Next screening "Le Concert"

"Le Concert (The Concert")

Thursday 13 January 2011

6.30pm pre-screening drinks & nibbles

7.00pm film screens

Opening at #1 at the French cinema box-office, The Concert is pure entertainment - a warm-hearted, joyous story filled with great wit and humanity. The stirring finale set against Tchaikovsky's Concerto is simply magnificent. You'll walk out of this film feeling great.

A celebrated conductor of the Bolshoi Orchestra, was fired 20 years ago for hiring Jewish musicians but reforms his orchestra to play in Paris ...

During the Brezhnev era, Andrei Filipov was a prodigy - the greatest conductor in the Soviet Union and he directed the famous Bolshoi Orchestra. But after refusing to expel his Jewish musicians, including his best friend Sacha, he was fired at the height of his glory. Thirty years later, he is still working at the Bolshoi, but... as a cleaner.When Andrei intercepts a fax from the Theatre du Chatelet inviting the Bolshoi Orchestra to Paris, he comes up with a crazy idea: he'll gather up his old musician friends (now working rag-tag jobs), head to Paris and pretend to be the famed orchestra to play Tchaikovsky's "Violin Concerto." The long-awaited dream to deliver one final performance!



Thursday 13 January 6.30pm



"An intelligent, perfectly mixed blend of comedy and drama that is emotionally satisfying on every level: the music, top-notch performances from a stellar cast and a sharp, incisive script."

Rated M

119 minutes

Language – French

Country of Origin – France/Russia

 

Christmas party and screening "Soul Kitchen"

Reels Members and Guests' Christmas Party

Thursday 2nd December 2010
6.30pm Christmas drinks and special nibbles
7.30pm "Soul Kitchen"

Join us for the Reels @ Wehl Christmas party, where Christmas cheer will abound with champagne, wine and special nibbles. A cheerful, feelgood film about food, love and family will screen afterwards.

Soul Kitchen

Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans… (John Lennon)

Soul Kitchen is about family and friends, about love, trust and loyalty and about the struggle to protect a place called home in an increasingly unpredictable world.

**** Margaret ****1/2 David

WINNER SPECIAL JURY PRIZE VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2009

WINNER GOLDEN GNOME AUDIENCE AWARD, GERMAN FILM FESTIVAL AUSTRALIA 2010

WINNER C.I.C.A.E. PRIZE HAMBURG INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2009

Synopsis

Young restaurant owner Zinos is down on his luck. His girlfriend Nadine has moved to Shanghai, his Soul Kitchen customers are boycutting the new gourmet chef, and he’s having back trouble! Things start looking up when the hip crowd embraces his revamped culinary concept, but that doesn’t mend Zinos’s broken heart. He decides to fly to China for Nadine, leaving the restaurant in the hands of his unreliable ex-con brother Illias. Both decisions turn out disasterous: Illias gambles away the restaurant to a shady real estate agent and Nadine has found a new lover! But brothers Zinos and Illias might still have one last chance to get Soul Kitchen back if they can stop arguing and work together as a team.

"Soul Kitchen is cheerful, wild, colourful … thoroughly enjoyable" David Stratton, At the Movies

"Feelgood comedy" The Age

 Trailer

http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s2875039.htm

Read the full story on the making of Soul Kitchen

http://www.sharmillfilms.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/SOULKITCHEN_PR.pdf

Country of Origin: Germany
Language: German w/English subtitles
Duration: 99 minutes
Rating: MA
Director: Fatih Akin
Featuring: Adam Bousdoukos, Moritz Bleibtreu, Birol Unel

Next screening "Van Dieman's Land"

Thursday 18 November 2010

The true story of Australia's most notorious convict, Alexander Pearce

Hunger is a strange silence

**** David Stratton, ABC's At the Movies

The true story of Australia's most notorious convict, Alexander Pearce and his infamous escape into the beautiful yet brutal Tasmanian wilderness.

A point of no return for convicts banished from their homeland, Van Diemen's Land was a feared and dreaded penal settlement at the end of the earth. The entrance to its remote station of secondary punishment, Macquarie Harbour, was named 'Hell’s Gates' by its prisoners as a reference to the gates of hell in Dante's 'Inferno' - "Abandon all hope ye who enter here" - was plastered at the Harbour's mouth as a warning to all souls sent there.

In 1822, eight convicts escaped Macquarie Harbour in a fateful bid for freedom. This band of Irish, English and Scottish thieves were immediately hurled into chaos as their plan failed and they were thrust into the heart of a harsh and foreboding landscape. With little food or equipment, in a place these immigrants knew little about, they battled a merciless enemy - the unforgiving, barren land - a land where God wields an axe.

Official site

“http://www.vandiemensland-themovie.com/flashsite/

Review & Trailer

http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s2671830.htm



Rated MA  |  Runtime 104 minutes  |  Language English

Next screening "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"

Thursday 21st October 2010  |  6.30pm
A mystery wrapped in a riddle, stamped with a tattoo. 

* * * *  ABC's At the Movies

In 2009 The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was the most successful film in Europe, despite not having a UK or Ireland release. The impetus was the success of Stieg Larsson’s posthumous Millennium Trilogy – The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – which have become a publishing phenomenon, shifting approximately 30 million copies worldwide with little sign of the sales abating.


Synopsis

Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared from a family gathering on the island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger clan. Her body was never found, yet her beloved uncle is convinced it was murder and that the killer is a member of his own tightly knit but dysfunctional family. He employs disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and the tattooed and troubled but resourceful computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) to investigate. When the pair link Harriet’s disappearance to a number of grotesque murders from almost forty years ago, they begin to unravel a dark and appalling family history. But the Vanger’s are a secretive clan, and Blomkvist and Salander are about to find out just how far they are prepared to go to protect themselves.

Everyone has secrets in the "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," a mind-bending and mesmerizing thriller that takes its time unlocking one mystery only to uncover another, all to chilling and immensely satisfying effect. 

BETSY SHARKEY, Film Critic

Rated MA15+
Running Time - 152 mins  |  Language Swedish  |  Country Sweden



Trailer
http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s2844452.htm



Heckle & Jeckle's squawk on 'Bliss'

"Bliss" was not quite blissful, perhaps if it had finished 30 minutes earlier it may have been. That, however, is one opinion, which may not reflect the Reels members, as Bliss received 4 stars in the starbox rating a little bird told me.

What was interesting was the reaction to many of our members after the screening, ‘what was so confronting?’ When it was first released in the 1980s Bliss had people walking out of cinemas, received an R rating and major distributors refused to screen the film. It then became an art-house classic.



We viewers in 2010 didn’t find Bliss confronting at all – well I can’t speak for all the audience – only about a dozen with whom I managed to have a chat. So much in the film was intimated, as opposed to being shown in great detail and today seems rather tame. One of our members thought that Harry was at heart a decent man, who was sucked into the vortex of vacuous human endeavours but then manged to escape the confines of concrete jungles and office cells.

What hasn’t changed over the years are the elements of the story about the human condition – greed, relationships, love, hate, seeking for true meaning of life, destruction of our environment, redemption.

Seeing the movie again after all those years has, however, made me want to go out and re-read the novel.

That's the squawk for now. Original squawkers will be back soon with their entertaining reviews.

Next screening "Bliss - the Director's Cut" & our AGM

'Bliss - the Director's Cut' will be the film for our next Reels event, Thursday 29th July.

Annual General Meeting- prior to the screening we will hold our AGM. All roles on the committee will be vacated and the current committee is welcoming new members. We especially need help with the promotions,
setup, setdown.

AGM 5.30pm Thursday 29th July 2010 at Wehl Street Theatre.

'Bliss - the Director's Cut'
Thursday 29th July 2010

6.30pm pre-screening wine
7.00pm film commences

"Bliss" has been re-released with the Director's Cut. This coincides with Bliss the opera, that has been playing in Australia and has now ventured overseas.

Synopsis

Bliss is the acclaimed movie based on Peter Carey's award-winning novel, Bliss, and the debut film of celebrated director Ray Lawrence (Lantana, Jindabyne)

Following a four-minute death from a heart attack, Harry Joy (Barry Otto) returns to life finding the certainties of his former existence have entirely vanished. The world he previously knew, which saw him drifting amiably through life as a successful advertising executive, has become a literal living Hell. His wife Bettina (Lynette Curran) is in a sordid affair with Harry's business partner (Jeff Truman) and his teenage son (Miles Buchanan) engages in an incestuous relationship with his sister (Gia Carides) - exchanging drugs for sex with her... All around him people are dying of cancer and Harry's advertising agency has taken to promoting carcinogenic products.

Harry is convinced he actually is living in Hell and befriends an angel in the form of ex-prostitute Honey Barbara (Helen Jones) to return him to happiness.

History

To say it was ahead of its time is an understatement – the boldness of its metaphors and the sharpness of its satire were too much for many people in 1985. Indeed, the film was almost stillborn after 400 people walked out during its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival (another 1,600 stayed). No Australian distributor would touch it, especially once it received an ‘R’ classification, because of the depiction of incest between Harry’s children, David and Lucy (Gia Carides). The classification was overturned on appeal and the film eventually opened in the smallest cinema in Sydney, a former newsreel theatre with 130 seats. A couple of glowing reviews helped it to find an audience that kept growing. When the film won the AFI Awards for Best Picture, Best Direction and Best Adapted Screenplay for 1985, Bliss had become an art-house hit. It played for six months in Sydney and around the country.
(source http://aso.gov.au/titles/features/bliss/notes/)

Trailers & further information

The film http://aso.gov.au/titles/features/bliss/

The opera http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2009/s2781757.htm

Heckle & Jeckle's squawk on 'Cold Souls'

HELLO FROM HECKLE AND JECKLE
Well, we really liked last night's weird film. 4 stars from both of us.
It took us a while to work out what was going on - was it of the old genre of the cold war, spies and espionage or was it about people smuggling? However, as it rolled on the penny dropped and we found ourselves very engrossed in the adventures of Paul (no snores from Jeckle this time) and his abandoned soul. What an imaginative and strange story.

To us, Paul was a very likeable character and his facial expressions were marvellous. In fact we liked all the characters except for the Russian "boss" (can't remember his name).

We decided that the moral of the story is to be comfortable with and accept yourself, no matter what your short comings.

Good choice committee. Thank you.
SQUWARK !!

POST SCRIPT
It was great that people hung around afterwards. The film had a lot of people nattering in the foyer, so Heckle hopped around surreptitiously and did some eavesdropping. The most interesting comment overheard was that this film about souls did not mention religion once. Excellent observation.

Heckle also reports that the latest Nova film seen is, I Am Love. In a word - Divine ! The great news is that the committee is negotiating for us to see it, so I will say no more at this stage.

Over and Out for sure this time.
SQUAWK !!