In addition, on March 19 the Dryden will present a special screening of Mary Pickford in The Poor Little Rich Girl, accompanied by a new score composed by Philip Carli and performed by the Flour City Orchestra. This special event is sponsored by the Humanities Project of the University of Rochester’s College of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering, in collaboration with George Eastman House and the Eastman School of Music. Special ticket prices: $15, $10 members and students. No Take-10 tickets or passes.

HOME – March 5

THE SUN – March 6

WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS – March 13

THE MAID – March 26 and 28

LOURDES – April 3 and 4

THE MAN FROM LONDON – April 17

South Korean cinema has enjoyed a considerable revival in the last decade, particularly with the kinetic, action-packed genre exercises from filmmakers like Park Chan Wook (Old Boy) and Bong Joon-Ho (The Host). But another strain of features has also been emerging, films like those by Hong Sang-soo (Woman on the Beach), which can best be described as low-key, character-driven black comedies. Daytime Drinking, the feature debut of Noh Young-Seok, belongs more to this latter group, but it has a willingness to go for the occasional big laugh and a somewhat perverse, Kafkaesque sense of dread that recalls the situation in Martin Scorsese’s brilliant After Hours.

At the beginning of Noh’s very funny comedy of errors, our hero, Hyuk-Jin, gets terribly drunk with his buddies after being dumped by his girlfriend. Pressured to accept an invitation for a weekend getaway with his friends, he arrives in a cold, distant province to find that his now-sober pals have all neglected to show up. Alone, he embarks on a strange road trip, encountering a series of individuals who continually misunderstand him and encourage him to drink until he’s blotto. These encounters typically end with hostility being unleashed upon Hyuk-Jin, and there’s more than one occurrence where he literally loses his pants.

Hyuk-Jin’s absurd journey offers a sort of deadpan variation on The Hangover, though it casts a more thoughtful and critical eye on a society not unlike our own where hazing and high-pressure drinking situations are not uncommon among men of all ages. Director Noh’s considerable talent, however, lies in his rare ability to put these serious ideas across with a light, assured touch. He’s a filmmaker to watch for.

Daytime Drinking will screen on April 9 at 8 p.m.

—Jim Healy, Assistant Curator, Exhibitions, Motion Picture Department

The New Director Series begins March 20 with 21 Below, an emotionally powerful new documentary filmed largely in Buffalo. 21 Below tells the compelling and multi-faceted story of one American family in crisis. Pregnant with her first child, Sharon returns to Buffalo to repair the relationship between her mother and her younger sister, Karen, who is pregnant with her third child and caring for one daughter dying from a rare genetic disease. Richly complex and inspiring, 21 Below unfolds as a compassionate portrait of a family coming apart and the compromises required for reconciliation. Director Samantha Buck will appear in person to introduce and answer questions after the screening. No Take-10 tickets or passes.

Though Tati produced only a handful of feature films, his iconoclastic aesthetics, exploration of class politics, refusal to work with professional actors, and view of a newly modern and consumerist postwar France gained him international acclaim as an auteur. Tati achieved notoriety for his revolutionary approach to sound design. He typically set dialogue at the same pitch as environmental noise, boosted sound effects meant to enhance sight gags, and recorded complex layers of interrelated effects, music, and ambient sound to correspond perfectly with visual cues, producing cinematic synaesthesia.

Oddly, his films were not as popular in France as they were abroad. Nevertheless, they inspired fellow French film giants like Robert Bresson and François Truffaut. The New York Times contends that Tati was “an unlikely and aloof member of the French New Wave” and suggests that his slapstick humor functions as a socio-cultural commentary in much the same fashion as Jean Luc Godard’s Marxist mantras. Tati, who explains his comedic skill as the product of keen observational skills, applied the same logic to his films.

In March, the Dryden Theatre will present the complete features (and one program of short films screening on March 3) of this filmmaker many consider to be the foremost chronicler of urban postwar France.

Tati’s first feature, Jour de fête (March 10), revolves around the trials and travails of a bumbling village postman who, inspired by drink and a documentary about the modernist efficiency of the American postal service, hatches a series of experiments to speed up his own delivery by bicycle. Tati introduced Hulot in Mr. Hulot’s Holiday (screening in a newly restored print on March 12 and 14), in which the hero has disastrous interactions with bourgeois sun worshippers at a seaside resort.

In the Oscar®-winning Mon Oncle (March 17), Tati’s best-known work, Hulot is uncle to a nephew being raised in a modernist house outfitted with the latest devices designed to economize time and labor. Tati’s third feature, Playtime (March 21), finds Hulot challenged by modernity in the city of Paris, which Tati completely fabricated on a massive set built on the outskirts of the actual city. Both films concern the alienating effects of postwar France’s obsession with modernist architecture and urban design, the proliferation of technology, and American-style conspicuous consumerism. In Trafic (March 24), Hulot is an automobile inventor and the focal point of “a satire on mankind’s ill-fated love-affair with the motor car.”

Tati’s final film, Parade (March 31), appropriately enough, brings his career full circle in that it is a document of a circus/music-hall performance featuring the director’s own mime acts.

—Dinah Holtzman, Assistant Film Programmer, Motion Picture Department

Special Thanks to Delphine Selles-Alvarez, Program Officer, Cinema, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, and Brian Belovarac and Sarah Finklea of Janus Films.

Beginning his career in documentaries, Forsyth made his feature debut in 1980 with a low-budget comedy about a group of Glaswegian teenagers (played by members of Glasgow Youth Theatre) who relieve their boredom by stealing sinks and plumbing supplies. The four main actors in That Sinking Feeling (which wasn’t released in the U.S. until 1984) were all cast in Forsyth’s sophomore effort, Gregory’s Girl, the story of a teenage boy’s fixation on the first female member of his school’s soccer team. These decidedly quirky first two features are youth comedies populated by unusually wise, even philosophical, youngsters, who make the bittersweet discovery that you can’t always get what you want.

The international success of Gregory’s Girl paved the way for Forsyth’s next—and best-loved—movie, Local Hero. Though produced with support from Warner Bros. and starring two American actors (Peter Riegert and Burt Lancaster), Local Hero is remembered today for its unique Scottish-ness and a subtle but ahead-of-its-time message on protecting our natural environment (it’s Al Gore’s favorite movie). Like Mac, the humbled oil executive hero of Local Hero, radio d.j. Dicky Bird in Comfort and Joy is another foiled romantic who finds himself embroiled in a misadventure; specifically, a war between Glasgow ice cream vendors.

When the producer of Local Hero, David Putnam, was briefly named head of Columbia Pictures, he provided Forsyth the opportunity to make his first American movie. The result was the haunting and criminally neglected masterpiece Housekeeping, starring Christine Lahti as the eccentric guardian of two orphaned girls. Forsyth completed two more wonderful and underseen comedies in the U.S., Breaking In, starring Burt Reynolds and Casey Siemaszko as a professional burglar and his inexperienced protégé, and Being Human, featuring Robin Williams as five characters (or is it just one?) who learn through 10,000 years of history and heartbreak what it means to be alive.

It’s been more than a decade since Forsyth completed his last feature, Gregory’s 2Girls, a sequel to one of his earlier successes that returned him to filming in Scotland. His body of work reminds us that there’s a lot of comfort and joy and beautiful melancholy to be derived from life’s ordinariness. Some might say there’s no room for his subtle, quiet style of storytelling in a world dominated by increasingly bombastic popular culture, but seeing these films just might remind you that we need Bill Forsyth now more than ever.

—Jim Healy, Assistant Curator, Exhibitions, Motion Picture Department

Featured series screenings

All films are at 8 p.m. unless otherwise indicated

Thursday, March 11

THAT SINKING FEELING (Bill Forsyth, UK/Scotland 1979, 92 min.)

Sunday, March 14

Two films for one admission price

7 p.m. GREGORY’S GIRL (Bill Forsyth, UK 1981, 91 min.)

8:45 p.m. GREGORY’S 2GIRLS (Bill Forsyth, UK 1999, 111 min., Digital Projection)

Thursday, March 18

COMFORT AND JOY (Bill Forsyth, UK 1984, 105 min.)

Thursday, March 25

BREAKING IN (Bill Forsyth, US 1989, 91 min.)

Thursday, April 1

BEING HUMAN (Bill Forsyth, UK/US 1994, 122 min.)

Bill Forsyth in person for two screenings:

Saturday, April 10

7 p.m. LOCAL HERO (Bill Forsyth, UK 1983, 111 min.)

Sunday, April 11

HOUSEKEEPING (Bill Forsyth, US 1987, 116 min.)

In DeNiro and Scorsese’s first collaboration, the semi-autobiographical Mean Streets, the film’s principal obsessive, Charlie, is played by Harvey Keitel. The religious and sensitive Charlie is a small-time hood who desperately tries to rein in his best friend (and id) Johnny Boy (DeNiro), an irrepressible and irresponsible prankster who could not care less about his debts to the mob. DeNiro was promoted to leading man for Taxi Driver, and his Travis Bickle, driven to violence he thinks will help purify a trash-filled New York City, is one of the most disturbing characters ever depicted on film.

Though prone to volatile moments, Jimmy Doyle, the jazz saxophonist in New York, New York, might be the most likeable character DeNiro ever assayed for Scorsese, but Jimmy’s search for a “major chord” keeps him from being happy in his marriage to singer Francine (Liza Minnelli). Likewise, it’s an all-consuming but groundless jealousy that destroys the marriage of boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, still the director and star’s most celebrated film together.

Perhaps the most underrated of their combined efforts, The King of Comedy remains the most relevant for today’s audiences in its depiction of marginally talented comedian Rupert Pupkin’s unstoppable quest for fame through television.

After a seven-year hiatus from Scorsese, DeNiro took a secondary role in the now-classic mob epic Goodfellas. Though Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill provides the film with its comically uninhibited and amoral spirit, it’s DeNiro’s greedy and paranoid thug Jimmy Conway who raises the specter of death.

Cape Fear’s revenge-obsessed and Bible-quoting ex-con Max Cady just might literally be the Angel of Death, and DeNiro put himself through a punishing physical regimen that makes the sinewy and tattoo-covered Max all the more frighteningly real. Casino brought Scorsese back into gangster territory for his eighth and (to date) final pairing with DeNiro, whose Ace Rothstein is the classic control freak brought down by loyalty to his less-than-reputable friends and wife.

These stories of obsession can also be viewed as allegories for the filmmaking process and the director’s difficult task of keeping everything under control. Scorsese’s reliance on the spontaneous, unpredictable, and often improvisatory behavior of DeNiro offers an example to any single-minded director who might resist creative input from his cast. Scorsese, with his powerful editing, pulsating soundtracks, and constantly roving cameras, will always be a technically dazzling auteur, but he understands that it’s the actors’ performances that really bring his films to life.—Jim Healy, Assistant Curator, Exhibitions, Motion Picture Department

Screenings: All films are at 8 p.m. unless otherwise listed.

Wednesday, January 6

MEAN STREETS (Martin Scorsese, US 1973, 110 min.)

Wednesday, January 13

TAXI DRIVER (Martin Scorsese, US 1976, 113 min.)

Wednesday, January 20

NEW YORK, NEW YORK (Martin Scorsese, US 1977, 164 min.)

Wednesday, January 27

RAGING BULL (Martin Scorsese, US 1982, 129 min.)

Wednesday, February 3

THE KING OF COMEDY (Martin Scorsese, US 1983, 109 min.)

Wednesday, February 10 20th Anniversary!

GOODFELLAS (Martin Scorsese, US 1990, 146 min.)

Wednesday, February 17

CAPE FEAR (Martin Scorsese, US 1991, 128 min.)

Wednesday, February 24

CASINO (Martin Scorsese, US 1995, 182 min.)