SpongeBob Squarepants Live Spectacular!
Sunday, July 24 – 4:00 & 7:00 PM

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? SpongeBob Squarepants! Bikini Bottom’s most famous residents hit our stage for two different LIVE events – one for the little kids and one for the big kids. See the entire cast as they perform one of their favourite episodes followed by a lively panel discussion and Q&A. The family fun kicks off at 4:00p.m. followed by a show for just the big kids (ages 13 to 103) at 7:00p.m. Enjoy a day of nautical nonsense with the voice behind SpongeBob, Tom Kenny, and other members of the cast!

Tickets for “SpongeBob Squarepants Live Spectacular!” are $29.50 & $39.50 (plus taxes and service charges). This event is part of Festival Loto-Québec Just For Laughs.

For Tickets Call:
Admission (514) 790-1245
http://www.admission.com

He’s Just Not That Into You Live!
Wednesday, July 20 & Thursday, July 21 – 9:30 PM

Comedian and consultant for Sex and the City Greg Behrendt and Sex and the City writer Liz Tuccillo, authors of the NY Times #1 Best Seller, tell the hilarious story of how this heartfelt book came to be and how it changed the rules of dating for women all over the world. Come prepared to laugh and have your relationship questions answered at the Q&A following the performance.

Tickets for “He’s Just Not That Into You Live!” are $32.50 (plus taxes and service charges). This event is part of Festival Loto-Québec Just For Laughs.

For Tickets Call:
Admission (514) 790-1245
http://www.admission.com

Secret Schoolyard Films is curating a film screening at Zeke’s Gallery 3955 Saint Laurent, Wednesday July 13th at 9pm. The screening will showcase work by local filmmakers such as Nick Martin, Galit Seifan, Karina Garcia, Robbie Purdon and Jonathan Rafman.

At FANTASIA the other evening I ran into some young friends of mine, avid cinephiles every one, and they were uniformly shocked to hear that I intended to meander home to get something to eat instead of attending the final screening of LOW LIFE, the latest film by important Korean writer/director Im Kwon-taek. For what is food-based sustenance compared with the cinematic variety? Well, with all due respect to Important Films, a good meal would have been more satisfying. Even my co-viewers—those who had assured me that LOW LIFE Could Not Be Missed—had to admit that it was rather uninspiring. My friend deemed it basically a revisiting of CASINO, transplanted to Korea in the tumultuous decades post WWII; I was thinking much the same, though it must be said that LOW LIFE is not as derivative as all that. But, despite many energetic and bracing scenes, the epic nature of the story—the sort-of rise and sort-of fall of an “honourable” thug, set against the historical fluxes that alternately help and hinder him—suffers from the biopic syndrome of too much, too glancingly touched upon.

LOW LIFE just felt far too stuffy and irrelevant after the Korean romantic comedy that screened just before, PLEASE TEACH ME ENGLISH (dir. Kim Sung-su), a remarkably winning little number that is giddy and goofy in all the right ways. The ingénue is pretty but bespectacled. A common trope to be sure, however, unlike many an American teen-nerd-girl-gets-makeover genre flick, wherein the path from geek to chic is an insultingly short one (“ugly duckling” takes off glasses, lets down hair and VOILA! she’s a stunner), this gal is truly an awkward dork—all the while that I was growing to love her I also wanted to smack some self-possession into her. The stakes are surprisingly high in a romantic comedy that features a triad of annoyingly self-centered and/or hopelessly clueless leads, and actually manages to make them all lovable. The film is jam-packed with fantasy scenarios, all cute references to a hyper-mediated daily life that, contrary to prevailing opinion, here seems to actually encourage the flowering of a romantic imagination. So adorable that describing it—as one inevitably must—as postmodern doesn’t hurt the film one bit.

(Last scheduled screening is today, Tuesday July 12, 7:35 at the De Seve Theatre.)

First night of the film fest that seems to last all summer—FANTASIA. A late start, which I’ve been told is classic Fantasia shtick, but such tardiness works particularly well with my personal schedule, so I’m not complaining. It means I actually made it into the “6:30” screening of ASHURA, with some time to spare. Show was sold out and the Hall theatre packed, but thankfully a friend/colleague rescued me from an especially rickety seat off in the corner wedged between strangers. (Oh, I want to officially state that my friend was robbed of the door prize—he answered the skill-testing question a good 5 mins. before someone closer to the front finally did. Our section was outraged. Well, by that I mean that a few of us meekly called out, “Hey! He already said that!”)

But on to the movie:

ASHURA is big, splendid, fantastical, sparkly, goth, kabuki-informed, myth-inspired, sword-fight driven, period extravaganza, at turns emotionally over-wrought and knowingly, comically cheesy. But of course it all comes down to love. The star-crossed lovers are that and then some; what’s worse, they’re demon-crossed. This is one of those films wherein the virgin—so troubled and pure, so gamine and sportive—can lick the blood from her about-to-be-lover’s wound, and yet seem no less virginal. The final climax is a long time in coming: I kept thinking they were setting us up for a sequel before I realized that, no, we were in it for the long-haul this time around.

Nonetheless, I was glad I stuck around to see how those crazy kids sorted out their particular cosmic brand of demon-slayer devoted to newly-minted-uber-demon-goddess (who seems determined to have him killed for, well, for popping her cherry, basically) problems. We’ve all been there…

• For any one interested, ASHURA was only scheduled for the opening night, but it seems that it will be screened for the second time today, Friday July 8—at 5:15…or did the sign say 5:45? Sorry I don’t recall with certainty, but it’s sometime in the 1700 hour block…

ASHURA’S web site: http://www.ashurajo.com/

Fantasia’s opening night party is going to be at S.A.T. (1195 Boul St. Laurent). Doors open at 9. Tickets are 9 dollars at the door. Shows are going to start around 11. Shows? Live performances by Poxy, D.J. Frigid & Gentle Bake-mono + DJ XL5 + DJ Chevy Van. Visuals by Pillow & Mademoiselle.

The 2005 edition of the FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL kicks off this Thursday night at 6:30 pm with two screenings at the Hall Theatre:

6:30 ASHURA (dir Yojiro Takita) 2 hours.

Followed by CRYING FIST (dir. Ryoo Seung-wan) at 9pm (2 hours 14 minutes).

Well, clearly, this weekend it’s going to be Spielberg’s second installment into what is shaping up to be a trilogy of post 9/11 exploits of the pop-unconscious. We got the airport safety reclamation project THE TERMINAL in 2004, and now, in every theatre you can find, we have the WAR OF THE WORLDS, a sobering study of the United States’ lack of military preparedness in the event of intergalactic warfare. And, coming soon, we’ll see what the IMDb is calling UNTITLED 1972 MUNICH OLYMPICS PROJECT: Spielberg’s Tony Kushner scripted exploration of guilt-ridden Mossad hitmen going after the Palestinian terrorists who murdered Israeli athletes at the ’72 Munich games.

There’s a good NY Times article that says all this even better (you need to suffer the indignity of registering for free):

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/01/movies/01spie.html

But just to maintain the credibility of this blog: if you’ve never seen J.P. Melville’s LE CERCLE ROUGE, this weekend you get a rare chance at Cinema du Parc. Melville is most famous for BOB LE FLAMBEUR, which suffered a dopey yet fitfully entertaining remake by Neil Jordan called THE GOOD THIEF. Expect hard-boiled dialogue by an aristocratic thief, witty cinematography, and ironic Americanisms of the sort that only a French Americaphile like Melville can pull off. See it before John Woo remakes it.

Le Cercle rouge [2:20]
Fri, Sat, Sun, Thu: 5:00
Mon, Wed: 8:30
Tue: 7:00

Last year, at around this time, a number of Synoptique staffers were involved with the 3rd INTERNATIONAL WOMEN AND THE SILENT SCREEN CONGRESS.

http://cinema.concordia.ca/wscreen

A special SYNOPTIQUE edition followed that September, featuring dazzling recreations of panel presentations given by silent cinema gurus Tom Gunning, Christine Gledhill, and Concordia professor Rosanna Maule.

http://articles.synoptique.ca/wscreen

So, now, we’re more than happy to announce information on the 4th international WSCREEN conference, held next year in sunny Guadalajara, Mexico:

Please join us for the Fourth International Women and the Silent Screen Conference which will be held at the University of Guadalajara in the beautiful colonial city of Guadalajara, Mexico June 7 through June 10, 2006. Following the first Women and the Silent Screen Conference, held in Utrecht in 1999, the second in Santa Cruz, CA in 2001, and the third in Montreal in 2004, the Guadalajara conference will include scholarly panels and workshops that advance research on historical and theoretical issues related to women and silent cinema from 1898 through 1937. The Call for Papers in English and Spanish will be published shortly.

The WWSC co-directors

Patricia Torres San Martin
University of Guadalajara

Joanne Hershfield
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill