Dienstag, 25. Februar 2014

take 67: 26.2.2014

THE LOST PARADISE OF UBU


Door open 20h


20h30: Australia 1987, 86min.
http://i.imgur.com/yXrgp.jpg 
Azaria Chamberlain was not killed by a dingo but saved and raised by said dingos. She is raised in an incestuous dingo environment and travels back to Sydney transformed as the second coming...a new messiah for a new age.

She returns home to the demented family of a perverted movie producer and his wife trying to cover up their atrocities, two Nazi dykes busy raising up little Adolph with spankings and all, David Argue as a psychic investigator and incestuous dog boy, a mad scientist trying to discover the cure for AIDS and other diseases through human experimentation, its all here folks...





  
22h00: Poland 2003, 89 min. english subtitles

 
Based on themes of Alfred Jarry’s drama „Ubu Roi“, which premiered 1869 in Paris, Piotr Szulkin created a surreal take on Poland, full of allusions to historical and modern phenomena: By manipulating the masses and promising them prosperity, freedom and democracy, upstart “King Ubu” manages to take power. His vulgar and brutal reign ruins the country. Ubu surrounds himself with flatterers and – egged on by foreign ambassadors – starts a war against czarist Russia. After his defeat, his people oust him and his wife. Confident that he will always fall on his feet, Ubu goes into exile…

Piotr Szulkin adapts Alfred Jarry's work to create a caricature of the Polish nation (or, in Ubuesque lingo, of the "Folish nation") as it enters democracy and soon suffers from the shortage of beer. In an interview given in 2006, Szulkin said that "Ubu The King is becoming reality right at [his] doorstep. Dialogs and theatrical scenes cease to be cinematic fiction and parody." Critical of Poland, the film met with negative reactions among the Poles, and was never as popular as Szulkin's earlier films. But that doesn't prevent the rest of us from enjoying it! Although much different from his science-fiction films, Szulkin's Ubu król is a masterpiece of bawd absurdity, political satire insofar as it is a satire of politics tout court, and Rabelaisian crassness.

Alfred Jarry's used here has been brilliantly translated by a Polish genius of puns, Tadeusz Boy-Zelenski, and it would be impossible to reproduce the same complexity in English. Just to give a few examples: In his speech to the nation, Ubu presents his "economic plan": turning shit into gas and using that to brew the much wanted beverage: beer. However, in Polish, "to brew beer" also means to "cause trouble"--and thus the economic "solution" is already programmed as the beginning of a new crisis. The alchemical substance, merdre, is translated as "grówno"... which in turn contains the word "równo"--"equal", thus alluding to the basis of democracy... Freedom, "wolność", on the other hand, dissolves in no less excremential "rozwolnienie", or diarrhea... (Hmm... Subtitling this definitely won't be an easy project!)

Besides Jarry's play, Szulkin uses a number of songs: from operatic arias (e.g. Moniuszko's Straszny dwór, Verdi's Nabucco), through some drinking songs, to revolutionary chants. The lines from the chorus are recited by a little girl, vaguely reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland, with her prim dress and her jumping rope.


Dienstag, 18. Februar 2014

take 66: 19.2.2014

BACK WITH A BLAST!!!

Door open 20h

20h15: Spain 1976, with english subtitles
 
 
 
A couple of English tourists rent a boat to visit the fictitious island of Almanzora, just off the southern Spanish coast. When they arrive, they find the town deserted of adults, there's only children who don't speak but stare at them with eerie smiles. They soon discover that all the children of the island have been posessed by a mysterious force or madness which they can pass from one to another, and which makes them attack and murder their elders, who can't defend themselves because nobody dares to kill a child...  
 KINO ANDERS 4 of 4 STARS!





  
22h15 
SURPRISE HORROR MOVIE!!!