Sunday Night Film Club – Boston

How about we break up this streak of mediocre-at-best “Summer Movies” with the original blockbuster:

The peaceful community of Amity island is being terrorised. There is something in the sea that is attacking swimmers. They can no longer enjoy the sea and the sun as they used to, and the spreading fear is affecting the numbers of tourists that are normally attracted to this island. After many attempts the great white shark won’t go away and sheriff Brody, with friends Hooper and Quint decide to go after the shark and kill it.

(Note: We had talked last week about seeing Jaws at the Somerville this week. It turns out that Jaws isn’t showing this week, it’s next, so we’ll likely see it next weekend).

The Old West.. where a lone cowboy leads an uprising against a terror from beyond our world. 1873. Arizona Territory. A stranger with no memory of his past stumbles into the hard desert town of Absolution. The only hint to his history is a mysterious shackle that encircles one wrist. What he discovers is that the people of Absolution don’t welcome strangers, and nobody makes a move on its streets unless ordered to do so by the iron-fisted Colonel Dolarhyde (Ford). It’s a town that lives in fear. But Absolution is about to experience fear it can scarcely comprehend as the desolate city is attacked by marauders from the sky. Screaming down with breathtaking velocity and blinding lights to abduct the helpless one by one, these monsters challenge everything the residents have ever known. Now, the stranger they rejected is their only hope for salvation. As this gunslinger slowly starts to remember who he is and where he’s been, he realizes he holds a secret that could give the town a fighting chance against the alien force. With the help of the elusive traveler Ella (Olivia Wilde), he pulls together a posse comprised of former opponents-townsfolk, Dolarhyde and his boys, outlaws and Apache warriors-all in danger of annihilation. United against a common enemy, they will prepare for an epic showdown for survival.

“After being deemed unfit for military service, Steve Rogers volunteers for a top secret research project that turns him into Captain America, a superhero dedicated to defending America’s ideals.”

From the Oscar-winning team behind Man On Wire comes the story of Nim, the chimpanzee who in the 1970s became the focus of a landmark experiment which aimed to show that an ape could learn to communicate with language if raised and nurtured like a human child. Following Nim’s extraordinary journey through human society, and the enduring impact he makes on the people he meets along the way, the film is an unflinching and unsentimental biography of an animal we tried to make human. What we learn about his true nature – and indeed our own – is comic, revealing and profoundly unsettling.

Nick (Jason Bateman), Dale (Charlie Day) and Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) are workers who would like nothing better than to grind their oppressive employers into the dirt. Quitting their jobs is not an option, so — fueled by alcohol and dubious advice from a shady ex-convict (Jamie Foxx) — the men devise a complex and seemingly foolproof plan to permanently rid themselves of their terrible bosses. The problem is, any plan is only as clever as the brains behind it.

East Africa during World War I: after British missionary Robert Morley dies in the wake of a German attack, his prissy spinster sister Rose (Hepburn) hitches a ride on the African Queen, a rundown riverboat operated by gin-sodden Canadian Charlie Allnut (Bogart) who later finds shes got a formidable agenda: whip up a few homemade torpedoes to get revenge on a German gunboat floating on a lake, with only a hair-raising ride down the rapids, an enemy fort, and Deutsch officer Theodore Bikels noose in the way. Shot on location in the Belgian Congo and Uganda by Technicolor specialist par excellence Jack Cardiff (The Red Shoes), THE AFRICAN QUEEN had its own set of off-camera adventures: Mrs. Bogie, Lauren Bacall, came along on the trip as probably the most glamorous waitress in the world; the boat sank in the river and had to be salvaged; Huston kept the camera turning when a hippo nearly capsized it during the final scene; and virtually the entire crew came down with dysentery, except for the strictly whiskey-imbibing Huston and Bogart. Oscar nominations to Hepburn, Huston, and screenplay with Bogart winning for Best Actor, beating out Fredric March, Montgomery Clift, and Marlon Brandos Stanley Kowalski. Seen for decades only in washed-out prints (the original 3-strip Technicolor negatives had long since shrunk), THE AFRICAN QUEEN, in this new 35mm restoration, once again looks magnificent, with deep, burnished browns and yellows and a level of detail that picks out every drop of sweat on Bogarts brow (Dave Kehr). Restored by ITV Global Entertainment and Paramount Pictures. notes adapted from the Film Forum, NYC

“Fifteen-year-old Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) has two big ambitions: to save his parents’ marriage via carefully plotted intervention and to lose his virginity before his next birthday. Worried that his mom (Sally Hawkins) is having an affair with New Age weirdo Graham Purvis (Paddy Considine), Oliver monitors his parents’ sex life by charting the dimmer switch in their bedroom. He also forges suggestive love letters from his mom to dad. Meanwhile, Oliver attempts to woo his classmate, Jordana (Yasmin Paige), a self-professed pyromaniac who supervises his journal writingespecially the bits about her. When necessary, she orders him to cross things out. Based on Joe Dunthorne’s acclaimed novel, Submarine is a captivating coming-of-age story with an offbeat edge.”

For his new film, master director Patricio GuzmA!n (The Battle of Chile, The Pinochet Case) travels 10,000 feet above sea level to the driest place on earth, Chileas Atacama Desert. There, atop the mountains where the sky is so translucent that telescopes can see right to the boundaries of the universe, astronomers from all over the world gather to observe the stars. Meanwhile, at the base of the mountains, the harsh heat of the sun preserves secrets from the past: the remains of Pre-Columbian mummies; 19th-century explorers and miners; and the remains of political prisoners adisappeareda by the Chilean army in the 1970s. So it happens that, while astronomers examine the most distant and oldest galaxies above, women, surviving relatives of the disappeared, search below for the remains of their loved ones.

From Terrence Malick, the acclaimed director of Badlands, Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, comes The Tree of Life, an impressionistic story of a Midwestern family in the 1950s. The film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (Brad Pitt). Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn) finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith. Through Malick’s signature imagery, we see how both brute nature and spiritual grace shape not only our lives as individuals and families, but all life. Winner of the Palme d’Or (top honors) at this year’s Cannes International Film Festival.