This week, Indie Memphis and Memphis In May are teaming up to bring you films from this year’s honored country, the Czech Republic.
Family Friend
On Tuesday at Malco’s Ridgeway Cinema Grille, director Jan Hřebejk presents his film Family Friend. Set in the early 1940s during the Nazi occupation of Europe, the film tells the stories of three resistance fighters, Jindřich (Martin Finger), Karel (Karel Dobry), and Otto (Jiří Macháček) who are arrested by the Gestapo. The film’s title refers to Jiří (Ondřej Sokol), a doctor who helps look after the families left behind, and whose relationship with Jindřich’s wife Vilma (Aňa Geislerová) starts to veer into the romantic. The film is the first installment in the Garden Store trilogy, created by Hřebejk with his partner, writer Petr Jarchovsky. Tickets are available on the Indie Memphis website.
This Week At The Cinema: Czech Mates and Norma Desmond
On Sunday, May 13 at 2:00 PM at the Paradiso, one of the greatest films of all times returns to the big screen when Turner Classic Movies presents Sunset Boulevard. Since its debut in 1952, it has been the definitive critique of the allure and poison of fame. Gloria Swanson delivers one of most incredible onscreen performances in cinema history as Norma Desmond, an actress who devoted everything to becoming a movie star. She succeeded, but then outlived her fame and locked herself away in her mansion crowded with tokens of her career. Billy Wilder’s masterpiece predicted and explained so much about the psychic landscape of the twentieth century. For just one example, forty years before Michael Jackson famously acquired a pet chimp named Bubbles, Norma Desmond was faced with the sticky question of what to do when her pet chimp passed into the great jungle in the sky. Check out this clip of Desmond’s introduction to narrator Joe Gillis, played by William Holden, in which Swanson slam dunks one of cinema’s greatest line deliveries.
This Week At The Cinema: Czech Mates and Norma Desmond (2)
See you at the movies!
