a cheery note.

Young Guns is, after all, a story of Billy the Kid’s early days, the period in which he first made his reputation as a dangerous outlaw.

Emilio Estevez gives Billy a convincingly humorous side and some of the other actors - most notably Kiefer Sutherland as an amusingly sensitive type and Casey Siemaszko as the film’s resident cut-up - also help to keep things genial. The stars, who also include Lou Diamond Phillips and Charlie Sheen, appear as the Regulator gang, a group originally deputized to help fight crime, until their enthusiasm got out of hand.

As directed by Christopher Cain, Young Guns makes no particular effort to strike a note of historical accuracy. Sequences like the one in which the young outlaws drink a peyote potion are staged in distinctly modern terms, and largely played for laughs. The film’s look is also casually anachronistic, with a showy visual style that suggests an old sepia photograph bursting into life as a rock video. Mr. Cain often relies on hand-held camera work, even for a shot of a pheasant skittering across the prairie. The footage is often so stylishly shadowy and high-contrast that the stars’ faces are hidden by their cowboy hats, with nothing visible but the tip of a nose.

Young Guns is best watched in the playful, none-too-serious spirit in which it was made. Though the film concentrates reverentially on its young stars, it also includes good performances from a few grown-ups, notably Terry O’Quinn as a lawyer and especially Jack Palance as the story’s wild-eyed villain. nytimes.com