[ThisWeek] Lunafest; Prairie Flyer & Grangeville Bluegrass Co.; Transamerica at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

[thisweek at kenworthy.org]

This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre...

University of Idaho Women¹s Center presents
Lunafest
2006 Film Festival 
Proceeds will support scholarships for women.
Thursday, March 23
7:00 PM
$5/adult, $3/student or senior

Doors open at 6:45, films start at 6:45.
Food provided by One World Cafe.
* * *

An evening of bluegrass featuring
Prairie Flyer &
Grangeville Bluegrass Co.
Friday, March 24
7:00 PM
$12/adult, $8/child under 13
* * *

Transamerica (R)
Saturday & Sunday, March 25 & 26
4:25 & 7:00 PM
$5/adult

Regular movie prices:  $5/adult, $2/child 12 or younger
KFS series pass prices:  $30/10 films, $75/30 films.
KFS passes accepted year-round for Sunday movies!

For more information on movies, events, rental rates, and/or to download a
schedule, visit www.kenworthy.org

Coming in April: Sirius Idaho Theatre presents A Walk in the Woods &
Collected Stories; The Celestine Prophecy; The Best of Youth; Cache; Why we
Fight.
* * *
Next week at the Kenworthy-

University of Idaho presents
American Indian Film Festival
March 29 - April 1

MOSCOW, Idaho ³American Indian Activism and Leadership² is the theme of this
year¹s American Indian Film Festival hosted by the University of Idaho.
            
The films selected for this year¹s festival bring to light national and
local issues and concerns, including dam removal, young tribe members
struggle with pop-culture and American Indian leadership representation.

The four day festival begins March 29 with ceremonial opening with remarks
by Rebecca Miles, a member of the Nez Perce Tribe, and the first female
elected chairman in the tribe¹s history, and ends April 1 with a
presentation by John Trudell, American Indian activist and actor.

The free films, partially funded by the Idaho Humanities Council, will be
shown at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre at 7 p.m. each day, with panel
discussions following the screening.

The following is the film schedule with brief descriptions:

Wednesday March 29

Film:   ³Thunderbird Woman-Winona LaDuke²
        Filmed on the White Earth Reservation: A story of Winona LaDuke
Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), a leading figure in the struggle for American Indian
land rights and sovereignty, vice-presidential candidate, novelist,
environmentalist, anti-nuclear activist and mother.
 
Panel: American Indian women leaders and activists, including Rebecca Miles.
 
Thursday March 30

Film:   ³Doing it?²
        An abstinence-education documentary. Three Nez Perce high school
students are influenced by the images and messages they see on television
and want to find out if everyone is ³doing it². Filmed in Lapwai in March
2005, it was produced by Nez Perce Tribe Students for Success Program.
 
Film:   ³Surviving Lewis and Clark: The Nimiipuu Story²
        This documentary focuses on the contributions of the Nez Perce
people to the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Highlights the major events that
have contributed to some of the social and economic difficulties in today¹s
Nez Perce homeland.
 
Panel: Dialogue with filmmakers and actors
 
Friday March 31

Film:   ³Unconquering the Last Frontier²
        This documentary chronicles the Elwha Klallam Tribe¹s struggle to
survive in the midst of hydroelectric development in Washington.
 
Film:   ³The Snowball effect²
        Film explores the controversy surrounding the recently proposed ski
resort expansion and snowmaking with wastewater on the San Francisco Peaks.
American Indian tribal officials, spiritual leaders, Forest Service
officials and concerned citizens discuss the issues of economic
misconceptions, threats to the environment, global warming, sacred lands
protection and public health concerns associated with groundbreaking studies
on wastewater. 
 
Panel: Native Americans and non-Native Americans working with treaty rights,
salmon preservation, sacred land, economic development and private property
right issues.
 
Saturday April 1 

5 p.m. - 8 p.m. UI Native American Student Association will be selling
Indian tacos outside the Kenworthy.
 
Film:   ³Trudell - The Movie²
        A documentary about American Indian activist John Trudell, a poet,
singer and powerful voice of the human spirit. His work began as an activist
for American Indian rights and freedoms and was the national spokesperson
during the Indians of All Tribes Occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969.  He
assisted in the formation of American Indian Movement (AIM) in the Œ70s and
has appeared in several movies, including ³Incident at Oglala,²
³Thunderheart,² ³On Deadly Ground² and ³Smoke Signals.²
 
Presentation / Question and answer: with John Trudell.

Contacts: Katie Dahlinger, UI Communications and Marketing, (208) 885-7251,
kdahlinger at uidaho.edu
* *  *

This week¹s movie review-

Transamerica

Written and directed by Duncan Tucker
Rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has
nudity and obscenities. Advisory: This film contains full frontal nudity,
strong language, drug use and a false penis.
Running time: 103 minutes.

Academy Award Nomination: Best Actress in a Leading Role: Felicity Huffman

As reviewed by Mick LaSalle writing for the San Francisco Chronicle

"Transamerica" provides the frame and the occasion for one of the year's
best performances, Felicity Huffman's as a woman trapped in a man's body
who's passing for female while awaiting a sex-change operation. The film is
not about the sex change but about an adventure that presents itself about a
week before the operation: She finds out that she is a father and that her
teenage son is in jail in New York.

Though Huffman is not the only good thing in the movie, she brings so much
to it and subtly enlivens it to the extent that it's difficult to imagine it
without her. Her performance requires that she, in essence, play someone who
is playing someone else. She is really Stanley, but she has become "Bree"
thanks to a series of surgeries, a daily regime of hormones and rigorous
self-discipline. She is rigid with control, consciously moderating her voice
and tone and presenting only the facial expressions that she has mastered in
the mirror. Huffman's shoulders carry the weight of a life spent being
careful, so as to pass, so as to avoid getting beaten up, so as to avoid
being treated like a freak.

Significantly, Huffman does this across the sex divide. That's important to
remember. She is a woman playing a man playing a woman, which requires that
she not ease into playing the woman side of her own nature, even as she's
playing a man who's doing everything he can to seem womanly. And that's just
the beginning of what Huffman does. The gender ramifications are just part
of the story.

There's also the way Huffman depicts Bree reacting to her circumstances.
This is a person of obvious intelligence, who is middle-aged and from a
reasonably well-off family. Yet we see her working in menial jobs. What
happened? Were there lost years? A drug problem? We never know, and yet
again, that history is in Huffman's tense shoulders and her weary
expression. She has the essence of someone who has gone through life as an
alien, desperate to be known and yet hoping not to be noticed -- someone who
at the same time has come into a certain self-knowledge and dignity, through
mistakes and quiet suffering. This isn't critical fantasizing. This is all
in the way Huffman looks, talks and moves, and she's extraordinary.

What's more, it comes as a relief to find this performance in such a
relaxed, human film, and not a social polemic. For most of the way,
"Transamerica" is a quirky comedy.

The gulf between Bree's bizarre appearance and her church-lady manner and
aspirations provides the source for much of the humor. But the movie is
never mean to her. It's equally understanding of her family, including her
horrified mother (Fionnula Flanagan) and rowdy, ne'er-do-well sister, who's
played with self-deprecating wit by Carrie Preston. The film's intelligent
compassion also extends to the son (Kevin Zegers, who is as handsome as the
young Alain Delon). The son could have been just another aggrieved young
wise guy, but instead we're aware of his real need for parental love.

In American mythology, from Mark Twain's "Roughing It" through "Thelma &
Louise," taking off on the open road has always been an occasion for
self-discovery. While Bree is not the usual hero or heroine, the road has
the same salutary effect on her, and it's interesting to watch Huffman
register the progress of that inner transformation.

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

"Transamerica" stars Felicity Huffman as a man who feels compelled to become
a woman. The surgery is only a week away when Sabrina (Bree, for short)
learns that 17 years ago she fathered a son. Margaret, her therapist, was
under the impression that as a man named Stanley, her client was a virgin.
"There was this one girl in college," Bree muses, "but the whole thing was
so tragically lesbian I didn't think it counted." Well, it counts now:
Margaret (Elizabeth Pena) insists that Bree must meet the son and come to
terms with him before the final surgery.

Bree reluctantly leaves Los Angeles and travels to New York to meet young
Toby (Kevin Zegers), a brooding street hustler who wants to improve himself
by becoming a porn star. This career choice is distressing to Bree, a
ladylike middle-class conservative. Unwilling to reveal her real identity,
Bree poses as a Christian caseworker who specializes in converting sex
workers to Jesus. Toby agrees to drive back to L.A. with Bree, mostly
because he needs the ride.

By this point in the plot description, I have the attention of readers who
fired off e-mails about "Brokeback Mountain," informing me that
homosexuality was "a sin promoted by the liberal left." I responded that
most people are gay or straight before they can talk, let alone vote. In any
event, surely my correspondents would approve of those who go to the length
of gender reassignment surgery to be sure their genitals match their
orientation?

My own impression is that most transgender people have little interest in
homosexuality; if they did, they'd be "pre-op" forever. Bree seems to have
had little sex of any kind, working two jobs as she does to save up for her
operation. She's not a terrifically exciting person, dresses like Mary
Worth, is terribly nice and needs to get out more. In the early stages of
their automobile journey to Los Angeles she spends a lot of time correcting
Toby's grammar.

Toby: "I'd probably be, like, disemboweled by a Ninja."

Bree: "You needn't say 'like.' Probably 'disemboweled by a Ninja' is
sufficient."

There is a quiet strain of humor throughout "Transamerica," but this is not
so much a comedy as an observation about human nature. I am grateful to
Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com for pointing out something I simply did not
notice: The movie assumes a transsexual will be more welcome in a blue state
than a red one, and that when a man is attracted to Bree, it is an American
Indian named Calvin Two Goats (Graham Greene). "He's allowed to be
open-minded," she writes, "because he's a Navajo -- in other words, a
spiritually open-minded outsider, as opposed to your typical Middle
American." (It is significant that Bree works in L.A. as a waitress in a
Mexican-American diner; Mexicans, like Indians, apparently have a genetic
tendency to open-mindedness.)

The movie works, and it does work, because Felicity Huffman brings great
empathy and tact to her performance as Bree. This is not a person who wants
to make a big point about anything. She (we might as well recognize Bree's
nature with the pronoun) has spent a lifetime living in a body that does not
fit, and just when deliverance seems at hand, she is suddenly supplied with
an ungrateful son. How ironic, as Wordsworth did not quite observe, that the
mother is father to the child.

That "Transamerica," written and directed by Duncan Tucker, works as a film
is because Bree is so persistently and patiently herself. If she had been
wilder, stranger, more extroverted, the movie might fly off the rails. It is
precisely because she is so conventionally sincere that the movie gathers
power in deep places while maintaining a relative surface calm. How does she
respond to the undeniable interest of Calvin Two Goats? Reader, she blushes.

This is all new for her, too. What Felicity Huffman brings to Bree is the
newness of a Jane Austen heroine. She has been waiting a long time to be an
ingénue, and what an irony that she must begin as a mother. But she is a
good person to the bottom of her socks, and at the end of "Transamerica,"
you realize it was not about sex at all. It was about family values.

As reviewed by A. O. Scott writing for the New York Times

To call Felicity Huffman's performance in "Transamerica" persuasive would be
an understatement, as well as somewhat misleading. Her character, Bree
(short for Sabrina), is a pre-operative transsexual who lives in a modest
bungalow in Los Angeles and in a condition she refers to as "stealth." In
other words, though still technically male, Bree passes for a woman, though
there is nothing very stealthy about her elaborate, almost theatrical
displays of femininity. In her tasteful pink outfits and meticulously
applied makeup, she presents an image of womanliness that harks back to an
earlier era. 

In this debut feature by Duncan Tucker, who wrote and directed it,
"Transamerica" sets out to affirm Bree's dignity, to liberate her and others
like her from any association with camp or freakishness. That the film
succeeds without slipping too far into sentimentality or didacticism is in
no small measure the result of Ms. Huffman's wit and grace. The challenge
Ms. Huffman faces here is complicated: she must convey the layers of Bree's
identity and the spaces between those layers. It is not just that the
actress must play a man who is playing a woman - that much is a matter of
technique (with some prosthetic assistance, to be sure) - but also that she
must impersonate a performer in the midst of learning a complicated role.
Her performance is a complex metamorphosis, and it is thrilling to watch.

Mr. Tucker is a subtle and conscientious writer; he takes care to treat Bree
as a person rather than a case study. Ms. Huffman carries herself with such
sensitivity and authority that you never doubt Bree for an instant.

Film reviews researched and edited by Peter Haggart

* * *
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre
508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho
208-882-4127
Sign up for this weekly email on events and movies at the Kenworthy by
logging onto our website
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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