[ThisWeek] Napoleon Dynamite and Sin City at the Kenworthy

[thisweek at kenworthy.org]

This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre-

Napoleon Dynamite (PG)
Wednesday, July 20
1:00 & 7:00 PM
$1/child under 13, $4/adult

Sin City (R)
Friday, Saturday & Sunday, July 22, 23 & 24
7:00 PM
$5/adult
(see REVIEW below)
* * *

Also in July at the Kenworthy-

Insty Prints & North Idaho Athletic Club present
Two Brothers (PG)
July 27, 1:00 PM

New West magazine presents
My Town, a film by Michael Hayes
July 28, 7:00 PM
$5/adult, $3/student or senior

Hitchhiker¹s Guide to the Galaxy (PG)
July 29 ­ 31, 7:00 PM

Coming in August:  Because of Winn Dixie, Robots, Madagascar, Mad Hot
Ballroom, Howl¹s Moving Castle

Thanks to the following Wednesday matinee sponsors:
Insty Prints & North Idaho Athletic Club, Tom & JoAnn Trail, U.S. Bank,
Wells Fargo Bank, Gritman Medical Center

Regular Movie prices:  $5 adult, $2 child 12 or younger.
Wednesday matinee prices:  $4/adult, $1/child 12 or younger
KFS passes accepted year-round for Sunday movies!
* * *

³MY TOWN²

On Thursday, July 28 at 7:00 PM, New West Magazine <http://www.newwest.net>
will sponsor an encore showing of the film, "My Town".  The 70 minute film
by Washington State University Associate Professor, Michael Hayes focuses on
the cultural clash in Moscow involving Christ Church Pastor Doug Wilson. The
screening will be followed by a panel discussion.

In the film Hayes includes interviews with Wilson, his brother Evan Wilson,
New St. Andrews College Dean Roy Atwood, as well as community
representatives including JoAnn Muneta, Bill London, and Rosemary Huskey.
Hayes also includes film of Wilson¹s history conference and the controversy
regarding Wilson¹s pamphlet, ³Southern Slavery As It Was.²

Tickets are $5 for adults and $3 for seniors and students.  Proceeds from
the screening will benefit the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre.

For more information, call 208-882-4127.
* * *

Reel in the Money Campaign
Challenge grant to benefit historic Kenworthy

The Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre (KPAC) announces the receipt of a
$5,000 challenge grant from the Schreck Family Foundation to kick off the
Reel in the Money Campaign.  The KPAC¹s goal is to raise an additional
$10,000 for the historic downtown building, including electrical upgrades,
equipment, and maintenance needs.  On Friday July 22 at 10:00 AM, KPAC will
hold the first of several theater tours for the public.  Interested parties
should call 882-4127 to reserve a spot on the tour.

The Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre is the home of Moscow Community Theatre
<http://www.kenworthy.org/MCT.htm> and is rented annually by various
organizations including Sirius Idaho Theatre
<http://www.SiriusIdahoTheatre.com> and the University of Idaho
<http://www.uidaho.edu>.  The Kenworthy Film Society--an activity of
KPAC--shows documentary, foreign, and independent films on a weekly basis.
Revenues from films and events account for only 60% of KPAC¹s income.  The
balance (40%) must come in the form of donations and grants.

The Kenworthy is an historic theater that opened to the public in 1926.  A
Moscow landmark, the Kenworthy Theater¹s history spans over three-quarters
of a century and includes vaudeville, silent films, theatre, and dance
productions.  In December 1999, the Kenworthy Theater was donated to the
community and is now owned and operated by the KPAC Board of Directors. The
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre is a non-profit, 501 (c) 3 organization and
all contributions are tax deductible.  Those making contributions of $250 or
more will be invited to the campaign celebration party to be held in the
fall 2005.

For more information or to schedule a tour, call Julie Ketchum at
208-882-4127.

Julie Ketchum
Executive Director
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre
P.O. Box 8126
Moscow, ID 83843
http://www.kenworthy.org
* * *

This week¹s review-

Sin City

Directed by Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez; written by Mr. Miller, based
on his series of ''Sin City'' graphic novels
Rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The film
contains a smorgasbord of stylized, generally unrealistic-looking violent
acts, including a lot of dismemberment; there is also alcohol use, adult
language, some hanky-panky and many women in various stages of undress.
Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes

As reviewed by Mick LaSalle writing for the San Francisco Chronicle

"Sin City" is a film noir about a crime-filled city and the people who
inhabit it, but it's also a movie unlike any other. The film uses a
combination of live action, performed by real actors, and computer graphics
to transform Frank Miller's graphic novels into moving pictures. To remember
"Sin City" hours later is to remember from a different part of the brain
that remembers conventional movies. It's to remember a comic book come to
life. 

Just technically speaking, it's a remarkable achievement. Robert Rodriguez
and Miller (who shared directing duties) set out to do something different
and have succeeded in creating a complete other world that's seamless and
beautiful. They've not only mastered the technology but have used it with
artistry. Most frames in "Sin City" are in black and white, with splashes of
vibrant color -- the red of a woman's lipstick, the sickly yellow of a
eunuch's complexion. Sometimes a woman is entirely in color, and the man is
in black and white. In one shot, a woman takes two steps toward the camera
and turns from color to black and white as if stepping into shadows. All
these moments have a psychological reverberation -- they say something,
paint a mood or instill a feeling.

The performances are in keeping with the visuals, big but controlled. They
match the heightened world of the comic book, without spoofing it or
commenting on it. For Mickey Rourke, "Sin City" is practically a homecoming.
Here's an actor who has seemed a bit strange in any cinematic setting for at
least 10 years. But in this comic book context of outsized villains and
heroes, everything grand-scale and skewed about Rourke as a screen presence
becomes a virtue. It's not enough to say that Rourke is good in "Sin City."
It really feels like he lives there.

"Sin City" also provides an invigorating showcase for Bruce Willis, as an
old cop, Hartigan, who is to retire because of a heart condition. Of course,
his last case turns out to be his biggest, one involving a child murderer
(Nick Stahl) who also happens to be the son of a senator.

"Sin City" could be criticized as old stuff. The noir world it presents is
derivative of 1940s film, and it bears a family resemblance to other
postmodern fantasy noirs, such as "Dark City" and "The Crow." Like film
noir, it can also be accused of misogyny. Women are slain with abandon --
though so are men -- and the one vision of female strength the movie offers
is that of the prostitute.

Part of me wants to resist "Sin City," because it's art based on art that's
based on art -- that is, a movie based on a comic book based on a film genre
-- and, like anything three stages removed from inspiration, it has nothing
to say. It's a style piece, a fever dream about film noir, and that hardly
seems ambitious or important.

Yet if the movie's aims aren't lofty, its entertainment value is high and
consistent. Virtually every moment of "Sin City" engages the mind and the
eye. The energy never flags; the story never stalls. It starts in motion,
and ends in motion. To make a movie this entertaining is to accomplish a
small miracle. 

As reviewed by Roger Ebert writing for the Chicago Sun-Times

If film noir was not a genre, but a hard man on mean streets with a lost
lovely in his heart and a gat in his gut, his nightmares would look like
"Sin City." 

The new movie by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller plays like a convention
at the movie museum in Quentin Tarantino's subconscious. A-list action stars
rub shoulders with snaky villains and sexy wenches, in a city where the
streets are always wet, the cars are ragtops and everybody smokes. It's a
black-and-white world, except for blood, which is red, eyes which are green,
hair which is blond, and the Yellow Bastard.

This isn't an adaptation of a comic book, it's like a comic book brought to
life and pumped with steroids. It contains characters who occupy stories,
but to describe the characters and summarize the stories would be like
replacing the weather with a weather map.

The movie is not about narrative but about style. It internalizes the harsh
world of the Frank Miller "Sin City" comic books and processes it through
computer effects, grotesque makeup, lurid costumes and dialogue that chops
at the language of noir. The actors are mined for the archetypes they
contain; Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Benicio
Del Toro, Clive Owen and the others are rotated into a hyperdimension. We
get not so much their presence as their essence; the movie is not about what
the characters say or what they do, but about who they are in our wildest
dreams.

The movie is based on three of the "Sin City" stories, each more or less
self-contained. That's wise, because at this velocity, a two-hour, one-story
narrative would begin to pant before it got to the finish line. One story
involves Bruce Willis as a battered old cop at war with a pedophile (Nick
Stahl). One has Mickey Rourke waking up next to a dead hooker (Jaime King).
One has a good guy (Clive Owen) and a wacko cop (Benicio Del Toro)
disturbing the delicate balance of power negotiated between the police and
the leader of the city's hookers (Rosario Dawson), who, despite her
profession, moonlights as Owen's lover. Underneath everything is a deeper
layer of corruption, involving a senator (Powers Boothe) whose son is not
only the pedophile but also the Yellow Bastard.

Frank Miller and Quentin Tarantino are credited as co-directors, Miller
because his comic books essentially act as storyboards which Rodriguez
follows with ferocity, and because he was on the set every day, interacting
with the actors; Tarantino because he directed one brief scene on a day when
Rodriquez was determined to wean him away from celluloid and lure him over
the dark side of digital. (It's the scene in the car with Owen and Del Toro,
who has a pistol stuck in his head.) Tarantino also contributed something to
the culture of the film, which follows his influential "Pulp Fiction" in its
recycling of pop archetypes and its circular story structure. The language
of the film, both dialogue and narration, owes much to the hard-boiled pulp
novelists of the 1950s.

As reviewed by Manohla Dargis writing for the New York Times

Based on the comic book series of the same name by Frank Miller, who
directed the film with Robert Rodriguez, this slavishly faithful screen
adaptation tracks the ups and downs (mostly downs) of tough guys and dolls
recycled from the lower depths and bottom shelves of pulp fiction.

Instead of Raymond Chandler, though, with his weary allusions to Shakespeare
and Keats, these hard-boiled tales owe a debt to the American primitivism of
Mickey Spillane and comic book legends like William Gaines.

Set in a nowhere metropolis, the film opens with a gaspingly beautiful image
of a woman staring into the night. Dressed in a shimmering gown the color of
newly spilled blood, she stands with her back to the camera, oblivious. That
gives us time to register that this red is the only color in a landscape
exclusively painted hot white, bottomless black and silvery gray. It also
gives the narrator (Josh Hartnett) time to creep up on her. Soon, the man
offers the woman a cigarette and takes something far more precious from her
in return. With a few short sentences and an act of violence, the filmmakers
telescope the death and desire to follow, as well as the underlying
brutality of their world.

Film reviews researched and edited by Peter Haggart
* * *

Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre
508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho
For more information, call 208-882-4127 or visit http://www.kenworthy.org
* * *
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
PAMELA PALMER, Volunteer
Mailto:ppalmer at moscow.com
Film and Events Committee
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

http://www.kenworthy.org

To speak with a KPAC staff member,
call (208) 882-4127
Mailto:kpac at moscow.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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