3-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep, Swoosie Kurtz, and Jill Eikenberry star as former classmates at a reunion seven years after their graduation from Mount Holyoke College, who assess whether they have achieved their youthful goals. In a flashback, the friends – all part of a group dubbed “uncommon” because they were expected to be “amazing” before they reached thirty – relive their senior year and examine the influences that shaped them. Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein’s first play illustrates facing adulthood at the height of the women’s movement.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
FIGHT was based on improvisations developed by Charles Rydell and Brigid Berlin. In FIGHT the actors play a New York couple locked in a hell of relentless combat and intimacy. Conceived by Andy Warhol.
An ordinary middle class suburban couple sees a celebrity parrot on TV who supposedly foretells the future. The parrot predicts the world is coming to an end. The couple are initially shocked, and then decide to make the most of the time they have left.
In this short by the British animators Derek Lamb and Jeff Hale, a music hall performer detaches his arms, legs, ears and eventually his head for the amusement of the audience. There’s a wry humour to his performance, but also a striking sense of detail in his movements and gestures- Lamb and Hale were both veterans of the animation world by the time they collaborated on the short. Their style will likely be familiar to anyone who watched Sesame Street during the 80s or 90s- cartoons by both Lamb and Hale were in regular rotation on the show.
A corrosive comment on romantic love by the brilliant Japanese animator Yôji Kuri; a bedraggled male is chased endlessly in alienated landscapes by a voracious female continually repeating the word ‘Ai’ (‘love’, in Japanese). Her attempts at domesticating him with a chain fail, but the chase continues, forever.
A black-and-white short without any words that shows how seven different people spend a Sunday. Karpo Godina’s first professional short and his last black-and-white film.
Arguably Larry Gottheim’s most exuberant experiment in the single-shot, single-roll format (and his first with a soundtrack), HARMONICA trains the camera on a friend improvising a tune in the backseat of a moving car. Held out the window, the harmonica becomes a musical conduit for the wind, while Gottheim’s film transforms before our eyes into a playful meditation on wrangling the natural elements into art.
Documentary on history and culture of the gypsy communities worldwide. Part One takes us on a search for the lost gypsy tribes of Egypt, up the Nile to the ancient town of Luxor in the shadow of the great Pharaoh’s tombs. Along the way, we meet dancing girls and acrobats, magicians, fortune-tellers and even mystics performing an exorcism. Part Two is a penetrating, provocative tour of a fabled people’s existence. It reveals the prejudice they still face daily and which they combat with the lyrics and music they have carried and adapted on their long migrations.