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Films in aid of the
Survivors of the Tsunami in the Indian Ocean:

A World Cinema special event, Organizer&Host: Dr. B. F. Samuel.

Film Series Focus Shifts To Aiding Iran Quake Victims 04-JAN-2004*original site not available!
Film Series Focus Shifts To Aiding Iran Quake Victims 04-JAN-2004

On Monday: 03-January-2005,
Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday: 04-/05-/06-January-2005,
in Stanley Coulter Hall #239 [SC], at 19:00,
640 Oval Drive on the university campus.
Parking is available in University Street Parking Garage [PGU].
Enter through the west door (closest to the Class of 1950 Hall [CL50]).
AND
On Saturday: 08-January-2005,
West Lafayette Public Library , at 14:00,
208 W Columbia Street, @ West Lafayette, (765) 743-2261,

Viewings will begin at 19:00/14:00 promptly and a discussion will follow immediately after.

Process for Donations
Films for the Fund Raiser

Previous Film Themese&Seasons: Film Critics
Previous Film Themese&Seasons: Film Critics

Process for Donations

Anyone wishing to donate funds should make cheques payable to: “Tsunami Relief Fund (Account # 128319)”.

Please send the cheques to: OR, deposit the cheques in: any branch of Purdue Employees Federal Credit Union,
within the Greater Lafayette [Indiana, US] area.

If anyone needs to give a donation through an electronic transfer, the routing number for PEFCU is: Rt # 2749 76067.

PEFCU has agreed to supervise the process and have donated their services to wire the transfer of the funds from this account (in four equal parts) directly to:

• The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies,
• Catholic Relief Services,
• World Vision, and
• American Jewish World Service.
  

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Films for the Fund Raiser

Previous Film Themese&Seasons: Film Critics
Previous Film Themese&Seasons: Film Critics

Films for the Fund Raiser

#1 of 3: Monday: 03-January-2005, at 19:00, in Stanley Coulter Hall #239:
BEYOND BORDERS
(2003) US/GERMANY, (in English/Amharic/Khmer/Chechen mix).
Director: Martin Campbell. (2 hr. 06 min.) 3 bones/4.
“Film Grammar” suggests that the visuals are informing us that the romance between the two leads is the real subject of the film. However, the film has good intentions and wants to call our attention (as armchair viewers) to the plight of refugees, in various parts of the world. Of course, there is more than one way to send a message, and maybe this film (beautifully shot in three locations) will affect audiences that wouldn’t see or understand a more truthful portrait of refugees. The lead female, Angelina Jolie, is personally involved in efforts to help refugees and isn’t simply dining out on a fashionable cause. She is an official ambassador of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The story follows an idealist British doctor working without any agency support in three different scenarios: Ethiopia (filmed in Botswana), Cambodia or Kampuchea (filmed in Thailand), and Chechnya (filmed in Montreal). For us, the pictures are as real as we will ever see in any non-documentary film, and is, therefore, a good reflection of the different situations that refugees find themselves.

ANGELS IN AMERICA?
A (three-day) CINEMATIC FORUM on the
Political & Religious Issues of Power, Love, Death, Guilt, Forgiveness, & Life!
#2 of 3: Tuesday+Wednesday+Thursday: 04-+05-+06-January-2005, at 19:00, in Stanley Coulter Hall #239:
ANGELS IN AMERICA
(2003) US.
Director: Mike Nichols; Screenplay: Tony Kushner, based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning play. (1 hr. 00 min. + 1 hr. 00 min. x 3 nights = 6 hours) 4 bones/4.

All the principal actors were nominated for every acting award, and the director was honored likewise. Won eleven 2004 Emmy Awards, and nominated for another ten. Won five 2004 Golden Globes, and nominated for another two. This HBO mini-series dominated this year’s Emmys, and rightfully so! From its source material to its scope, its cast, its length, and its structure, the mini-series boldly announces itself as one for the ages. Thanks to a phenomenal cast, Mike Nichols’ sensitive direction, and Tony Kushner’s script, it generally achieves its generation-defining ambitions. Of course, it helps that the generation it aspires to define has already passed, which lends Kushner’s work an elegiac quality fitting its delicately wrought portrayal of gay America wrestling with a plague of biblical proportions. The story runs from 1985 to 1990 and takes in a broad sweep of characters, but not nearly as many as other writers would have packed in, simply to give a broader demographic sampling. Central to the film is Prior Walter (Justin Kirk), a 30-year-old AIDS sufferer whose boyfriend Louis (Ben Shenkman) leaves him in an astonishingly heartless manner, only to take up soon after with recently uncloseted U.S. attorney Joe Pitt (Patrick Wilson). Left mostly to his own devices, with only his friend Belize (Jeffery Wright) to help, as Walter gets sicker, he begins to have visions of an angel (Emma Thompson, odd, arrogant and completely captivating), determined to make him a prophet, claiming that God has deserted the world and that humans are at fault.

Part I (consisting of the first three chapters) is titled Millennium Approaches, and Part II (consisting of the last three chapters) is titled Perestroika. Kushner adapts the series from his two-part Pulitzer-winning play. It charts the nation’s unsteady struggle through the onset of the ’80s AIDS crisis, through the interlocking stories of a Mormon couple torn asunder by the husband’s closeted homosexuality, a guilt-stricken legal flunky who leaves his AIDS-stricken partner, and the last days of arch-conservative Roy Cohn (played with gusto by Al Pacino). The infamous lawyer never let his status as a gay Jew keep him from working tirelessly against the interests of both groups. Haunted by the sly, taunting ghost of executed spy Ethel Rosenberg (Meryl Streep), Cohn isn’t about to go gently into that good night, especially when played by a ham as well-seasoned as Pacino. Kushner’s ironic and sincere, ambitious and unafraid words soar over a plague-ravaged but hopeful country, achieving the grace and sublime transcendence at the heart of Nichols’ beautifully realized socio-political fable.

The most complex and intriguing character in this play is Roy Cohn, a real-life anti-Communist zealot whose proudest achievement was ensuring that Ethel Rosenberg was executed for treason, instead of a life sentence. However, he was also a gay man who loathed his own kind. In one scene riveting in its cold-blooded logic and near-insane denial, Cohn explains to his doctor, “I am not a homosexual, I am a man who has sex with men, because a homosexual could not get the president on the phone (or, “Better, the president’s wife”), but Roy Cohn can. Therefore, Roy Cohn is not a homosexual.” Then he bullies the doctor into diagnosing him with liver cancer instead of what he actually has, AIDS. There are many “Big Issues” being thrown around in the mini-series like confetti -- AIDS, the Reagan years, the Rosenberg case, Mormonism, the fate and promise of America, acceptance of homosexuals in society, religious prophecy -- it comes as no surprise that although one begins to expect a grand unification theory to be presented, a clear-cut one never seems to be proffered. Rather, it is content with a number of small conclusions via short scenarios, that don’t seem to be more than ten minutes before the topics change. For a long series, this seems to work in that it has something for everyone, at least if one is knowledgeable about McCarthyism, the Rosenberg episode, the Reagan-era AIDS, and gays being used as scapegoats for the religious right! The series is also littered throughout with scraps of genius and joy, especially the lyrical interludes featuring Harper Pitt. A Mormon already teetering on the verge of nervous collapse before finding out that her husband Joe is gay, but who escapes for a time afterward into a full-fledged fantasy world, complete with an imaginary angelic travel agent who can take her anywhere she wants. Her performance is pitch-perfect and makes her every scene count, regardless of how little she ultimately fits in to the big picture of the film.

#3 of 3: Saturday: 08-January-2005, at 14:00, in West Lafayette Public Library:
TO END ALL WARS
(2001) UK/THAILAND/US, (in Scottish accent and Japanese.
Director: David L. Cunningham; Writer: Ronald Bass. (2 hr. 05 min.) 3 bones & half/4.
Very closely based on his (1962) book Through the Valley of the Kwai, released as Miracle on the River Kwai, the film chronicles the experiences of Ernest Gordon, who survives as a PoW building the Burma-Siam Railway during WWII under the Japanese. He emerges with a miraculous weltanschauung on the capacity of human survival and love for one’s fellow human without jingoism or patriotism. The director and the script writer include the reunification of the author and the young Japanese intellectual (who worked in the camp as a translator) in the film, but the Scotsman (who ended up as the Dean of Chapel of Princeton University) did not see the release of the film. This is a story of moral character (in the ilk of Nelson Mandela, Bishop Tutu, and Jimmy Carter) which few people ever achieve; and one could hope that GW might experience a similar transformation!

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Previous Film Themese&Seasons: Film Critics
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