film

"The Great Gatsby" aka 'The Great Glitzy'

James Sanford — Fri, 10 May 2013 00:36:01 +0000

If the old saying that nothing succeeds like excess were true, director Baz Luhrmann’s movies would have out-grossed Avatar, Titanic and everything in the Star Wars catalog. Over the past 20 years, the Australian filmmaker has built a reputation as a filmmaker who always buys in bulk when it comes to sets, costumes, music and emotions.

'How to Survive A Plague': A history of AIDS activism

Rebecca Thiele — Thu, 02 May 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Kalamazoo College will screen the documentary How to Survive A Plague, directed by K-College alum David France, Sunday at the Dalton Theatre at 7 p.m. The documentary follows two major activists groups in the fight to keep people from dying of AIDS, the Treatment Action Group and the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. Now it’s set to be made into an TV miniseries on ABC.

Amour: A film about true devotion

James Sanford — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:39:14 +0000

You can see Amour at Western Michigan University’s Little Theatre. The first showing is Friday night at 7.

There’s a good reason why so many love stories end with the couple heading for the altar or happily running off together. That’s because falling in love is easy and staying in love can be very hard work -- especially if you spend 30 or 40 or 50 years with the same partner.

Silent film screening to feature live performance by famous klezmer musician

Rebecca Thiele — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:34:41 +0000

During this year’s Jewish Film Festival in Kalamazoo, movie-goers will get a chance to see the 1918 silent film, The Yellow Ticket. Most films in the festival will be shown at Celebration Cinema this weekend.

“It’s talking about a young Jewish woman who emigrates from Poland to Russia to study medicine, which is quite a progressive concept I think for a film that was made in the early 1900s,” says organizer Naomi Morse of the Jewish Federation of Kalamazoo and Southwest Michigan.

During the screening, viewers will get to hear the film’s score performed live by famous klezmer musician Alicia Svigals and pianist Marilyn Lerner. Klezmer is a type of Jewish folk music that originated in Eastern Europe.

The Host: An unbelievable alien invasion, but not a dull one

James Sanford — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 18:02:39 +0000

“I always liked science-fiction stories: I never dreamed I’d be living in one,” says one character in director Andrew Niccol’s “The Host.” But that’s the situation faced by everyone on Earth in the eerie future that writer Stephenie Meyer has envisioned. An alien race known as the Souls has seized control of the planet, taken over the bodies of nearly every person and created a world in which poverty, misery and violence have been wiped out.