The Wackness

AUG. 1-12
(FIRST WEEK 8/1-5)
FRI-TUES 3, 5, 7, 9
SAT-SUN MAT 1
(SECOND WEEK 8/6-12)
WED-TUES 5, 9:15, SAT-SUN MAT 1

Luke is a shy young man, an Upper East Side New Yorker, without many friends and not very trusting of adults.  In the summer of 1994, he is between high school and college, making pocket money selling marijuana from an ice cream cart.  A regular client is Dr. Squires, Luke's psychiatrist, who trades therapy for grass.  The good doctor's prescriptive advice for his patient to overcome his shyness is to find a girl and get laid.  But it happens that Luke's secret crush is Squires's own step-daughter, the socially secure and popular Stephanie.  Luke, of course, believes the doctor's advice is right and that he should follow it at once.  Winner of this year's Audience Awards at Sundance and at L.A., 'The Wackness,' said 'Rolling Stone,' is both "heartfelt and hilarious";  "an undeniable pleasure" (Chicago 'Sun-Times'). "Check out this gem," wrote 'Film Threat.'

Starring Ben Kingsley, Josh Peck, Jane Adams,
Written and Directed by Jonathan Levine, 2008
MAINE CO-PREMIERE
Running Time: 101 min Official Site

Beauty in Trouble

AUG. 6-12
WED-TUES 2:45, 7

After the devastating Prague floods of 2002 that leave thousands impoverished, Jarda has set up an illegal business with stolen cars.  In the flat attached to his chop shop he fights so much with his beautiful wife Marcela that, despite their passionate sex life together, she leaves him, escaping with her two children to move into a cramped apartment with her mother.  Her irritable and domineering stepfather, however, makes the change equally untenable.  When Jarda steals a car with a tracking system, he is caught, and at the police station Marcela meets the car's owner, an older man who becomes enchanted with her.  He offers her and the children more comfortable quarters there in the city and then invites them to his villa in Tuscany.  He is rich and kindly, gentle and respectful.  But his lovemaking lacks the excitement she feels with Jarda.  The film, wrote 'Film Journal International,' "is beautifully observed, with unending human surprise and a novelistic richness."  (In Czech)

Starring Ana Geislevrova, Jana Brejchova, Emilia Vasaryova, Josef Abrham
Directed by Jan Hrebejk, 2008
MAINE PREMIERE
Running Time: 110 min Official Site

Roman de Gare

AUG. 13-19
WED-FRI 3, 7
SAT-SUN MAT 1
SAT-TUES 5, 9

In this tense, intricately plotted thriller, we begin with seemingly unrelated characters whose paths eventually will cross in Claude Lelouch's "best work in over a decade" (Berardinelli); "smartly written and immensely satisfying."  Judith is a successful novelist being questioned by the police about two murders and a disappearance.  A serial killing pedophile has just escaped from prison.  After a fight with her boyfriend, Huguelle is abandoned at a rest stop on the highway when Pierre, a stranger, offers her a ride.  In one detail at least, he resembles the escaped killer.  She persuades him to impersonate her boyfriend and stay with her at her family's farm where she was going when her boyfriend drove off without her.  The questions of who is who abound, of who is creative or homicidal.  Wrote the San Francisco 'Chronicle,' "The movie has everything you'd want" in a 'roman de gare' (a popular novel you'd pick up at a train station or airport or take to the beach)--"stress, excitement, unexpected turns, and a meticulous design--but it also has complex characters, and that kicks it up a notch. It's the smartest and best suspense movie you're likely to see for a while." (In French) By the Director of 'Les Miserables,' 'A Man and a Woman'

Starring Written and Directed by Claude Lelouch, 2008
MAINE PREMIERE
Fanny Ardant, Dominique
Running Time: 103 min Official Site

Reprise

AUG. 13-19
WED-FRI 5, 9
SAT-TUES 3, 7

Two friends in their twenties finish their first novels at the same time and stand together at a mailbox in Oslo with manuscripts in hand.  They are filled with optimism and fantasy.  Phillip's book is accepted at once and published but Erik's is rejected.  Yet Phillip's sudden celebrity, minor as it is, seems to be the cause of the breakdown that follows, while Erik toughs out his disappointment and eventually sees his own book in print.  In their larger circle, friends are dependant, supportive, competitive;  their girlfriends threatening and essential.  "Trier's inspiring first feature," wrote the l.A. 'Times,' "joyfully tackles the process of self-creation, as well as the friendships that feed and sustain it, capturing the moment in life when nothing matters more than ideas, influences, and the possibility of shaping one's life into a work of art."  "An exuberant, exhilaratingly playful testament to being young and hungry--for life and meaning and immortality, and for other young and restless bodies--'Reprise,'" said the New York 'Times,' "is a blast of unadulterated movie pleasure."  The St. Louis 'Post-Dispatch' called it "the liveliest film of the year and easily one of the best."  (In Norwegian)

Starring Anders Danielsen Lie, Viktoria Winge, Espen Klouman-Hoiner, Pal Stokka
Written and Directed by Joachim Trier, 2008
PORTLAND PREMIERE
Running Time: 105 min Official Site

The Edge of Heaven

AUG. 20-26
WED-SAT 3, 7:15
SUN MAT 12:45
SUN-TUES 5, 9:15

In a complex plot that moves between Germany and Turkey, the film's six characters are three pairs of parent-and-child who increasingly interact as their lives overlap.  Yeter is a Turkish prostitute working in Bremen, where her customer Ali, a much older man and like her a transplanted Turk, asks her to come live with him.  His son Nejat is a professor there of German literature;  her daughter Ayten lives dangerously in Istanbul where she is an anti-government radical.  When Yeter dies through the accidental fault of Ali, his son travels to Turkey in search of Ayten to take her the bad news. But Ayten, escaping certain arrest as her colleagues are being rounded up, is on her way to Bremen in search of her mother with whom she has been out of touch, though Yeter's earnings have helped support her.  Wandering Bremen, Ayten meets Lotte, a university student, who befriends her with first a meal and then a room and then to share her bed.  Being lovers proves to endanger their freedom and their very lives, and Lotte's mother Susanne pleads with her daughter to abandon the affair and avoid what tragic entanglements may come of her devotion to this political radical.  "As the lives of the characters cross and entwine," wrote the New York 'Times,' there is a sense of human connections becoming stronger and thicker, of a fragile moral order coalescing beneath the randomness and cruelty of modern life."  (In German, Turkish, and English)

Starring Hanna Schygulla, Baki Davrak
Written and Directed by Fatih Akin, 2008
MAINE PREMIERE
Running Time: 122 min Official Site

The Grocer's Son

AUG. 20-26
WED-SAT 5:15, 9:30
SAT MAT 1
SUN-TUES 3, 7:15

Antoine left home ten years ago for life in the city, where he has been anything but a success, holding menial jobs, mostly waiting on table, that he loses frequently because of his quarrelsome disposition.  Now his father's heart attack, though they have not spoken in the decade he's been away, calls him reluctantly back to the rural town in Provence to help with the family business.  While his mother runs the store, Antoine is to take over the route his father drove with a truck full of groceries for the elderly whose small villages are some miles from town.  His resentful brother, immersed in his own business and facing a separation from his wife, thinks it's about time Antoine offered their parents some help.  His disagreeable and demanding father is critical of whatever he does.  Only his mother is glad to see him.  Antoine hates his new job and he's rude to his customers.  But Claire, his friend from the city, taking a break from her studies, joins him on his route, loves the beautiful countryside, and transforms the truck into a happy wagon.  Beginning to see the world through her eyes, he too is gradually transformed.  Customers prove to be colorful, eccentric, and warm.  Claire is too free-spirited for romance, but Antoine nurses his long-standing crush until the new Antoine finally wins her heart. "Intoxicating," said 'Film Journal International';  "a gem of a film," wrote the New York 'Times.'  (In French)

Starring Nicolas Cazale, Clotilde Hesme
Written and Directed by Eric Guirado, 2008
MAINE CO-PREMIERE
Running Time: 96 min Official Site

A Man Named Pearl

AUG. 27-SEPT. 2
WED-SAT 3, 7:15
SUN MAT 1
SUN-TUES 5, 9

"Every once in a while," wrote 'Spirituality and Practice,' "a film comes along that is a total surprise:  you discover that the images and people on the screen are taking you somewhere you've never been before,  It doesn't happen very often but when it does, you can feel the magic in your body and your mind as wonder and daylight sweep through you.  This enchanting documentary focuses on an extraordinary man, a garden of exquisite beauty and love, and a community that that has been brought to life by his artistry, enthusiasm, and sharing of the passion that moves him."  A story that begins with the ugly fact of racism becomes instead a feel-good movie of triumph and admiration.  Son of a sharecropper, Pearl Fryar works in a canning factory in a small, poor South Carolina town where he and his wife are denied a house in an all-white neighborhood because "black people don't keep up their yards."  So he and Metra acquire a house and three acres in a black neighborhood and Pearl begins his garden.  He plants bushes and trees and starts to grow and trim and shape them.  Without training or even drawings, he becomes an amazing sculptor, putting in hours in the evening after work, creating an ongoing, never ending, expanding gallery of art. Now it's Garden of the Month awards, national media attention, lectures to college art classes, imitations, exhibitions on museum lawns, busloads of tourists, and a Hollywood movie ('Edward Scissorhands') that his art inspired.  In his late 60s, he is modest, vigorous, and himself such a well-sculpted figure that there are visitors checking out the man as well as his art.

Starring Pearl Fryar
Directed by Scott Galloway and Brent Pierson, 2008
PORTLAND PREMIERE
Running Time: 78 min Official Site

Days and Clouds

AUG. 27-SEPT. 2
WED-SAT 4:45, 8:45
SAT MAT 12:45
SUN-TUES 2:45, 6:45

Early in their middle age in contemporary Genoa, Michele and Elsa are living an ideal life:  loving, prosperous, secure.  Then in a business move, his partners, one of them his oldest friend, oust him from the company he himself founded twenty years before.  He is too ashamed to tell anyone, especially his wife, and hasn't worked in two months, spending the days on his boat that he will have to sell along with their home.  Instead, in a last show of bravado, he throws a lavish birthday party for Elsa, picking up an enormous check they cannot afford.  Still, they make the best of it, adversity even drawing them closer.  They move to a small apartment.  Elsa suspends her volunteer work in fresco restoration and manages to find respectable employment.  But Michele, perceived as overqualified, finds nothing.  His humiliation deepens.  He takes a job delivering packages until his adult daughter spies him.  He takes another moving furniture with two low-level workers from his own former company.  Pretty soon he's too depressed to go to work at all and his furious wife berates him.  Friends abandon and betray them, one of them no longer remembering the money he borrowed from Michele and has not repaid.  "Few films," said 'Film Journal International,' "have dealt more incisively or compassionately with marriage," as Michele and Elsa cope with financial ruin and manage to salvage love.  "It is a simple yet gripping story which could happen to anyone."  (In Italian)

Starring Margherita Buy, Antonio Albanese
Directed by Silvio Soldini, 2008
MAINE PREMIERE
Running Time: 115 min Official Site