Imagine Count Orlok’s shadow creeping across the screen while every creak, crash andwhisper is created live before your eyes. The Invincible Czars return to the Eureka Theater on Friday, Sept. 12 at 7 p.m. with their acclaimed live original scores for The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and Nosferatu (1922), performed in sync with the […]
Film Preview
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Ready For Our Close-Up
If you’re looking for an unparalleled thrill at the movies, you can forget summer’s special effects bonanzas. Superman stunts and Star Trek warps can’t match the exhilaration of recognizing someone or something from your own life up there on the silver screen. Case-in-point: In 2008, a sizable crowd turned out at the Eureka Theater for […]
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Shadows and Fog
Shadows and Fog: San Francisco Noir is the theme for the Humboldt County Library’s Based on the Book movies series in April. Each Tuesday there’s a screening of a 1940s era crime film shot or set in the fabled Bagdad by the Bay. First up, April 9, the quintessential detective story, The Maltese Falcon, based […]
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Le Havre
The cinematic landscape of Finnish writer-director Aki Kaursimäki is one of offbeat bleakness. In his early films, such as 1988’s Ariel, the flatness of color matches the film’s tone and deadpan, working-class characters. No matter what dreadful situation Kaursimäki’s characters are experiencing in his universe, there is never a sense of romanticism, hipness or […]
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Satin Dolls and Tommy Guns
A fair portion of what we remember of “The Roaring ‘20s” is based on films of the ‘30s, fast-moving tales full of machine-gun-toting gangsters and scandalously sexy women in satin gowns. At the time, a certain section of the American public was outraged by what was seen as Hollywood’s corrupting influence on moral decency. […]
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The End of the World on DVD
The end of the world isn’t all zombie plagues and alien invasions (although sometimes it’s both — see Night of the Comets). We’ll skip the disaster-porn of Roland Emmerich’s 2012. Instead, the following list rounds up some lesser-known cinema to aid in mustering up appropriate dread for our impending doom. In the pre-apocalypse genre, […]
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Sherlock: Season 2
Over the past century Sherlock Holmes has not been long absent from stage or screen, but he’s currently everywhere, from a motion picture franchise (with Robert Downey, Jr.) to a new CBS television series (Elementary, which I deduce will not last long). And that’s apart from Holmes mutations on The Mentalist and Law and […]
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Two DVDs
A pair of worthy films that did not play in local theaters are now out on DVD: Damsels in Distress. In Whit Stillman’s first film since The Last Days Of Disco, a private East Coast college is watched over by a group of young philanthropists in training, headed by Violet Wister (Greta Gerwig). These […]
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The Black Pirate
It’s a tradition. Every year the ArMack Orchestra, comprised of students from McKinleyville and Arcata high schools, heads out on a journey to play a concert and learn more about music some place far away. Last year it was London. The next big trip is to New York City where the orchestra will compete […]
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Trouble Is My Business
The Humboldt County Library’s Eureka branch resumes its “Based on the Book” movie series in October. This time out it’s “Trouble Is My Business,” with four Tuesday night screenings of films based on Raymond Chandler’s crime novels featuring hard-boiled L.A. private eye Philip Marlowe. First up, Tuesday, Oct. 9: The Big Sleep, the classic Bogart/Bacall vehicle directed […]
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George Harrison: Living in the Material World
Seen last year on pay cable, this Scorsese film on the life of George Harrison is now widely available on DVD. A fair amount of the footage here has been otherwise available, but there’s a lot that comes from Harrison’s “home movies” and photos. There are archival soundbites with Harrison, and new interviews with […]
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Wild Grandmother
My Grandmother is not your usual silent film. The somewhat obscure 1929 Soviet political comedy mixes live action on wildly exaggerated expressionistic sets with puppetry, animation and stop motion photography to offer a scathing critique of bureaucratic excess. And the 21st century soundtrack, to be performed live Saturday night at the Arcata Playhouse by composer […]