Notes From The Program Director | Week of March 8th, 2024

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Notes From The Program Director

Week of March 8th, 2024

Melissa Tamminga

Rich Text

March 8-14, 2024

Hello, everyone!

This week, the enthralling epic that is Dune: Part 2 continues as does Wim Wenders life-affirming and gentle Oscar-nominee Perfect Days. We’ve also been able to add two more shows of Origin, so happily there are a couple more chances to see Ava DuVernay’s profoundly compelling new film.

I’m also relieved and delighted to say we’ve finally been able to book American Fiction, which will be here with us for at least the next week. It was, until now, the only Best Picture nominee of the full list of ten we had not played, and while my name is not Captain Ahab and American Fiction did not bite off my leg in a previous encounter at sea, I confess booking the film had became something of white whale of an obsession for me. We have, in any case, captured the film at long last! And I think, unlike Moby Dick (sorry, Melville), it will prove to be a crowd-pleaser.

The film is a tremendous feature debut for director Cord Jefferson, and while there are some critics who were disappointed by the film (PFC friend and series curator Brandon Wilson recommends this compelling analysis: "American Fiction and the Wet Eyes of the Sentimentalist" ), it is receiving mostly raves for its smart script and phenomenal performances, not only from the brilliant Jeffrey Wright but the entire cast. The film is a laugh-out-loud funny satire, which is quite a feat, considering it is tackling the thorny subject of "the bias and prejudices in the media and how such an imbalanced relationship with Black creatives places an undue burden on Black artists" (Robert Daniels, Ebert).

The story follows literary novelist Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, a writer who becomes increasingly frustrated as he watches other writers produce bestsellers that he feels offer stereotypical portrayals of “Blackness.” As a sort of joke and under a pseudonym, he writes a spoof of one of these novels, making it rife with outlandish, over-the-top stereotypes. To his horror, the spoof is perceived as a serious work and enthusiastically accepted by the publisher, who launches a campaign to sell the book as an earnest autobiography. And Monk himself is caught in the middle as the supposed subject of the autobiography and finds he must perform “Blackness” for the literary world and, eventually, for Hollywood (in ways white creatives never have to), thus compromising his own sense of authenticity of self. The satire of this component of the movie is quite broad but consistently funny and often hard-hitting.

The film takes on perhaps deeper complexity with the other major component it contains, that is, the family drama. Running parallel to the storyline of Monk’s travails in the literary world is the story of Monk’s family, and there, Monk himself becomes a great deal more complex in terms of how we might perceive him: family members push back on his ideas and reveal him to be a more flawed and human person than he might be able to show to the public, literary world. It is a poignant and often moving element of the film, grounding the broadness of the satire of the main narrative in something more complicated.

In addition to our theatrical-run films, we also have two special events this week: Spirited Away, the penultimate film of our wonderfully popular Ghibli series, and an encore screening of Ava DuVernay’s Origin.

While Studio Ghibli had been making films since 1985 that were much beloved by Japanese audiences and while Ghibli and Disney struck a deal in 1996 to release Ghibli films to American audiences, 2001’s Spirited Away, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, was the Ghibli film that many Americans first became familiar with, and it remains one of the most admired and most well-known of Miyazaki’s films. Winning an Oscar for Best Animated film that year, Spirited Away is a masterpiece of storytelling and artistry. Roger Ebert declared the film, in his 2012 retrospective review, to be “one of the finest of all animated films,” and I cannot disagree. It follows the story of a young heroine, Chihiro, who stumbles upon a world ruled by spirits, and who must rescue her parents (who’ve been turned into pigs by an enchantment) and regain her own name (stolen by a fantastical witch). It is a tale of high adventure, of surprises, delights, and fears around every corner. It is led by one of the pluckiest and most wonderful of cinema’s protagonists, animated with meticulous hand-drawn artistry by some of the finest animators in the world, and set to the music of Joe Hisaishi, whose scores also number among the finest ever composed.

If you’ve never seen a Ghibli film, let this be the place you begin, for while in the U.S., we often mistakenly believe animation is “just for kids,” Spirited Away might just be the film to change your mind. To be sure, Spirited Away will delight younger viewers and give them so much more than most U.S. animated films offer, but it is a film for everyone who loves cinema and the magic it offers. Spirited Away will play just four times: dubbed versions on Saturday, 1:30 pm, 9:45 pm and Sunday, 10 am and the subtitled version on Wednesday, 7:45 pm.

Third Eye -- our staff-curated cult classics -- returns for the March selection from projectionist Mica Della Sala: Pink Flamingos, directed by John Waters. Mica writes, “An obscene film, not for those faint of heart or weak of stomach. I can't say that I particularly enjoy this film, but I believe it is important to cinema and what art can be. Pink Flamingos tests the boundaries of media and makes you question what purpose there is to film, if any at all. I encourage you and your friends to find a list of content warnings before heading into this film, and to test your own boundaries, to stretch your mind and open it to a little bit of filth.” There’s no one quite like John Waters, and the recent news that he has another brand new film in the works, after a years-long hiatus, has the film world all abuzz. In the meantime, join us for the rare chance to see Pink Flamingos on the big screen, Saturday, March 9, 10:00 pm.

Cinema East also returns this month with Taste of Cherry, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s extraordinary film from 1997. Taste of Cherry was my own first encounter with Kiarostami’s work: it completely blew me away and it made me an instant Kiarostami devotee, and I subsequently consumed everything of his I could get my hands on at the time. I’ve never had the chance to see Taste of Cherry on the big screen, however, so this is an extraordinary opportunity. Look out for Cinema East curator Jeff Purdue’s newsletter this Sunday, offering us an introduction to the film, and join us on Tuesday, March 12 7:45 pm for a screening of the film and for an in-person introduction from WWU film professor Eren Odabasi.

Finally, on Thursday, March 14, at 7:45 pm, we have the opportunity to reflect on the life and work of Alexei Navalny with the film Navalny. Navalny won Best Documentary at the Oscars last year--where Alexei Navalny's wife accepted the award on his behalf while he languished, unjustly imprisoned, in Putin's gulag--and so it's perhaps a particularly ironic tragedy that Navalny's recent death at the hands of Putin would come just one year later as we again celebrate the Oscars.

I think we'd all like to believe that films can change the world, but perhaps not so much that they'd stop someone like Putin. Still, films like Navalny raise a defiant fist against those who would crush democracy, and the documentary paints an extraordinary picture of a man who, by defying Putin, knew it would mean his death. And as the film acknowledges, his family knew it, too, and yet they continued to support the mission that would cost a beloved husband and father his life. The film, as such, is a riveting one, with those genuinely life or death stakes.

See you at the movies, friends.

Melissa