Inspiring, fantastic film is an intelligent delight

Do you like your fantasy movies serving-up the same old, tired routine? Over-bearing CGI effects? Loud, distorted, blaring music? Explosions? Mechanical monsters smashing into each other? Silly and utterly contrived arrays of phony-baloney characters and super heroes who stretch the imagination and plausibility only as far as a juvenile on an amped-up energy beverage?

OR

Do you like your fantasy movies to treat you as a mature human being? To exercise your mind intellectually? To give you food for thought? And do you crave to trust in the director and actors to take you along for a ride to a far-off adventurous shore, to wade into deeper waters, and yet to safely deliver you back on solid ground?

If so, Orlando is the movie for you. As the latest installment in Friday Films’ tribute to Great Women of the Screen, Orlando features the sparkling Tilda Swinton. Swinton has risen to prominence with acting genius and out-of-mainstream roles. To boot, she is the actress to love for her sweetly quirky manner and lifestyle.

Photo by Jeffrey Allison

The film itself is like a mystical convergence of Fellini, Merchant-Ivory, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Virginia Woolf, on whose novel the film is based. And with Quentin Crisp playing Queen Elizabeth I, how can you lose?

Originally released in 1992, Orlando has just been re-released by its studio and Friday Films is proud to have it. Join me for a thoroughly superb and elegantly eccentric experience in VMFA’s Leslie Cheek Theater this Friday, 8/27, at 6:30.

-- H. Hobart Cornell, Critic-at-large

Cool off with "Some Like it Hot!"

Some Like It Hot will “run wild” at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts this Friday at 6:30PM and in glorious black & white. If you are searching for the perfect summer entertainment -- and who is not? -- this part gangster picture and mostly hilarious comedy is the movie to see. 

Follow two hapless Chicago musicians who change their identities -- to put it mildly -- while on the lamb from mob bootleggers in 1929 wintery Chicago who end up in sunny Miami playing with an all-girl band. Whether it is your first time or the twentieth, this one never runs out of steam. Some Like It Hot will deliver the wit, cleverness, and belly laughs you so richly deserve.

It is a thoroughly quality production with director, Billy Wilder, coming off big hits such as Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd., and Seven Year Itch. Tony Curtis was a hot property after The Sweet Smell of Success. Oscar winner Jack Lemmon was rising to great heights of acting repute in drama as well as comedy.

Photo by Jeffrey Allison

And, last but not least, Hollywood’s most sensational and unpredictable leading lady, Marilyn Monroe tops off the bill. She was the supreme movie star of movie stars, the authentic blonde bombshell, who was too often imitated but never duplicated. In 1959 this sizzling picture was adults only! Do come into our modern air conditioned Leslie Cheek Theater and cool off with Some Like It Hot. See you there!

- H. Hobart Cornell, Critic-at-large

For tickets or more information on Friday Films at VMFA, visit www.vmfa.museum/fridayfilms.

Blue Star Voices

Blue Star Voices