Rebecca (Zoe Lister-Jones) and Casper (Sam Rosen) are in for a long night in STUCK BETWEEN STATIONS (photo by Bo Hakala)
STUCK BETWEEN STATIONS (Brady Kiernan, 2011)
Friday, April 22, SVA Theater, 8:30
Sunday, April 24, AMC Loews Village 7, 5:30
Monday, April 25, Clearview Cinemas Chelsea, 9:45
Thursday, April 28, AMC Loews Village 7, 9:00
www.tribecafilm.com
www.stuck-between-stations.com
In many ways, Stuck Between Stations is the quintessential American festival movie. The low-budget indie feels like a deeply personal work, teetering on the edge of collapsing into overwrought melodrama but always able to get back on track. Cowriter and coproducer Sam Rosen stars as Casper, a young man who returns to his Minneapolis home for his father’s funeral. At a bar he bumps into his childhood crush, Rebecca (Zoe Lister-Jones), a grad student whose life is being turned upside down, as the head of her department just discovered that Zoe has been having an affair with her husband. Casper gets into a fight with Rebecca’s friends, then ends up spending the rest of the very long night with her as they wander through Minneapolis visiting a bizarre circus, breaking into a house, and talking openly and honestly about their lives, revealing only little bits at a time. It takes a while to warm up to the two main characters, but once director and coproducer Brady Kiernan gets things rolling, Stuck Between Stations becomes a compelling, moving ride. To keep the protagonists on-screen the whole way, Kiernan, in his feature-length debut, employs split screens whenever the two are physically separated, a conceit that ends up working. The film also stars Michael Imperioli as Rebecca’s mentor/lover and Josh Hartnett as the leader of a late-night partying bike crew. The title comes from a 2006 song by the then-Minneapolis-based band the Hold Steady in which Craig Finn sings, “Boys and girls in America, they have such a sad time together.” Audiences will end up not having a sad time together watching Stuck Between Stations.
Akira Kurosawa’s marvelous reimagining of Macbeth is an intense psychological thriller that follows one man’s descent into madness. Following a stunning military victory led by Washizu (Toshirô Mifune) and Miki (Minoru Chiaki), the two men are rewarded with lofty new positions. As Washizu’s wife, Asaji (Isuzu Yamada, with spectacular eyebrows), fills her husband’s head with crazy paranoia, Washizu is haunted by predictions made by a ghostly evil spirit in the Cobweb Forest, leading to one of the all-time classic finales. Featuring exterior scenes bathed in mysterious fog, interior long shots of Washizu and Asaji in a large, sparse room carefully considering their next bold move, and composer Masaru Sato’s shrieking Japanese flutes, Throne of Blood is a chilling drama of corruptive power and blind ambition, one of the greatest adaptations of Shakespeare ever put on film. Throne of Blood is screening April 17-18 as part of Film Forum’s “5 Japanese Divas” series, featuring four weeks of films starring Yamada, Machiko Kyo, Kimuyo Tanaka, Setsuko Hara, and Hideko Takamine, who play strong, determined women in such classic works as Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953), Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (1966), Mikio Naruse’s Okaasan (1952) and Flowing (1956), Kurosawa’s The Idiot (1951) and Throne of Blood (1957), Keisuke Kinoshita’s Carmen Comes Home (1951) and Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953), Sansho the Bailiff (1954), and Street of Shame (1956), among others.
Akira Kurosawa’s powerful psychological drama begins with a jazzy score over shots of a bustling Japanese city, people anxiously hurrying through as a Theremin joins the fray. But this is no Hollywood film noir or low-budget frightfest; Kurosawa’s daring film is about the end of old Japanese society as the threat of nuclear destruction hovers over everyone. A completely unrecognizable Toshirô Mifune stars as Nakajima, an iron foundry owner who wants to move his large family — including his two mistresses — to Brazil, which he believes to be the only safe place on the planet where he can survive the H bomb. His immediate family, concerned more about the old man’s money than anything else, takes him to court to have him declared incompetent; there he meets a dentist (the always excellent Takashi Shimura) who also mediates such problems — and fears that Nakajima might be the sanest one of all. I Live in Fear is screening this weekend at 11:00 am at the IFC Center as part of its Weekend Classics: Kurosawa series, with fifty percent of ticket sales benefiting the 
