2013-14 season

JODOROWSKY RETROSPECTIVE
EL TOPO & THE HOLY MOUNTAIN

Mexico/USA, 1970/1973: DOUBLE FEATURE
Saturday April 12, 1:45 PM at The Globe.

Cinematheque @ CUFF!
Calgary Cinematheque is a proud partner for this exciting double feature
Tickets: $8 each or  $10 for both

EL TOPO
Mexico, 1970, 125 Minutes, 35mm (Western)
Spanish with English Subtitles
El Topo sparked the Midnight Movie phenomena, catalyzed by an endorsement from John Lennon and Yoko Ono. El Topo is also the most controversial quasi-Western head trip ever made! See Trailer

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN
Mexico/USA, 1973, 113 Minutes, 35mm (Sci-Fi, Drama)
Spanish with English Subtitles
The scandal of the 1973 Cannes Film Festival, The Holy Mountain is a spiritual quest for enlightenment pitting illusion against truth. See Trailer

VISIT CUFF's SITE FOR FULL DETAILS & TICKETS
Tickets available in advance and at the door.
Highly recommended you purchase in advance.

Goldfinger (1964)

Director: Guy Hamilton
April 10, 7:00 PM
The Plaza Theatre | DCP
Part of our 60's Britian Series

Goldfinger (1964) is the third film in the James Bond series and the third to star Sean Connery as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond. Goldfinger was produced by Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman and was the first of four Bond films directed by Guy Hamilton.

Bond is back and his next mission takes him to Fort Knox, where Auric Goldfinger and his henchman are planning to raid Fort Knox and obliterate the world economy. To save the world once again, Bond will need to become friends with Goldfinger, dodge killer hats and avoid Goldfinger's personal pilot, the sexy Pussy Galore. She might not have feelings for Bond, but will 007 help her change her mind? 

$12 General | $10 Student/Senior | $8 Members

WATCH TRAILER

Forbidden Planet  (1956) 

Director: Fred M. Wilcox
March 27 - 7:00 PM
March 29 - Noon
at The Plaza Theatre
Part of our AMAZING SOUNDTRACKS SERIES

$8 Members, $10 Students, $12 General

Forbidden Planet follows a starship crew sent to investigate the silence of a colonized planet, where they arrive to discover two survivors, an obedient robot and a deadly secret. This is the first science fiction film set entirely on another planet in interstellar space, far away from our home here on Earth. 

Forbidden Planet is considered a landmark 1950's science-fiction film with groundbreaking special effects, including the first cinematic use of an entirely electronic musical score by Louis and Bebe Barron. 

STARRING:

Leslie Nielsen, Walter Pidgeon and Anne Francis

FILM SCHOOL GUEST, MARCH 29 - PETER HEMMINGER

WATCH TRAILER

IF.... (1968) 

Director: Lindsay Anderson
March 13 - 7:00 PM at The Plaza Theatre
Part of our 60'S BRITAIN SERIES

$8 Members, $10 Students, $12 General

Rebellious students at an English private school plan a violent revolt against their repressive environment in director Lindsay Anderson's highly acclaimed but extremely controversial drama. Centering on a small group of non-conformists led by Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell - in his first feature), the film paints a distinctly negative picture of the British school system and, by extension, English society. Daring and unpredictable in content and form, If... mixes color and black-and-white cinematography as easily as it mingles satire with dark fantasy...  

STARRING:

Malcolm McDowell (in his first film), David Wood, Richard Warwick, Christine Noonan

WATCH TRAILER

The Ladykillers (1955) with The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (1960)

March 3 - 7:00 PM
Digital | Theatre Junction GRAND
Part of our 60'S BRITAIN SERIES

The Ladykillers (1955) – Music 'Professor' Marcus (Alec Guinness) rents a London flat from sweet old lady Louisa Alexandra Wilberforce (Katie Johnson). He tells her that, from time to time, several other musicians will visit in order to rehearse. In truth, Marcus can't play a note, nor can his visitors: he's a criminal mastermind, holding court over a gang of thieves, including the likes of punkish Harry Robinson (Peter Sellers), homicidal Louis Harvey (Herbert Lom) and punchdrunk 'One-Round' Lawson (Danny Green). The gang uses Marcus's flat as headquarters as they conceive a daring 60,000 pound robbery. After pulling off the job, the gang stuffs the loot in a railway station locker. To avoid detection, Marcus convinces his ever-trusting landlady to pick up the money. Through a series of comic complications, Mrs. Wiberforce returns home with a police escort, with neither the woman nor the bobbies suspecting that she's carrying a fortune in her suitcase. Mistakenly believing that Mrs. Wiberforce has ratted on them, the gang reluctantly plans to eliminate her. The Ladykillers won an Oscar nomination for William Rose's screenplay, and a BFA award for veteran character actress Johnson. – Hal Erickson, Rovi

The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film (1960) – Having worked with Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Graham Stark on the anarchic TV programmes Idiot’s Weekly and A Show Called Fred, Richard Lester was the ideal choice to direct this Oscar-nominated 11 minute short, which unintentionally marked his cinematic debut. The humour may appear slightly dated today but in the early 60s this home movie would have been extraordinarily original and surreal.

Shot over two fun-filled Sunday’s in a field for just £700, using Sellers’s new hand-held Bolex 16mm camera, it boasts a series of simultaneous slapstick vignettes set to Lester’s composed music. Opening with a charwoman in a meadow scrubbing the soil, until passing rambler Spike Milligan sets up is tent on the spot – only to be interrupted by a photographer, the act includes such zany moments as 5 men flying a kite, a portrait painter, a man playing a record on a tree stump, a duel between David Lodge and Sellers, and Graham Stark getting punched on the nose by Leo McKern. – www.britmovie.co.uk

Saturday Night & Sunday Morning

February 13 – 7:00 PM, The Plaza
89 Minutes | 35mm | Director: Karel Reisz 
Part of our 60s Britain Series

The first film to put working-class life on screen – without apology. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning follows one of Britain's angry young men of the 1960s, a hard working, hard drinking factory worker who slaves all week at his mindless job for his modest wages. Come Saturday night, he's off to the pub for a loud and rowdy beer with Brenda, married to a fellow worker. His devil-may-care attitude soon draws a new love interest, Doreen, as Brenda announces she's pregnant. Arthur promises to pay for an abortion, then Brenda learns of and confronts him about Doreen. He denies everything, but it's obvious that their affair is all but over. 

BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING (1965)

Monday, January 6, 2014. 7pm

Theatre Junction | 608 1 St SW, Calgary, AB
107 minutes | B&W | Digital

Based on the mystery novel by Marryam Modell (using the pseudonym Evelyn Piper), Bunny Lake Is Missing is a bizarre study in motherhood, kindness, enigma, and insanity. Ann Lake (Carol Lynley), an American freshly relocated to England, wishes to drop off her daughter Bunny for the girl's first day at a new nursery school. Oddly, Ann cannot locate any teachers or administrators, only the school's disgruntled cook (Lucie Mannheim). She is forced to leave Bunny unsupervised in the building's "first day" room, under the reassurance that the cook will be responsible for the child. When Ann returns in the afternoon, the cook has quit and Bunny Lake is missing…    ~ Aubry Anne D'Arminio, Rovi

QUADROPHENIA (1979)

Hillhurst Sunnyside Community Centre 1320 5 Avenue NW, Tennis Court
Donations greatly appreciated.
English | United Kingdom | 120 minutes | Color | 1.85:1 | English

Set against the soundtrack of The Who’s 1973 mighty concept album Quadrophenia, Phil Daniels plays working-class Jimmy, the drug-induced Mod, who hates his job and is misunderstood by his parents. But by night, he comes alive, with the all-nighters, his pills and his scooter-riding friends. Always on a high, life can’t get any better. Then there’s the Brighton scooter run, where both Mods and Rockers converge, ending in the battle of the cults on Brighton Beach. What goes up must come down, and with Jimmy’s come-down, his life is turned around, and so begins his downward spiral into paranoia and isolation, and the four-faceted mindset: Quadrophenia. -The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema –IMDB, Cinema_Fan

Quadrophenia was made in 1979, at the height of the British punk movement, and the filmmakers contemplated casting a punk musician as the lead, to lend Jimmy an authentic air of rebellion. They considered Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols for the role, but the film’s insurance company refused to allow him to be cast. Rotten apparently would have turned down the role anyway, saying he didn’t want to “live out any of Pete Townshend’s fantasies.” -The Criterion Collection

John Bindon, who plays Harry, the gangster, was just as colorful as his character. Before he was cast in Quadrophenia, Bindon did security for the 1977 Led Zeppelin U.S. tour, and he was tried for murder in 1978. He allegedly had many links to the London underworld and was even mixed up in a scandal involving Princess Margaret. -The Criterion Collection

During the initial shooting of the riot scenes in Brighton, some of the professional extras (the only paid ones in the film) cast to portray policemen were seen laughing as the cameras rolled. Roddam was not pleased, and before the reshoot, he instructed some of the mod extras to really attack the “police.” -The Criterion Collection

Like Father, Like Son

Sunday Sep 22, 1:45 pm
Friday Sep 27, 7:15 pm
At Eau Claire

Albertan Premiere
Japan, 2013, 120 min.

Japanese film master Hirokazu Kore-eda (I Wish, Air Doll) returns with another warm contemporary drama, wherein a rich family and poor family discover that their sons were switched at birth.

Successful architect Ryota Nonomiya (Masaharu Fukuyama) and his wife Midori (Machiko Ono) are celebrating their six-year-old son’s acceptance into a top primary school, only to find out that a mistake from their hospital means that they have someone else’s child, and that their biological son is being raised by another family. The two families are advised to meet, and over the next year, work to exchange the boys to their rightful parents. But Ryota is appalled at the other family’s unkempt, easy-going nature, and seeks to not only keep the son he has raised, but also buy off the other parents to give up legal ownership of his true, biological son.

Inspired by the director’s own recent experience with fatherhood, Like Father, Like Son was nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes. The darker implications of the film are tempered by tender interactions with the children, and the deep empathy that slowly emerges in this exploration of nature versus nurture and the true meaning of parenthood.

Director Hirokazu Kore-Eda
Executive Producer: Yasushi Ogawa, Chiaki Harada, Satomi Odake
Producer: Kaoru Matsuzaki, Hijiri Taguchi
Screenwriter: Hirokazu Kore-Eda
Cinematographer: Mikiya Takimoto
Editor: Hirokazu Kore-Eda
Production Design: Keiko Mitsumatsu
Cast: Masaharu Fukuyama, Machiko Ono, Yoko Maki, Lily Franky

The Killing, (1956) by Stanley Kubrick

Thursday, October 10, 2013. 7pm
The Plaza Theatre, 1133 Kensington Rd NW.

84 minutes | black & white | DCP |

“Stanley Kubrick’s account of an ambitious racetrack robbery is one of Hollywood’s
tautest, twistiest noirs. Aided by a radically time-shuffling narrative, razor-sharp dialogue from pulp novelist Jim Thompson, and a phenomenal cast of character actors, including Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Timothy Carey, Elisha Cook Jr., and Marie Windsor, The Killing is both a jaunty thriller and a cold-blooded punch to the gut. And with its precise tracking shots and gratifying sense of irony, it’s Kubrick to the core.”- Criterion