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<FONT FACE="Verdana"><B>This week at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre...<BR>
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Summer Matinee series continues with:<BR>
</B><FONT COLOR="#800000"><H2>Nanny McPhee (PG)<BR>
</H2></FONT><B>Wednesday, July 19<BR>
1:00 PM<BR>
</B>$4/adult or teen, $1/child under 13<BR>
<B><BR>
</B><FONT COLOR="#800000"><H2>DaVinci Code (PG-13)<BR>
</H2></FONT><B>Friday & Saturday, July 21 & 22<BR>
7:00 PM<BR>
Sunday, July 23<BR>
3:45 & 7:00 PM</B> <BR>
$5/adult, $3/child under 13<BR>
KFS pass accepted for Sunday movies<BR>
<B>(See movie reviews below)<BR>
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Next week at the Kenworthy-<BR>
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Sponsored by <I>US Bank<BR>
</I><FONT COLOR="#000080"><H2>Ice Age: The Meltdown (PG)<BR>
</H2></FONT><B>Wednesday, July 26<BR>
1:00 PM<BR>
</B>Also showing-<BR>
<B>Thursday - Saturday, July 27 – 29<BR>
7:00 PM<BR>
Sunday, July 30<BR>
4:45 & 7:00 PM<BR>
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<B>Coming in August:</B> Goal!; Water; An Inconvenient Truth; A Prairie Home Companion<BR>
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Regular movie prices: $5/adult, $3/child 12 or younger<BR>
Wednesday matinee prices: $4/adult, $1/child 12 or younger<BR>
KFS series pass prices: $30/10 films, $75/30 films. KFS pass good only for Sunday movies.<BR>
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For more information on movies, events, rental rates, and/or to download a schedule, visit our website at www.kenworthy.org<BR>
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This week’s movie reviews-<BR>
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</B><FONT COLOR="#800000"><H2>Nanny McPhee<BR>
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Directed by Kirk Jones; written by Emma Thompson, based on the "Nurse Matilda" books by Christianna Brand<BR>
Rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It has some strong language.<BR>
Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes<BR>
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<B><I><U>As reviewed by Marrit Ingman writing for the Austin (Texas) Chronicle<BR>
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“There should be more movies like this,” opined one grandmotherly type to another at our screening. Based on Christianna Brand’s Nurse Matilda books and featuring an A-list cast of British character actors, <U>Nanny McPhee</U> is indeed something of a rarity: a movie for children that is about children and their world. <BR>
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There are no aliens in it, no cartoon animals, and no fast-food restaurants. (Partly this is due to the turn-of-the-century setting, but it’s also a matter of the film’s tone.) And while the kids – seven of them – are pretty much wisenheimers, they are not cooler-than-thou, and the adults in their lives aren’t blithering idiots, but flawed people who make mistakes until they reach a point of reckoning. <BR>
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<B><I><U>As reviewed by Stephen Holden writing for the New York Times<BR>
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The title character in "Nanny McPhee," loosely adapted from Christianna Brand's Nurse Matilda books (written in the 1960's), is a severe, unsmiling crone who wields a crooked walking stick that she raps hard on the floor to conjure magic. McPhee also has an alarming habit of materializing out of thin air while always insisting (in one of the movie's running jokes) that she knocked beforehand. Ominously reassuring, she promises she will be there "when you need me but don't want me."<BR>
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McPhee is a clownish figure with a bulbous nose, facial warts and a buck tooth that droops over her lower lip. As she shapes up a chaotic brood of seven children who have driven their widowed father, Mr. Brown (Colin Firth), to his wits' end, her physical flaws melt away, one by one.<BR>
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The day she arrives on the doorstep out of the blue, Mr. Brown, who works in a funeral parlor, is facing imminent financial ruin and the breakup of his family, having run through 17 nannies, who all were driven out of the house by his impossible brood. He has been put on notice by his wife's wealthy, imperious Aunt Adelaide (Angela Lansbury), who has been supporting the family, that unless he remarries within a month, she will cut them off. The role of the dithery, harried dad is well off the beaten path for Mr. Firth, but he dispatches it with unassuming ease.<BR>
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Just as she arrives, the children are gleefully destroying the kitchen and have tied up the family's good-hearted cook, Mrs. Blatherwick (Imelda Staunton). McPhee sets to work immediately: her strategy is to let the children have their way until she conjures a magical moment of reckoning. Once they've started making mischief, the children are unable to stop what they've started until they beg "please," and she calls a halt to the spell.<BR>
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The movie's boldest stroke is its garish visual palette, which paints late-Victorian Britain in psychedelic Day-Glo hues. Much of the visual excess is heaped on the odious Mrs. Quickly (Celia Imrie), a snobbish, carnivorous widow to whom Mr. Brown, to meet the marriage deadline, becomes engaged. Outfitted in glaring fuchsia, she strolls around with two pet sheep, each dyed a different hideous color.<BR>
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Delightful performances buoy the movie immensely. Ms. Lansbury's frosty Adelaide is as intimidating as any snobbish grande dame embodied by the mistress of hauteur, Dame Judi Dench. Ms. Macdonald blossoms like an English rose in the sunlight. Ms. Staunton's Mrs. Blatherwick is as spluttery and sentimental as Angela Baddeley's Mrs. Bridges from the television series "Upstairs, Downstairs." As Simon, the oldest and most diabolical of the holy terrors, Thomas Sangster wears the Mephistophelean grin of a pubescent Mick Jagger plotting mischief.<BR>
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Richest of all is Ms. Thompson's McPhee, who conveys with a thousand subtle hints that just behind her affronted snaggletoothed glare lies a reservoir of affection and good will.<BR>
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<B><I><U>As reviewed by Dan Callahan writing for Slant Magazine<BR>
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The movie heralds something like a return for Emma Thompson, who wrote the witty screenplay and stars as a forbidding governess who takes an unruly brood of children in hand and teaches them how to be self-reliant. Thompson wears a discolored W.C. Fields-type nose, two warts (one of which sprouts picturesque hairs) and a large snaggle-tooth that makes her speak slowly and carefully. As the children's equally forbidding aunt, Angela Lansbury also wears a large fake nose: she's like a cross between Lady Bracknell and a parrot. When Lansbury hilariously flutes the word "incest," she could be Edith Evans wondering about a handbag (it's an amusing reminder of her role as the son-kissing Mrs. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate). From Lansbury and Thompson to Imelda Staunton, Derek Jacobi and Colin Firth, who is very touching as the children's widowed father, <U>Nanny McPhee</U> is filled with British pros having a field day.<BR>
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The film is visually beautiful, with great splashes of blue, purple, and green in the settings and the clothing. The story's climax involves the vigorous, marksmanlike throwing of multi-colored cakes into deserving faces and a storm of snow that wipes the movie's visual palette clean with flurries of dazzling white. Director Kirk Jones uses special effects so discreetly that they really do seem magical. When you compare this movie to something like the disastrous Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, which it resembles to some degree, it's clear just how excellent <U>Nanny McPhee</U> is. There's a special kind of genteel yet deeply vulgar dark humor that only the Brits know how to do, and Thompson's guiding intelligence and "get on with it!" point of view is deeply and vivifyingly British. Thompson's Nanny can seem like a tyrant, at first, forcing her rebellious charges to say "please" and "thank you." But she's really teaching them that when you have respect for others, you have respect for yourself. At a testing point in the narrative, Nanny refuses to help Simon (Thomas Sangster), the leader of the kids. "Think," she says, a bracing, crucial command that epitomizes her skill with children.<BR>
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Thompson, who was pleasingly ubiquitous in the early '90s, has been rather unavailable since (she's been busy raising children.) If the outlook of <U>Nanny McPhee</U> reflects her own, then she has some lucky kiddies. The movie celebrates cleverness and self-possession; at the screening I attended, the theater was packed with noisy children, climbing over seats, making a ruckus. When the film began, they fell silent, and they stayed silent and rapt throughout, as if Nanny was having a powerful effect on them. For kids, Nanny McPhee might be a new classic, the sort of thing they want to watch over and over again, and it's so good and so much fun that parents shouldn't mind the repetition much.<BR>
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<FONT COLOR="#800000"><H2>The Da Vinci Code<BR>
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Directed by Ron Howard<BR>
Written by Akiva Goldsman. Based on the novel by Dan Brown.<BR>
Rated PG-13 for disturbing images, violence, some nudity, thematic material, brief drug references and sexual content.<BR>
Running time: 2 hours, 28 minutes<BR>
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<B><I><U>As reviewed by Philip French writing for The Observer (London)<BR>
</U></I></B><BR>
We have had Dan Brown's novel, two dozen books expanding, exploiting or refuting it, numerous cultural commentators on <U>The Da Vinci Code - the Phenomenon</U> and <U>The Da Vinci Code - the Trial</U>. Now, at last, we have “the Movie.”<BR>
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The movie begins briskly by cross-cutting between a patronisingly simplistic lecture on iconology being given in Paris by Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks looking like Richard E Grant on a bad-hair day) and some dirty work at the Louvre. We've seen the antagonists of Godard's Bande à part run through the Louvre in four minutes, a half-blind Juliette Binoche being taken there on a secret, nocturnal visit in Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, and Paul Newman standing riveted in front of Géricault's Raft of the Medusa. But nothing has prepared us for the museum's ageing curator, Jacques Sauniere (Jean-Pierre Marielle), being murdered there after hours by an albino monk, Silas (Paul Bettany).<BR>
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Before he dies, Sauniere provides a series of clues, mostly written in his own blood, involving the pentagram, Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Vitruvian Man and so on. To the crime scene, Captain Fache (Jean Reno) brings Langdon and Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou). Langdon is there because he knew Sauniere, is professor of religious symbology (a branch of codology) at Harvard and, it transpires, is being framed for the killing. Sophie is a police cryptographer, the granddaughter of Sauniere, and is also being set up for this and subsequent crimes.<BR>
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After working out the clues with the speed of a stockbroker doing the Telegraph crossword on the 8.15 from Tunbridge Wells, they go on the run together. Over the next two days, they brief each other on matters of cryptology, the Holy Grail, the birth of Christianity, Opus Dei and the Priory of Sion, while escaping from the British and French cops and various would-be assassins with the ease and ingenuity of Harry Houdini. The cryptographers are constantly creeping into crypts, talking crap and copping out as clues lead to bizarre discoveries and encounters in churches in France, Scotland and England, including Westminster Abbey.<BR>
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<U>The Da Vinci Code</U> is essentially a familiar sort of conspiracy movie that assumes that nothing in this world or in history is as it seems. For two millenniums, sinister and benign forces have been at work to protect and deceive. In this case, we are invited to believe that a patriarchal Catholic church has been preserving the idea that Christ was wholly divine, while a secret society of good men (Isaac Newton, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Louvre's Jacques Sauniere among them) have been protecting the descendants of a human Christ and his bride, Mary Magdalene, embodiment of the eternal feminine.<BR>
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The film brings in elements of two popular conspiracy series: the Indiana Jones yarns (Langdon is another handsome, two-fisted, adventurous, questing academic) and the Harry Potter fantasies (Sophie, like Harry, is an anointed one and, as here, cowled assassins are on the loose around Hogwarts).<BR>
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But there are also traces of Mel Gibson's <U>The Passion of the Christ</U>. The movie's chief killer, Silas, not only delivers his mobile phone reports to his employer, the Spanish bishop, Manuel Aringarosa (Alfred Molina), in Latin, but he also practises the corporal mortification Opus Dei insists on by flagellating himself in a manner that would win Gibson's enthusiastic approval and wearing a tight garter of nails, a form of self-punishment known as a cilice. Not all Opus Dei members submit themselves to such masochistic torture, the suave bishop explains, and one supposes that for Ruth Kelly offering herself up to a daily flaying by the press is mortification enough.<BR>
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Hanks seems constantly perturbed, behaving as if Forrest Gump had been cast as Sherlock Holmes, and the toothsome Tautou is more maudlin than Magdalene, her thick accent often rendering her expository contributions difficult to follow. However, Ian McKellen, as the camp, conspiratorial Grail expert, the super-rich Old Etonian Sir Leigh Teabing, injects some life into the affair through the simple glee he brings to a role that's a cross between a megalomaniac Bond villain and a prim Anthony Blunt. He handles with some skill the didactic scene in which he explains to Tautou and the audience the arcane symbolism of Da Vinci's The Last Supper, which lies at the centre of the book's drama and theology.<BR>
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I don't think anyone is likely to have their faith shaken or renewed by <U>The Da Vinci Cod</U>e, though, if you're looking for a truly distinguished thriller that debunks the history of conspiracy theories, get hold of Umberto Eco's <U>Foucault's Pendulum</U>. Anyone worried or puzzled about the theological issues raised by Dan Brown could do worse than read Bart D Ehrman's <U>Truth and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code</U>, a lucid, unaggressive book by the chairman of the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina, who actually enjoyed the novel.<BR>
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He doesn't come to the defence of Opus Dei, but it couldn't buy publicity like the book and film have provided. It has been given unprecedented opportunities to present its case, and very likely shops in Soho and elsewhere specialising in correctional equipment are seeking Opus Dei's imprimatur.<BR>
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How Columbia Pictures intends to deal with the protests from the National Organisation for Albinism and Hypo-pigmentation over the depiction of Silas, the albino assassin, I don't know.<BR>
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Some years ago, the late Art Buchwald suggested that the reason there were so many psychopathic villains in the movies was that psychopaths have no professional organisation to protect their interests.<BR>
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<B><I><U>As reviewed by Steve Davis writing for the Austin Chronicle<BR>
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God help the moviegoer with attention deficit disorder: The Da Vinci Code comes at you like the fast and the furious and seldom lets up. Its labyrinthine narrative of religious conspiracies, Christian revisionism, and complex puzzle-clues don't make for a leisurely experience, but it's not taxing to the point of inducing a headache. <BR>
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While Akiva Goldman's faithful adaptation of Dan Brown's runaway bestseller and pop-culture phenomenon treats the novel as if it were a sacred text, the blur between the film and its literary source should come as no real surprise, given how reading The Da Vinci Code often felt like watching a movie. <BR>
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The Da Vinci Code takes you along for the ride, but it never deigns to ask you where you’d like to go. Director Howard does a serviceable job of keeping up the film's pace, and an outstanding job of visualizing the clues that provide the key to what one fanatical character calls the "greatest cover-up in history." The deconstruction of Da Vinci's "The Last Supper" is so particularly well-done that it's hard to argue with its logic, if you're open-minded to that sort of thing. <BR>
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Tom Hanks seems oddly subdued in the role of the symbology scholar on the run from the French police after being wrongly accused of a curator’s murder in the Louvre that sets the plot in high gear. Granted, his character is just a pawn in the swirl of intrigue that envelops him, but Hanks' underplaying isn't very engaging and sometimes works against the movie. For all the brouhaha, The Da Vinci Code is really nothing but the Hardy Boys dressed up in the provocative attire of questioning centuries-old Christian beliefs about the divinity of Jesus Christ, the role of Mary Magdalene, and other aspects of the faith. If you take this stuff seriously, one way or another, you're sure to be duped. You've got to hand it to Mr. Brown: So dark the con of man, indeed.<BR>
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<B><I><U>As reviewed by Roger Ebert writing for the Chicago Sun-Times<BR>
</U></I></B><BR>
Let us begin by agreeing that The Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction. And that since everyone has read the novel, I need only give away one secret -- that the movie follows the book religiously. While the book is a potboiler written with little grace and style, it does supply an intriguing plot. Luckily, Ron Howard is a better filmmaker than Dan Brown is a novelist; he follows Brown's formula (exotic location, startling revelation, desperate chase scene, repeat as needed) and elevates it into a superior entertainment, with Tom Hanks as a theo-intellectual Indiana Jones.<BR>
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Hanks stars as Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbologist in Paris for a lecture when Inspector Fache (Jean Reno) informs him of the murder of museum curator Jacques Sauniere (Jean-Pierre Marielle). This poor man has been shot and will die late at night inside the Louvre; his wounds, although mortal, fortunately leave him time enough to conceal a safe deposit key, strip himself, cover his body with symbols written in his own blood, arrange his body in a pose and within a design by Da Vinci, and write out, also in blood, an encrypted message, a scrambled numerical sequence and a footnote to Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), the pretty French policewoman whom he raised after the death of her parents. Most people are content with a dying word or two; Jacques leaves us with a film treatment.<BR>
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Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou and Jean Reno do a good job of not overplaying their roles, and Sir Ian McKellen overplays his in just the right way, making Sir Leigh into a fanatic whose study just happens to contain all the materials for an audio-visual presentation that briefs his visitors on the secrets of Da Vinci's "The Last Supper" and other matters. Apparently he keeps in close touch with other initiates. On the one hand, we have a conspiracy that lasts 2,000 years and threatens the very foundations of Christianity, and on the other hand a network of rich dilettantes who resemble a theological branch of the Baker Street Irregulars.<BR>
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Yes, the plot is absurd, but then most movie plots are absurd. That's what we pay to see. What Ron Howard brings to the material is tone and style, and an aura of mystery that is undeniable. He begins right at the top; Columbia Pictures logo falls into shadow as Hans Zimmer's music sounds simultaneously liturgical and ominous. The murder scene in the Louvre is creepy in a ritualistic way, and it's clever the way Langdon is able to look at letters, numbers and symbols and mentally rearrange them to yield their secrets. He's like the Flora Cross character in "Bee Season," who used kabbalistic magic to visualize spelling words floating before her in the air.<BR>
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The movie works; it's involving, intriguing and constantly seems on the edge of startling revelations. After it's over and we're back on the street, we wonder why this crucial secret needed to be protected by the equivalent of a brain-twister puzzle crossed with a scavenger hunt. The trail that Robert and Sophie follow is so difficult and convoluted that it seems impossible that anyone, including them, could ever follow it. The secret needs to be protected up to a point; beyond that it is absolutely lost, and the whole point of protecting it is beside the point. Here's another question: Considering where the trail begins, isn't it sort of curious where it leads? Still, as T.S. Eliot wrote, "In my beginning is my end." Maybe he was on to something.<BR>
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<I>Film reviews researched and edited by Peter Haggart<BR>
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<FONT COLOR="#008000"><FONT SIZE="5"><B>Take a seat!</B></FONT></FONT> We mean that literally. The Kenworthy is offering you the opportunity to purchase one of a limited number of theater chairs in the main auditorium. Your gift will entitle you to an engraved, brass name plate mounted on the back of the seat of your choice (based upon availability). One individual or business name per seat, please.<BR>
<BR>
This naming opportunity, back by popular demand, is available for a donation of $500 per chair. You may purchase a chair in two installments of $250 over two years, or in three installments of $200 over three years.<BR>
<BR>
Your gift will assist with the ongoing operation and renovation of the Kenworthy Theater and fulfillment of our mission to be Moscow's premiere, historic, downtown, community performing arts venue and cinematic art house.<BR>
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For information about the Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre, call Julie Ketchum, Executive Director, at 208-882-4127.<BR>
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<BR>
<I>Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre<BR>
</I>508 S. Main Street, Moscow, Idaho<BR>
</B>208-882-4127<BR>
Sign up for this weekly email on events and movies at the Kenworthy by logging onto our website <BR>
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</U></FONT>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~<BR>
PAMELA PALMER, <B>Volunteer<BR>
</B>Mailto:ppalmer@moscow.com<BR>
Film and Events Committee <BR>
Kenworthy Performing Arts Centre<BR>
<BR>
http://www.kenworthy.org<BR>
To speak with a KPAC staff member, <BR>
call (208) 882-4127<BR>
Mailto:kpac@moscow.com<BR>
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