Hot Docs is dominating the movie conversation this week – and rightly so, as there’s some great stuff screening at the 2012 festival.
(Speaking of which, if you weren’t able to catch Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry at its gala opening last night, there’s a repeat screening tomorrow afternoon at the Lightbox – here’s my interview with director Alison Klayman, if you need more prodding.)
If you’re not in a Hot Docs mood, though, there’s plenty of other stuff to see in town this weekend. Tomorrow, for example, the Carlton Cinema is celebrating Kathleen Turner’s week-long run in High at the Royal Alex next month with a day of free screenings of her films – and mostly good ones!
The Kathleen Turner Mini Film Fest kicks off at 1:15 pm with Francis Ford Coppola’s nostalgic comedy Peggy Sue Got Married, continues with Robert Zemeckis’s charming romantic adventure Romancing The Stone at 4:15 pm, keeps the Michael Douglas mojo going with Danny DeVito’s vicious comedy The War Of The Roses at 7 pm and wraps up with Lawrence Kasdan’s noir pastiche Body Heat at 9:15 pm. Again, all shows are free, though the theatre suggests a $5 donation to YouthLink.
I’m not so crazy about Peggy Sue Got Married – it’s not as charming or as clever as it thinks it is, and everyone seems vaguely frightened of Nicolas Cage – but the others are all solid entertainment, featuring Turner at her finest. (And Body Heat has that fantastic Mickey Rourke cameo.)
Looking for something in more of a classical vein? Consider F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh, screening Sunday afternoon at the Revue Cinema in the theatre’s Silent Sundays series.
Produced in 1924, Murnau’s powerhouse drama stars Emil Jannings as an aging hotel bellman whose demotion to bathroom attendant sets in motion a tragic fall – one which unconsciously mirrors the declining state of the German nation in the years after the First World War. Just 75 minutes long and still somehow epic in story and stature, The Last Laugh will be presented with live piano accompaniment by Laura Silberberg, and introduced by U of T cinema studies professor Charlie Keil.
And as I always say right about this time, if you’ve only seen this on DVD, you haven’t seen it at all.
