TheatreOne's Fringe Flicks First Four Films

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Sunday, November 21st, 2010
Sundays 1, 4, 7 pm Mondays 7pm

Mao's Last Dancer (Oct. 3-4)
Director: Bruce Beresford
Cast: Chi Cao, Bruce Greenwood, Kyle MacLachlan, Amanda Schull
Run Time: 117 minutes Country: Australia
Year: 2010 Language: English, Mandarin with English subtitles

Watch the trailer: http://www.maoslastdancermovie.com/

An official selection of the 2009 Toronto In­ternational Film Festival® and brought to the screen by acclaimed director Bruce Beres­ford (Driving Miss Daisy, Black Robe), Mao’s Last Dancer tells the inspiring true story of Li Cunxin.

Born in 1961, Li lived with his six brothers and impoverished parents in China’s Shan­dong Province. His family was destined to be labourers, but when recruiters from Madame Mao’s ballet academy in Beijing swept through his single-room school in search of untapped talent to mould into the future leading lights of the Cultural Revolution, eleven-year-old Li was selected, and committed to a strange new life of stringent training, both artistic and ideological.

Discov­ered by Ben Stevenson (Bruce Greenwood, Star Trek, I’m Not There), the artistic direc­tor of the Houston Ballet and part of the first American cultural delegation to Communist China, Li is given the opportunity to be one of the first exchange students allowed by Mao’s regime to go to America. When his exchange ended, Li refused to re­turn to China, leading to a dramatic standoff at the consulate that made headlines across the United States.

I am Love (Oct. 17-18)
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Cast: Tilda Swinton, Flavio Parenti, Edoardo Gabbriellini, Alba Rohrwacher, Pippo Delbono
Run Time: 120 minutes
Country: Italy Year: 2010
Language: Italian with English subtitles

Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhbTeBneRVU

An official selection of the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival®, I Am Love moves through the cultivated world of a wealthy and distinguished Milanese family. Exquisitely shot, beautifully paced and conceived, it is a film of ritual and order, centered on a massive mansion whose airy rooms convey the power and stature of the Recchi family.

Director Luca Guadagnino has made a superb film that touches on many different complexities. Sexual and class politics play a key role, as wonderfully controlled moments of passion and emotion suddenly trouble the surface placidity. Featuring a cast headed by Tilda Swinton (Michael Clayton, Burn After Reading), speaking Italian and Russian, this is a film in which tradition and modernity collide. A stunning work.

Please Give (Nov. 7-8)
Director: Nicole Holofcener
Cast: Catherine Keener, Oliver Platt, Amanda Peet, Rebecca Hall
Run Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Watch the trailer: http://showhype.com/video/please-give-trailer-hd-2010/

The holy trinity of our consumer society: The wanting, the getting, the guilt.

Nicole Holofcener’s new movie, Please Give, is a complex contemporary fable about a group of New Yorkers and the things they fancy: The right jeans, a bigger apartment, a younger woman, a decent friendship. It’s a wonderful movie full of people you wish you knew in real life, and like most of Holofcener’s movies, it’s a remarkable combination of comedy and tragedy.

Catherine Keener stars as Kate. She and her husband Alex (Oliver Platt) run a vintage furniture store in a trendy neighbourhood in Manhattan. Much of what they sell comes from the homes of dead people; they buy a lot of these items from the impatient adult children of the deceased, who view their parents’ hoarded goods as trash. Kate feels guilty about buying a lot of this furniture for next to nothing; then she feels guilty for selling it in the store at high prices.

Kate is a bundle of guilt. She’s endlessly handing out cash to homeless people and obsessively searching for just the right volunteer position. Kate’s need to do good provides some of the blackest black humour in this very dark comedy.

Wasteland (Nov. 21-22)
Director: Lucy Walker and Karen Harley Run Time: 99 minutes

Country: USA Year: 2010

Language: English

Ratings: NR

Watch the trailer: http://www.wastelandmovie.com/ndxz-studio/site/flash/trailer.html

Audiences at this year’s Sundance Film Festival® and Hot Docs Festival were abso­lutely floored by Waste Land, Lucy Walker’s (The Devil’s Playground) documentary about the people who survive on refuse from the world’s largest landfill site, outside Rio de Ja­neiro.

Artist Vik Muniz is the primary subject, as the film follows him to the Jardim Gramacho dump to employ the landfill’s inhabitants to work on an art project. But as we meet these “catadores,” it is they who steal the film’s spot­light. Resilient and extremely innovative in their ability to recycle almost anything, the locals embrace Muniz and his project in a surprisingly sophisticated manner. After all, they’ve been ferociously reading cast-off books from the likes of Machiavelli and Ni­etzsche over the years. As Muniz becomes increasingly close to the catadores, they be­come the inspiration for his art, while they in turn, are inspired by their involvement in the artistic process. It is this rare, dually-illu­minating scenario which captures significant media attention, catapulting the once face­less garbage pickers to international fame.

The film is extremely well-crafted and never focuses on the political issues at the expense of the individuals who inhabit the dump, and the use of time-lapse photogra­phy to demonstrate the laborious creation of Muniz’s art is used to great effect. The tone of the film is uplifting overall, giving the audi­ence real hope for many of the people living in a corner of the world that rarely sees any attention at all.