Tag: Movies

CAGE-A-RAMA 2018

CAGE-A-RAMA 2018

Join Matchbox Cineclub for Glasgow’s first CAGE-A-RAMA, celebrating the birthday of international treasure and batshit crazyman Nicolas Cage!

Over two days, we’ll be exploring two facets of the unfathomable diamond that is Cage, starting on Saturday 06/01 with Cage the Fighter and the Holy Trinity of The Rock (1996), Face/Off (1997) and Con Air (1997).

On Sunday, we’ll explore the gentler side of Nicolas, with Cage the Lover: Valley Girl (1983), Moonstruck (1987) and Raising Arizona (1987).

Both days feature tons of exciting Cage-related bonus features, all starting from 12pm.

Keep up-to-date with the Facebook event page here.

£4 (+£1 booking fee) per film
Day pass: £9 (+£1 booking fee)
Weekend pass: £18 (+£1 booking fee)

Tickets from CCA: Book online, 0141 352 4900.

This event is by arrangement with Park Circus

Poster illustration by Vero Navarro.

Matchbox Cineclub vs Scalarama

ThisIsScalarama_web

Scalarama is just around the corner and we have some of our biggest and best events lined up for it this September. First, we team up with Video Namaste for an event inspired by Everything Is Terrible, the Found Footage Festival and Adam Buxton’s Bug. Then we have a very special event celebrating the 20th anniversary of Chris Morris’ landmark TV comedy Brass Eye. Our Glasgow events culminate on our regular date at CCA with our very first live score commission. Finally, we’re using Scalarama to launch our first ever tour, bringing back John Paizs’ masterpiece, Crime Wave for its theatrical debut across the UK.

07/09: Video Bacchanal at Nice N Sleazy 

The ‘90s in cinema were an amazing nightmare. A sugar-syrup throb of VHS scanlines, dire fast food tie-ins and probably the weirdest time in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s life. Come join the Video Namaste boys in a wee trip through the weird videoshop hellscape of 90s cinema and all the amazing stuff that orbited it. Have a drink, gawk at us forgetting to remember and then have a wee dance with us as we play some Exxtra Special ‘90s soundtrack songs afterwards.

supermanlives

17/09: Oxide Ghosts: The Brass Eye Tapes with director Q&A at CCA

Made from hundreds of hours of unseen material from his personal archive, director Michael Cumming’s film shares insights into the process of making the legendary TV series Brass Eye. Michael directed both the pilots and the series and, over a two-year period, witnessed the highs and lows of Brass Eye from a very personal perspective.

Part documentary, part artwork – the film is designed solely for live screenings and is made up almost entirely of never before seen footage. Oxide Ghosts carries the blessing of Chris Morris and provides a rare glimpse of his extraordinary working practices.

Michael will be doing a Q&A after the film – spilling beans, shattering myths and letting a few cats out of the bag. Celebrating 20 years since Brass Eye’s transmission in 1997, this film and Q&A session are a must for fans of the series but will appeal to anyone with a curiosity about how great comedy is made.

Oxide Ghosts_poster

21/09: Cowards Bend The Knee with live score by Ela Orleans at CCA

Guy Maddin is one of the most distinctive and idiosyncratic directors currently working. The Canadian auteur has mined and subverted the imagery and style of late silent and early sound cinema in such films as The Forbidden Room and The Saddest Music In The World to disorientating, often hilarious effect. Cowards Bend The Knee is one his greatest, but least-known films. Originally conceived of and presented as a peephole show, the film’s ten chapters concoct an alternative cinematic biography for Maddin, torn between the influence of his hockey star father and his attraction to Meta, the beautiful girl from the local beauty salon / illegal abortion clinic.

This is Guy Maddin in purest form, the most concentrated and probably craziest film of his career. Never have hockey, hairdressing, homophobia and hand amputations collided to such dizzying effect, in perhaps the most authentically surrealist film of the 21st century. For Scalarama, Matchbox Cineclub have commissioned Ela Orleans to write a new score.

Ela Orleans has gained an international cult reputation for her haunted, noir-inflected torch songs. She recently came to more mainstream attention when her magnum opus Circles of Upper and Lower Hell was nominated for the SAY Awards. However, the Polish-born musician has a parallel career, scoring film soundtracks having studied composition under David Shire (The Conversation, The Taking of Pelham 123) in New York. She has composed new soundtracks for films as diverse as Frank Borzage’s Lucky Star, Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures.

After the screening, journalist Brian Beadie will discuss Ela’s work and approaches to film scoring.

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September and beyond: Crime Wave DCP tour at various UK venues

One of the greatest and yet most perversely overlooked debuts in Canadian movie history, writer-director John Paizs’s Crime Wave announced the birth of a new genre in Canuck cinema: what cultural critic Geoff Pevere dubbed “prairie postmodernism.” Crime Wave’s recent restoration by TIFF debuted to a rapturous reception during Glasgow Film Festival 2017, programmed by us. Still unavailable on DVD, VOD or streaming, Paizs’ lost classic now comes to UK theatres for the first time. Dates are confirmed at DCA (Dundee), Castle Cinema (London), Hawick and HOME (Manchester).

Disney

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The Search For Weng Weng @ GFT

Kung saan ay Weng Weng?

Our next screening is a co-presentation with GFT, of the documentary The Search For Weng Weng. Director Andrew Leavold will be present to introduce the film and take part in a post-screening Q&A, hosted by journalist Graham Rae. Check out the trailer:

Australian video store owner-turned-guerrilla filmmaker Andrew Leavold stumbled across a dubbed copy of B-movie For Your Height Only, featuring a 3-foot tall James Bond–type character, played by Filipino actor Weng Weng. This hugely entertaining documentary follows Leavold’s ensuing two-decade obsession with Weng Weng, as he travels to Manila to try and track down the elusive former novelty star. Comprising of interviews with filmmakers and footage of Leavold’s adventures, The Search For Weng Weng is a surprisingly moving exploration of the life and career of the obscure actor.

Saturday 05/08 at GFT. Tickets are available here.

Five More Films about Filmmaking

To celebrate our screening of Maurice Hatton’s Long Shot (1978), about a couple of filmmakers struggling to get their dream project set up at 1977’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, and after the first five, we recommend another five films about filmmaking…

Crime Wave

Crime Wave (John Paizs, 1985). Dunno what it is about Winnipeg, but they unaccountably love Phantom of the Paradise more than anywhere on Earth and every so often they produce an outsider filmmaker par excellence. Perhaps most notably, Winnipeg gave us Guy Maddin and John Paizs – the latter responsible for this, unfortunately (and barely) released the year before Sam Raimi’s Crimewave (1986), condemning it to be overlooked in perpetuity. Which is a shame, because it’s great – a tongue-in-cheek homage to 1940s/1950s American screen culture, it features Paizs himself as a struggling screenwriter who can only write beginnings and endings.

Barton Fink2

Barton Fink (Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, 1991). Speaking of writer’s block, has there ever been a better take on it than the Coens’? Never mind that the brothers insist they don’t suffer from it (work on Miller’s Crossing had simply slowed to a crawl, so they took a break to develop Fink), or that no-one really agrees on what it’s about. It’s still John Turturro’s signature role, give or take a Jesus, the root of an excellent Simpsons joke and still one of the Coens’ all-time best.

Living

Living In Oblivion (Tom DiCillo, 1995). Still pretty much the go-to reference point for films about indie filmmaking, this was inspired by DiCillo’s experiences making the extremely early-90s Johnny Suede and not making his passion project Box of Moonlight, ultimately his follow-up to Oblivion). Particularly notable for the shade it casts on Johnny Suede star Brad Pitt via his stand-in character, Chad Palomino (James LeGros), and Peter Dinklage’s diatribe against Hollywood  cliché (“I don’t even have dreams with dwarves in them!”).

Cecil B Demented3

Cecil B Demented (John Waters, 2000). One of the best late-period Waters but weirdly not the most loved. Cecil B Demented (Stephen Dorff) is the leader of a cell of kamikaze filmmakers – the SprocketHoles – who kidnap film star diva Honey Whitlock (Melanie Griffith) to force her to act in their film. Maybe it’s a little inside baseball – it’ll help if you know your Premingers from your Peckinpahs – but that’s almost part of the joke. It’s a Matchbox favourite (we screened it in April 2015) with a ridiculously prescient cast (early roles for Michael Shannon and Maggie Gyllenhaal among many others) and really just gets better with age.

The Independent

The Independent (Stephen Kessler, 2000). From the celebrated director of Vegas Vacation (1997) and featuring playing-themselves cameos from Peter Bogdanovich, Karen Black, Roger Corman, Ted Demme, Ron Howard and Fred Williamson, this is a mockumentary portrait of Morty Fineman (Ben’s dad Jerry Stiller), a Lloyd Kaufman-style master of the B-movie. He’s over the hill and down on his luck, but banking on an unlikely comeback – in fact, his struggle to get  a dream project made and his career on track mimics that of the stars of Long Shot. How’s that for putting a bow on it?

Sean Welsh

Long Shot screens at CCA on Thursday 21/07. Tickets are on sale now.

Lost and Found: LONG SHOT

We’re honoured to present Dylan Cave’s excellent article on our July film, Long Shot (Maurice Hatton, 1978), from the Sight & Sound series on overlooked films currently unavailable on DVD or Blu Ray.

Long Shot Sight and Sound
Click image to read full article

Our rare screening of Long Shot, on 35mm, is followed by a Q&A with special guests, discussing Scottish filmmaking, all from 7pm on Thursday 21st July at CCA, Glasgow. Tickets are on sale now.

Used with permission, courtesy Sight & Sound. Unauthorised use is forbidden. This article originally appeared in the June 2016 issue. www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound.

Forbidden Zone trailer

Here’s the trailer for our upcoming screening of Forbidden Zone (Richard Elfman, 1980). The screening is by arrangement with Arrow Video. Seating is limited, tickets are on sale now. Keep up-to-date at the Facebook event page here.

Matchbox Cineclub presents FORBIDDEN ZONE

ForbiddenZoneWeb

Valpuri Karinen designed the poster for our upcoming screening of Forbidden Zone (Richard Elfman, 1980). Valpuri also made Matchbox’s Spaceballs poster, and you can check out more of her work at her website, here, or at her Tumblr, here.

Our Forbidden Zone screening is by arrangement with Arrow Video. Seating is limited, tickets are on sale now. Keep up-to-date at the Facebook event page here. 

COMIN’ AT YA in EXPLODOSCOPE!

Matchbox Cineclub‘s May screening will be COMIN’ AT YA! (Ferdinando Baldi, 1981) on Thursday 19/05/16 at the Old Hairdressers, Glasgow.

COMIN’ AT YA! (Ferdinando Baldi, 1981) is the film that launched the 1980s 3Dsploitation boom, with flying spears, vampire bats and even babies, all jumping off the screen towards you. Matchbox Cineclub are celebrating its 35th anniversary with a special screening in 3D (we’re providing the glasses) and an explosive sound set-up. You can’t miss it, cos it’s COMIN’ AT YA! 

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Synopsis: HH Hart (Tony Anthony), a bank robber, loses his wife (Victoria Abril) to kidnappers on their wedding day. Subsequently, she is traded as a prostitute by villain Pike Thompson (Gene Quintana). HH Hart races against time to find his wife, with the help of a Scottish preacher.

CominAtYa_poster

Tickets are available from Brown Paper Tickets right here. This screening is by arrangement with The Little Film Company.