FRIDAY -- Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher

Tomorrow at the Silent Movie Theater the Cinefamily will be screening Ratcatcher, Lynne Ramsay's little-seen first film (which is not to say that her second film exactly tore up the box office either). The last film in Cinefamily's "Female Gaze" series is also its best. Ramsay has an uncanny eye for detail; it plays more like a series of compelling still-photos than a traditional narrative.

Quoth the Cinefamily website: "Ratcatcher is a grim coming-of-age tale set in working-class Glasgow during a sanitation strike, but director Lynne Ramsey's imaginative flights of fantasy and masterful filmmaking seem to help her characters transcend the world of garbage and grime they inhabit. She selects her details with the taste of a great short-story teller, just a couple at a time; each image and sound is beautiful in some way, rich with potency. Ratcatcher ... represents the best of a trend towards a modern poetic realism -- films trying for hyper-realism in location and characters, but seeking to create a strange, mysterious quality, rather than just a gritty documentary world."


WHERE: The Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax
WHEN: Friday, August 29, 2008 @ 7:30pm
COST: $10
MORE INFO: The Cinefamily Website
Or you could just buy it on Criterion DVD

TONIGHT -- 2-for-1 Tickets to Worst Date Movie Ever

In a move of either subversive brilliance or perverse deviance -- or hell, why not both? -- the Cinefamily is offering a two-for-one deal on tickets to confrontational auteuriste Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl tonight as part of their "Female Gaze" series. Breillat has long had a reputation for making films dealing with sexuality and gender power-dynamics that are in the words of the Cinefamily's website "shocking masterpiece[s] of provocation," or what the rest of us might call "fucked up." If you've never seen one of her films -- and really, what's wrong with you? -- Fat Girl is an excellent place to start... but maybe not the best choice for a first date.

Quoth the Cinefamily website: "Anaïs is the eponymous 12-year-old lead, a would-be Cyrano whose stifled sexual awakening coincides with her beautiful sister Elena's first experiences with desire and seduction. Subtle tension escalates between the sisters as they navigate Breillat's signature sexual terrain, an ominous landscape fraught with the constant potential for delusion, deception, violence, and tragedy. Not surprising that Breillat was a best-selling novelist by the age of 17 -- the storytelling in Fat Girl decimates the conventions of teen dramas in favor of a daring explication of lust and loyalty, with an ending that famously shocked and polarized international audiences."

(Afterward, if your relationship is still intact, you can hang around for Fuego!, a film which appears both less serious and more entertainingly misogynistic than Fat Girl:)


"The authentic story of a real person,
told with integrity and stark candor."
WHERE: The Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax
WHEN: Tonight, Friday August 22, 2008 @ 7:30pm
COST: $10 for two tickets
MORE INFO: The Cinefamily
Fat Girl Criterion Collection DVD