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SUMMER SERIES
FILM NOIR
This annual summer series celebrates Film Noir in all its stylish, seductive and cynical glories, and has become one of the most popular events on our calendar. Fifteen dark gems from the genre's vintage early-1940s-to-late-1950s heyday screens over 13 sultry nights. Viewers are cautioned to expect appalling amounts of crime, corruption and chaos, venality and greed, melancholy and bitterness, moral disorientation, female treachery, male disenchantment and sexual stupidity, world-weary fatalism, and postwar pessimism. All served up in a dangerous delirium of head-spinning hard-as-nails dialogue and eye-popping Expressionist style.
PLUS! — New limited edition Film Noir T-shirts featuring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake are now available at the Box Office and on-line.
August 11-September 2. More info.
retrospective
Kurosawa Centennial — Final Screenings
Pacific Cinematheque's comprehensive retrospective on the cinema of Akira Kurosawa ends soon — and we've saved some of the best for last. Closing highlights include: Kagemusha, a sumptuous, spectacular jidai-geki co-produced by George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola; Dersu Uzala, a made-in-Siberia epic that won the 1975 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film; Ran, Kurosawa's thrilling re-telling of King Lear, presented in a new 35mm print; and Madadayo, the master's final feature, based on the life and work of Japanese author
Hyakken Uchida.
Ends August 10. More info.
An exploitation film from the land of Anne Murray, Mr. Dressup, and Medicare? It's true! Canadian Ivan Reitman directed Hollywood comedies like Ghostbusters (1984), Meatballs (1979), and Kindergarten Cop (1990) — but few know that his 1973 horror film, Cannibal Girls, was Canada's first international b-movie hit. Future comedy icons Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin are stranded in a snow-bound small town in Ontario — unfortunately, it also happens to be home to a group of young, sexy, murderous, flesh-eating women! "We improvised most of it, and that's basically how I learned to direct," says Reitman. "It was made for $6,000." Cannibal Girls is presented in High-Definition. Please note that this theatrical re-release does not have the "Warning Bell". More info.
Enter to Win Tickets! — We are giving away two pairs of tickets to any screening of Cannibal Girls, August 20-22. To enter, send your contact info and preferred screening to:
contest@cinematheque.bc.ca
Contest ends noon, TUESDAY, AUGUST 17. Winners, chosen by random draw, will be contacted shortly after. Good luck!
FRAMES OF MIND SUMMER CLASSICS
Taxi Driver
 "Listen, you f--kers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the c--ts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up."
So said Robert De Niro's Travis Bickle — one of cinema's great anti-heroes — in Martin Scorsese's Palme d'Or-winning feature. Written by Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver examines the life of Bickle, a lonely, depressed Vietnam vet whose struggles to find meaningful connections on the streets of New York City lead to horrible violence. Post-screening discussion with Mark Harris.
Wednesday, August 18 - 7:30pm. More info.
DIM CINEMA
Death by VHS
Sixteen Winnipeg artists present their VHS, Hi-8, Super-8 and 16mm films and videos for August's DIM program: DEATH BY VHS: New Cinematic Discoveries from Winnipeg, Manitoba. A long, rich history of low-budget inventiveness is woven into the civic consciousness of Winnipeg , Manitoba, the birthplace of K-Tel, Hunky Bill's Perogie Maker, and the Green Garbage Bag. Countless Winnipeg artists have utilized the same Do-It-Yourself spirit in their practice, speaking to tradition as well as environmental necessity. Enriched with strange humour, hand-crafted experimentation and lo-fi/high-tec conundrums, the films and videos in this program are testaments to an aesthetic movement that is wholeheartedly Winnipeg's own.
Monday, August 30 - 7:30pm. More info.
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