Fall Cinema Shaping Up

This week Rob Thomas gave his recommendation to the South Korean film The Good, The Bad, The Weird. It played in Chicago earlier this year and was disappointed that it never screened here. (And while I'm at it, where were My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done and Good Hair?) But I'm glad I'll get the chance to see it on DVD.





Thomas brought the film up because the Orpheum is going to be showing a restored print of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly next week.





The UW's Cinematheque has a great fall semester lined up. Not only will there be an Errol Morris retrospective, but also a celebration in honor of the centennial of Akira Kurosawa's birth. There will be a series of eight of his films with Rashomon kicking things off on 3 September. And there will be lots of other films besides including Dario Argento's horror classic Suspiria which plays on All Hallows' Eve eve.





On 17 September the French gangster flick Mesrine: Killer Instinct is slated to open at Sundance. This is the first of the two-part story.

Speaking of Sundance, the Afghanistan war documentary Restrepo was to have opened there last week but has apparently been rescheduled for the 27th of this month. Micmacs was to have played here this summer at Sundance as well but that plan seems to have fallen into the void. Let us hope that this same fate does not befall Gasper Noé's Enter the Void as it looks interesting to say the least.





On the coming soon front, Werner Herzog has just about wrapped up his latest documentary, Caves of Forgotten Dreams, a look at the Chauvet Cave in France where the oldest known cave paintings are located. The kicker is that it's in 3D. I can just see it now. A tilting shot of a stalagmite with Werner's narration about how harsh the Earth was to our Paleolithic ancestors.

Lastly we have a trailer for Darren Aronofsky's latest, Black Swan. Looks like a cross between Robert Altman's The Company and Cronenberg's The Fly.