Cinema on the Rooftops – Madison in the Late Spring

Tonight begins the second year of rooftop cinema at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. The Daily Page has a good post with the schedule and links to some of the shorts which are available on YouTube or Google Video. Tonight is "The Strange World of Science Fiction" and features Science Fiction by UW prof and filmmaker J.J. Murphy. Also on the bill is La Jetée which was the basis for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys.

The UW Cinematheque is still on a short hiatus until their summer program begins. Look for John Frankenheimer's 1966 film Seconds to get things going again on 6 July. There will also be a 4-film Robert Altman retrospective, including M*A*S*H and a selection of winners from the Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou.

Starting at Sundance 608 on the 22nd of this month is Die Große Stille (Into Great Silence). This is an epic (nearly 3 hour) documentary that played at the Wisconsin Film Festival and is a look at the Grand Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps. Prepared to get all Zen because, from what I've read, there's no narrator to hold the viewer's hand and next to no dialogue in the film.

Lastly, since I'm sick to death of hearing about blockbusters like Spider Man 3 and American indie films like Waitress, I want to note that there are some foreign films to be had this week.

To begin, there's Max Ophüls' The Earrings of Madame De… at the Orpheum.

Out at Westgate, we have Indigènes (Days of Glory), a French-Moroccan-Algerian-Belgian co-production about "four North African [who] men enlist in the French army to liberate that country from Nazi oppression, and to fight French discrimination."

Lastly, we have La Doublure (The Valet) at Sundance 608. A French film, it chronicles "a porter and a top-model [who] pretend to be a couple in order to salvage a CEO's marriage."

Finally, I want to note that the Russian fantasy flick, Daywatch will be opening at Chicago's Music Box Theatre next week so I'm hoping that we'll get it here in Madison later this month. It is the sequel to Night Watch and quite a bit of fun.