Monday, January 2, 2012

Looking at LUNA and The World

      The other night we went out with Susan and Kurt to LUNAFEST, an omnibus package of nine short films “by, for, and about women,” though we three men were able to relate.  Susan initiated the outing and we didn’t realize until we arrived that this was sponsored by the LUNA snack bar for
women’s health and presented by Cincinnati World Cinema (CWC).  CWC is an all-volunteer group that has shown some essential foreign language films over the past few years, including the reissue of Army of Shadows and the devastating Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days.  

      The LUNAFEST selections ran the gamut in terms of tone, subject matter, and length.  There were both fiction and documentary shorts.  We felt the tops in the fictional realm were the spirited and charming A Reluctant Bride about a single Persian-Australian woman avoiding her family’s setups and the black comic slapstick Worst Enemy about a malcontent single Californian woman trying to survive her daily battle against herself.  In the documentary genre, Life Model presented a septuagenarian nude artist’s model while the Dutch I Am A Girl introduced us to a tween who has known since he was a toddler that he was a girl.  For good measure, the CWC producers generously forced the forty-five minute German Quirk of Fate on us.  It was a Teutonic (tendentious, depressing, virtually annotated) reading of It’s A Wonderful Life 

There were some gaping plot holes and it ended happily with only one major character dead.  The unhappy ending would have been the one character dead, the other major character back in jail, and their daughter a ward of the state.  Kurt liked it because of the It’s A Wonderful Life parallels; I love It’s A Wonderful Life mainly because of Jimmy Stewart’s line reading “Why did we have so many kids?”
My New Year’s Wish:  See CWC’s winter selections!  
These include Chico & Rita, an animated romance movie for adults set in the ‘50s in Havana, New York, and Vegas before the Cuban revolution.  It plays February 14 & 15 at the Carnegie Arts Center with a romantic dinner before the movie.
The Oscar Shorts play March 10 & 11, also at the Carnegie Arts Center on Scott Street in Covington.

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