Tuesday 11 December 8:30 pm Tom Jones (1963) Tony Richardson The first British film to win the the Best Picture Oscar since Laurence Olivier's "Hamlet," in 1948, "Tom Jones" made its star, Albert Finney, a household name in America. Based on Henry Fielding's famous novel, which was adapted to the screen by playwright John Osborne, it features Finney as the adventurous, amorous illegitimate son of a servant in eighteenth-century England. Osborne has condensed considerably Fileding's 1749 sprawlingly episodic adventure to fit a feature-length film (running time is 131 minute feature). Director Richardson treats the text as a slapstick rollicking material, inspired by silent film comedy devices, such as titles, wipes, slow-motion, etc. Both Osborn and Richrdson depart from the tradition of "kitchen-sink" realism that had marked their earlier works, manifest in the play and moviue "Look Back in Anger." Stylistically, Richardson also borrows >from the French New Wave in using his camera in a dynamic and jazzy way. "Tom Jones" was a commercial success prior to winning the 1963 Oscar and a smash-hit afterward; this period comedy is one of the most popular films of the entire decade. Several set-pieces are fantasically entertaining, such as the stag hunt at the estate of Griffith; the bedroom farce at the inn, and most memorable of all, Albert Finney and Joyce Redman staring at each other, while never stopping ripping food apart and stuffing it in their mouths, a scene that's both funny and strangely erotic. Reviewed by Emanuel Levi at www.emanuellevi.com

Wednesday 12 December 8:30 pm Reading Group - A Christmas Carol

Thursday 13 December THE WAR (2007) Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (Part 1) In the spring of 1945, as the war in Europe drew to a close, the CBS radio correspondent Eric Sevareid was troubled. He had been reporting on the fighting for four years, and had done his best to convey to his listeners back home all that he had seen and heard in Burma, France, Italy and Germany. But he was haunted by the sense that he had failed. He told his audience: "Only the soldier really lives the war. The journalist does not -- war happens inside a man -- and that is why, in a certain sense, you and your sons from the war will be forever strangers. If, by the miracles of art and genius, in later years two or three among them can open their hearts and the right words come, then perhaps we shall all know a little of what it was like -- and we shall know then that all the present speakers and writers hardly touched the story." For the past six years we have striven to create a documentary film series about the Second World War in that spirit. Ours has been, in part, a humbling attempt to understand "the things men do in war, and the things war does to them" (as Phil Caputo so aptly noted). We chose to explore the impact of the war on the lives of people living in four American towns -- Mobile, Alabama; Sacramento, California; Waterbury, Connecticut; and Luverne, Minnesota. Over the course of the film's nearly fifteen hours more than forty men and women opened their hearts to us about the war they knew -- and which we, their inheritors, could only imagine. Above all, we wanted to honor the experiences of those who lived through the greatest cataclysm in human history by providing the opportunity for them to bear witness to their own history. Our film is therefore an attempt to describe, through their eyewitness testimony, what the war was actually like for those who served on the front lines, in the places where the killing and the dying took place, and equally what it was like for their loved ones back home. We have done our best not to sentimentalize, glorify or aestheticize the war, but instead have tried simply to tell the stories of those who did the fighting -- and of their families. In so doing, we have tried to illuminate the intimate, human dimensions of a global catastrophe that took the lives of between 50 and 60 million people -- of whom more than 400,000 were Americans. Through the eyes of our witnesses, it is possible to see the universal in the particular, to understand how the whole country got caught up in the war; how the four towns and their people were permanently transformed; how those who remained at home worked and worried and grieved in the face of the struggle; and in the end, how innocent young men who had been turned into professional killers eventually learned to live in a world without war. Over the course of seven episodes, we spend a great deal of time in battle -- on the ground, in the air and at sea, in Europe and the Pacific -- examining in countless ways and from many perspectives what one of our witnesses, Paul Fussell, described as "the real war." "The rest of it," he told us, "is just the show-biz war. The real war involves getting down there and killing people. And being killed yourself or just barely escaping it. And it gives you attitudes about life and death that are unobtainable anywhere else." Throughout the series, one theme has stayed constant, one idea has continually emerged as we have gotten to know the brave men and women whose stories it has been our privilege to tell: in extraordinary times, there are no ordinary lives. The Second World War was fought in thousands of places, too many for any one accounting. This is the story of four American towns and how their citizens experienced that war. From the PBS web site

Friday 14 December 9pm Dinner followed by KaKa Film Night (our first Official Audience Participation Monthly Film) Showgirls (1993) Paul Verhoeven

Rape, Lesbianism, Prostitution and Interracial Relationships. Since its release, the movie has achieved cult status.According to activist writer Naomi Klein, ironic enjoyment of the film initially arose among those with the video before MGM capitalized on the idea. MGM noticed the video was performing all right, since "trendy twenty-somethings were throwing Showgirls irony parties, laughing sardonically at the implausibly poor screenplay and shrieking with horror at the aerobic sexual encounters." It is shown at midnight madness theaters alongside movies like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. It is heralded as one of the best "bad movies" of all time, and is somewhat of a camp classic (in the vein of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls). Even though the film was not so successful when first released, it is a very well known film, and over the years it has become increasingly popular. The DVD release to this day is one of MGM's top 10 selling DVDs. from Wikipedia

Sunday 16 December 14:00 The War (Repeat from Thursday Night see above)and Games of all kinds downstairs

Tuesday 18 December 8:30 pm Big Fish (2003) Tim Burton

Hook, Line and SInker: A Life of Telling Tall Tales Tim Burton -- who made ''Pee-Wee's Big Adventure,'' ''Edward Scissorhands'' and the first two ''Batman'' movies, among others -- is surely one of the most prodigiously imaginative filmmakers around. His best movies glide effortlessly from devilish whimsy to startling perversity, and even when his storytelling falters his inimitably strange visual sensibility leaves its haunting, humorous traces on the memory. There are, true to form, some startling scenes in his new movie, ''Big Fish'': the hero's arrival in a hamlet called Specter, where the streets are paved with grass and the citizens are always barefoot; his encounter with a witch (Helena Bonham Carter) whose glass eye can reveal the future; his appearance on a campus quadrangle carpeted with daffodils. The movie also includes, for good measure, a giant named Karl, a squad of circus folk (led by Danny DeVito), a pair of conjoined Korean twins and some menacing, anthropomorphic trees. The theme of ''Big Fish,'' adapted by John August from the novel by Daniel Wallace, is the transforming, sometimes bewildering power of the imagination, which would seem to be a natural subject for Mr. Burton. But the most curious thing about this magical-realist fable, which opens today in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto, is how thin and soft it is, how unpersuasive and ultimately forgettable even its most strenuous inventions turn out to be.

From a Review by A.O. Scott from the New York Times December 10, 2003

Thursday 20 December 9:30pm Live Performance - Agnethe Melchiorsen - New Songs