[ThisWeek] The Fall of '55, Factotum, The Godfather and The Grub-Stake at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre

[This Week at the Kenworthy]

This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre-

³Idaho Votes No on HJR2² presents
The Fall of Œ55
A Film by Seth Randal
Thursday, November 2
7:00 PM
FREE
Panel Discussion following film

On Thursday, November 2, "Idaho Votes No on HJR2" will present the Palouse
Premiere of Seth Randal's documentary film, "The Fall of '55," at 7:00 PM at
the Kenworthy Peforming Arts Centre in Moscow.

In the fall of 1955, the citizens of Boise were told there was a menace in
their midst.  On Halloween of that year, three men were arrested--accused of
being part of a giant "sex ring."  There was no such ring, but the result
was a widespread investigation which some people now call a witch hunt.  By
the time the investigation ended 16 men were charged with sex crimes.

The investigation attracted the attention of "Time Magazine" and newspapers
across America.  The subsequent publicity left scars which remain to this
day.

Head of Special Collections and Associate Professor at Boise State
University Albertsons Library, Alan Virta, who was the historian on the
film, will participate in a panel discussion immediately following the film.

Factotum (R)
Friday, November 3
7:00 PM
Saturday, November 4
4:40 & 7:00 PM
$5 Adults
(Review below)

Ganster Movie Month - Late Night Movie
The Godfather (R)
Saturday, November 4
10:00 PM
$3, includes popcorn
www.kenworthy.org for more info, including titles


Silent Film returns to the Kenworthy
Presented in cooperation with the Idaho Film Collection in the Hemingway
Western Studies Center at Boise State University.
The Grub-Stake (1922) not rated
A Nell Shipman Film
Sunday, November 5
4:00 & 7:00 PM
Tickets $5

Tom Trusky, professor at Boise State University and Director of the
Hemingway Western Studies Center, will introduce the film and lead a
question and answer session at the end. Trusky has spent more than
twenty-five years researching Nell Shipman, the silent star who was born in
Victoria, British Columbia, raised in Seattle, and made silent films in
north Idaho in the 1920¹s.

"The Grub-Stake" is a complex Klondike saga of betrayal, bigamy, attempted
murder, escape to an Eden ruled by Dame Nature--and true love.  Beautifully
photographed by Academy Award-winning Joseph Walker (later, Frank Capra's
cinematographer), the epic film stars Nell Shipman as heroine Faith Diggs.
Seeking love and financial independence in the far north, Faith discovers
her new husband is not Mr. Right but, instead, Mr. Villain.  He may be a
bigamist.  He not only intends for her to be a saloon "hostess," not a
laundress and laundry-owner as he had promised, but also he intends to
poison her father.  Faith and her father flee, guided by a "crazy" miner who
promises to take them to his lost gold mine.  The trio, chased by Faith's
husband and his band of gentlemen of dubious moral character, escape by
dogsled in a blizzard to Lost Valley.  In this sun-drenched paradise (Priest
Lake, Idaho, of course) wild animals and humans live in harmony--until the
band of evil-doers arrive on the scene.  The thrilling finale of Shipman's
magnum opus is the definitive cliff-hanger of silent--if not all--filmdom!

Trusky first became interested in the pioneering filmmaker Nell Shipman
nearly 20 years ago and conducted a search over a number of years for her
films, which had been presumed lost and destroyed. He recovered six films
from as far away as England; many have since been released on video and all
are in the process of being re-released on DVD. In 1987, Trusky edited and
published Shipman¹s autobiography, The Silent Screen & My Talking Heart, now
in its third edition, as part of Boise State's Hemingway Western Studies
Series.  In 2003, Trusky selected and edited Letters from God's Country,
Shipman's letters and essays.

Trusky, the world¹s leading authority on Shipman, has also given
introductory lectures at Shipman retrospectives in France, Switzerland,
Italy, the United States and Canada.

According to Trusky, interest in Shipman and her work is skyrocketing. ³She
was ahead of her time in many respects, and people are recognizing that,² he
said. Shipman strongly believed in location shooting and independent
filmmaking, he noted. Her films featured women heroes, and she supported
humane treatment of animals in films.

³She was sensitive about the environment and the sacredness of the land, and
this was in 1920,² Trusky added.

Shipman was born in Victoria and grew up in Seattle. She embarked on a
vaudeville career as a young girl. After finding success with the melodrama
³Back to God's Country,² Shipman brought a film crew and a menagerie of wild
and domestic animals to the remote shores of Priest Lake in northern Idaho.
At Lionhead Lodge, her wilderness film studio, Shipman battled weather and
financial disasters to create films starring kind animals and strong women

Her attempts to create films on location in that wild and isolated land
resulted in events that were as dramatic, and ultimately more tragic, than
any of her films. She died in 1970.

Additional information about Shipman and her work can be found at the Idaho
Film Collection's on-line archive at www.boisestate.edu/hemingway/film.htm.
* * *

Next week at the Kenworthy-

The Best Little Theatre in Moscow presents
a staged reading of
The Oldest Profession
by Paula Vogel

Directed by Bev Wolff and Terri Schmidt

Friday, November 10
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre
7:00 pm Live music and reception
8:00 pm Staged reading
Tickets $20
Proceeds benefit Sirius Idaho Theatre and Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre
Tickets available at BookPeople of Moscow and Neill¹s Flowers and Gifts in
Pullman

Encore performance in Pullman
Saturday, November 11
Gladish Little Theatre in Pullman
7:30 pm Staged reading
Tickets $12
Proceeds benefit Sirius Idaho Theatre
Tickets available at BookPeople of Moscow and Neill¹s Flowers and Gifts in
Pullman

The Oldest Profession, a comedy by Paula Vogel, focuses on the lives of five
older prostitutes working in New York and facing the problems of an aging
clientele, competition from younger street walkers, rising rent prices . . .
and all without the safety net of social security or health insurance.  The
play is set in the eighties, just before Reagan is elected, and so is
relevant to today - a backdrop of the upcoming elections, trickle-down
economics, rising gas prices, high rents, social security, etc.  There's
even a reference to strip mining.

Barbara Kirschner, in her eighties, and considered one of the grande dames
of Palouse theatre, plays the part of Mae, the madam.  Bev Hyde plays the
part of Ursula, next in line for management, while Martha Godchaux plays the
part of Lillian, the rose of Mae's stable.  Karen Rogers is Edna,
hardworking and good at her job, while Phyllis Van Horn is Vera, the baby of
the group. Kirschner has been involved with Lewiston Civic Theatre, Pullman
Community and Civic Theatre, and starred in major roles in 'Who's Afraid of
Virginia Wolf', 'Trip to Bountiful' and 'On Golden Pond'.  All of the rest
of the cast, except one, are retired.

Staged readings of the play will be Friday, November 10 at the Kenworthy
Performing Arts Centre in Moscow and Saturday, November 11th at the Gladish
Little Theatre in Pullman. The Moscow performance, a joint fundraising event
with proceeds going to Sirius Idaho Theatre and the Kenworthy Performing
Arts Centre, includes music and a reception prior to curtain time. Tickets
are $20 per person. Tickets for Saturday¹s performance in Pullman are $12.
Tickets are available at BookPeople of Moscow and Neill¹s Flowers and Gifts
in Pullman.

For more information contact Bev Wolff at bevw at adelphia.net, or call
509-336-9664


Also next week at the Kenworthy-

Half Nelson (R)
Saturday & Sunday, November 11 & 12
4:20 & 7:00 PM
$5 Adults
* * *

Coming in November at the Kenworthy-

House of Sand (R)
November 16 & 17
7:00 PM
November 18 & 19
4:20 & 7:00 PM
$5 Adults

Pirates of the Caribbean (PG-13)
November 24
7:00 PM
November 25
12:30, 3:45 & 7:00 PM
November 26
3:45 & 7:00 PM
$5/adult, $3/child 12 or younger

Coming in December: This Film is Not Yet Rated; The Science of Sleep
Regular movie prices:  $5/adult, $3/child 12 or younger
KFS series pass prices:  $30/10 films, $75/30 films.  KFS pass good only for
Sunday movies.

For more information on movies, events, rental rates, and/or to download a
schedule, 
visit our website at www.kenworthy.org or call 208-882-4127.
* * *

This week¹s Review-

Factotum

Directed by Bent Hamer; written by Mr. Hamer and Jim Stark,
Based on the novel by Charles Bukowski
Running time: 1 hour, 34 minutes

Rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). This film
contains drug use, alcohol abuse, sex and nudity. The language is blue, and
you could get a contact high from the alcohol fumes.


As reviewed by Manohla Dargis writing for the New York Times

For years the boozy, beautiful world of Charles Bukowski has proved catnip
to European filmmakers and a few American actors happy to go along for the
rough ride: Ben Gazzara, Mickey Rourke and now Matt Dillon. Bukowski¹s own
story (his parents moved to Los Angeles from Germany when he was 3) clearly
holds attraction for certain creative types, as do all his tales of ordinary
madness. That many of those stories take place in Los Angeles may be
particularly seductive, since few images telegraph the paradox of the
American dream better than a drunk passed out in the shadow of Hollywood.

Hollywood, as sign or guiding principle, is nowhere to be found in
³Factotum,² and there isn¹t a palm tree in sight. Shot in a seedy, forlorn
Minneapolis, far from that city¹s green-canopied streets and Prairie School
architecture, the film was directed by the wonderfully named Bent Hamer, a
Norwegian whose earlier features include the deadpan comedy ³Kitchen
Stories.² Working with the producer Jim Stark, Mr. Hamer adapted the
screenplay from the 1975 novel of the same title, with snippets from three
other, more characteristically Bukowskian sounding volumes: ³The Days Run
Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills² and the posthumous ³What Matters Most
Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire² and ³The Captain Is Out to Lunch and
the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship.²

Published when Bukowski was in his mid-50¹s and starting to reach a wider
readership, ³Factotum² presents the age-old struggle of man against
mediocrity. Henry Chinaski (Mr. Dillon), Bukowski¹s familiar alter ego, is
the heroic survivor of countless benders, brawls, rejection slips, crazy
women and soul-killing, mind-deadening jobs. Or, as he puts it so nicely in
the novel: ³How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by
an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed² ‹ there is, naturally, a
scatological dimension to this list ‹ ³brush teeth and hair, and fight
traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for
somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?²

In ³Factotum² Henry answers this most reasonable question mostly by trying
to avoid working, or at least working too hard, for other people. (Bukowski
himself toiled for the Postal Service for more than a decade.) To that end,
he takes a succession of menial jobs that require him to polish the
vainglorious décor of a newspaper building (he holds out hope, briefly, for
a job as a reporter), jackhammer ice and sort pickles. He does all of this
with degrees of competency and just enough interest to keep him from
collapsing into a stupor, though on occasion he does drop into the nearest
bar. There, in a flood of alcohol, he casts a bloodshot eye on the adjoining
flotsam and jetsam, taking notes on the human condition.

Of course Bukowski-Chinaski was always working, even when he could barely
hold down a job, sending out manuscripts and collecting, for many lean
years, rejection notices. In ³Factotum² Mr. Hamer shows us Henry coiled over
a dimly lighted table, pressing his pen hard into sheets of paper, as the
words float on the soundtrack. Mr. Dillon, wearing a beard and the flushed
cheeks of a committed lush, sounds as persuasive as he looks. Whether he¹s
nuzzling another drunk (Lili Taylor and Marisa Tomei take turns baring necks
and psyches) or swapping philosophies with another shirker (Fisher Stevens),
the actor delivers much of his dialogue with the hushed deliberation of a
man who spends a lot of time in his head, which makes sense, given the
company he generally keeps.

Like the film itself, Mr. Dillon¹s performance works through understatement.
It¹s easy to go big with Bukowski, the way that Barbet Schroeder did in his
1987 film, ³Barfly,² in which a freewheeling Mickey Rourke plays a skid-row
Puck in a theater of the damned. There are intimations of soul amid this
film¹s bloody grins and barstool gargoyles, but what it lacks is an
appreciation for Bukowski¹s tenderness, for those sighs of feeling that rise
up when life is this hard, but the soul enduring it has not hardened in
turn. Mr. Dillon¹s phrasing carries the weight of such feeling, as does the
hypnotically slowed gestures that give him the aspect of a man sitting at
the bottom of a pool and thinking about drowning.

Henry doesn¹t drown, though, as played by Mr. Dillon and interpreted by Mr.
Hamer, he does wallow magnificently and often rather hilariously. ³Factotum²
is a film about the horrors and occasional comedy of work, as well as
gutting through life on your own terms, which in Bukowski¹s case meant
turning both that horror and that comedy into literature. Even now, more
than a decade after his death and well along into his canonization, there
remains something genuinely liberating about his refusal to join the
clock-puncher¹s lockstep. Subversive might not be the right word with which
to characterize his commitment to his art, his muse, his hip flask and the
Big No, as in no to the straight and narrow, no to the clean and tidy. But
it does have a nice ring.


As reviewed by Mick LaSalle writing for the San Francisco Chronicle

There are literary types who like to go slumming, who like to think of
themselves as roughnecks. On the other side of the coin, there are many
Skid-Row drunks who fancy themselves as great creative artists. Both types
are poseurs, and both are very common. Their affectations and delusions put
them in contrast to the poet and novelist Charles Bukowski, who was the real
thing: a genuine lowlife, and a genuine talent.

"Factotum" is a film about his early working life, based on his
autobiographical second novel. A "factotum" is someone who does a wide
variety of jobs, usually in a subordinate capacity, and in the film Henry
Chinaski -- Bukowski's alter ego -- goes from job to job doing anything. He
delivers ice, works in a pickle factory and gets a job dusting a huge
statue. In his free time, and often during work hours, he gets drunk and has
sex with alcoholic women. "Factotum" is a grim and sometimes funny
examination of life on the margins and of a singular artist's world.

What a world. Bukowski wrote with pristine clarity, and yet his existence,
as presented here, looks like a muddle of alcoholism and encounters with
pathetic, boring people. It's fascinating and, if true, rather amazing: In
"Factotum," he's not a man deciding to live poor so he can write. He's a man
in his true element, a half step up from Skid Row, who somehow happens to be
locked into some creative circuit. Though the stuff of his life looks
absolutely barren of inspiration -- the same dives, the same rooming houses,
the same conversations with the same kinds of drunks -- he's churning out
three short stories a week. He's not Henry Miller, suffering for his art and
trying to walk on the wild side. He belongs there, and he's not really
suffering.

Too often when the popular arts depict people who are different from most
people, they take the obligatory sentimental default: But after all, we're
all the same. Well, no. We're not all the same, and it's enriching to know
the ways in which we're not. That's a high calling of art, to enable people
to transcend their own experience and understand something different.
"Factotum" does that.


As reviewed by Kenneth Turan writing for the Los Angeles Times

The low-life serenade writing style of the rebellious Charles Bukowski is an
acquired taste, but the good news about "Factotum" is that you don't need to
acquire it in order to thoroughly enjoy this playfully bleak piece of work.

That's because "Factotum," based on a 1975 Bukowski novel, is actually a
delicate melding of a trio of sensibilities that don't naturally cohere. It
gracefully combines the bleak world of the despairing poet and novelist with
the droll point of view of Norwegian director Bent Hamer and the distinctly
American independent acting sensibility of stars Matt Dillon and Lili
Taylor.

This may sound ungainly, but the result is a surprisingly satisfying film,
true to Bukowski and itself, a work that manages to make the man and his
profane world more palatable without compromising on who he was and what he
stood for.

The voice of the disenfranchised and the by-alcohol-dispossessed, Bukowski,
who died in 1994, recently returned to the news when his widow donated his
literary archive to the prestigious Huntington Library. Considered a major
literary figure in Europe, he's attracted cinematic notice before, in an
informative documentary called "Bukowski: Born Into This" and in several
fiction films, including "Barfly" (1987), in which his alter ego Henry
Chinaski was played by Mickey Rourke.

Director Hamer also has a noteworthy past: His charming "Kitchen Stories"
was a surprise art-house hit a few years back. Assisted here by the
mischievous music of Norway's Kristin Asbjornsen, who has turned some of
Bukowski's poems into songs, "Factotum" displays the director's trademark
absurdist sensibility and gift for whimsical humor.


Film reviews researched and edited by Peter Haggart
* * *

Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre
508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho
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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