Hamlet (director and star Bruce Ramsay) contemplates his bleak future in streamlined version of the Bard
HAMLET (Bruce Ramsay, 2011)
Cinema Village
22 East 12th St. between University Pl. & Fifth Ave.
Opens Friday, January 10
212-924-3363
www.cinemavillage.com
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Director and star Bruce Ramsay strips down and condenses the Bard in his 1940s-set noirish update of Hamlet, but in doing so he also drains one of Shakespeare’s most powerful tragedies of all its poetry and emotion. Trimming the tale down to a far-too-lean eighty-seven minutes, Ramsay cuts out characters and reinterprets scenes to focus on the family-related aspects of the story of betrayal, madness, murder, and revenge, using the original text for the most part while setting the entire film in one large house (actually the University Women’s Club in Vancouver). He fills the cast with veterans of Canada’s Bard on the Beach series, including Gillian Barber as Gertrude, Duncan Fraser as Polonius, Haig Sutherland as Laertes, Martin Sims as Guildenstern, Russell Roberts as the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and Lara Gilchrist as Ophelia; Welsh actor Peter Wingfield plays Claudius, with Stephen Lobo as Horatio and Bret Stait as Rosencrantz. The bare-bones film was shot in three days (for a mere — and rather admirable — $27,000), but it’s taken nearly three years for it to get a U.S. theatrical release, and it’s easy to see why. Ramsay’s Hamlet is more like a failed episode of Masterpiece Theatre, sort of Agatha Christie meets Downton Abbey in postwar London, than a fresh new look at the extremely familiar play, though it is a noble attempt. Indeed, “I must be cruel to be kind. Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.” Hamlet opens at Cinema Village on January 10, with Ramsay taking part in Q&As following the 7:10 screenings on Friday and Saturday night.
Expanded from her 2010 short film of the same name, Rola Nashef’s first feature, Detroit Unleaded, is a well-meaning if ultimately standard romantic comedy set within the Motor City’s Arab-American community. Described by Nashef, who was born in Lebanon and raised in Michigan, as a melding of Clerks, Do the Right Thing, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the film stars E. J. Assi as Sami, a Lebanese American teenager preparing to go to college in California when his father, Ibrahim (Akram El-Ahmar), is suddenly shot and killed at the family’s gas station / convenience store. With no other choice but to take over the business, Sami soon finds himself behind newly installed protective glass, using a buzzer to let customers into his store. He works with his cousin Mike (Mike Batayeh), who will sell just about anything and has big plans for their operation. Bored and lonely, Sami is surprised when the pretty Najlah (Nada Shouhayib) begins to show an interest in him, although she’s hands-off when it comes to any physical contact, fearful of what her big brother, Fadi (Steven Soro), would do if he finds out she might have a boyfriend. Meanwhile, Sami starts giving his mother, Mariam (Mary Assel), driving lessons so she can begin putting her life back together. Assi and Shouhayib are charming in their film debuts, displaying an endearing chemistry, but the narrative staggers whenever side characters are involved, from Najlah’s friends to the various oddballs who come into the store. Even Mariam’s story feels stagnant and stale. While it’s interesting getting an inside look at the battle between the old ways and the new generation in the Lebanese-American community in Detroit, the film settles on some clichéd plot twists, leading to an ending that will have audiences scratching their heads, wondering if a scene or two was missing. Winner of the Grolsch Film Works Discovery Award at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, Detroit Unleaded opens on November 22 at Cinema Village, with Nashef participating in a half dozen Q&As on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, joined by Assi, Batayeh, and Shouhayib at some of them.
Polish writer-director Władysław Pasikowski digs up a deeply disturbing and controversial part of his country’s past in the gripping drama Aftermath. When Franek Kalina (Ireneusz Czop), who left his family’s small farming village twenty years earlier, in 1980, comes home to spend the summer helping out his brother, Józek (Maciej Stuhr), he is surprised to find that his younger sibling has become a hated outcast. It turns out that Józek has been uncovering Jewish gravestones, which the townspeople and even the church have been using to pave roads and for various other architectural purposes. He’s been gathering them in the middle of his wheat field, building a cemetery that has outraged the villagers. They become even angrier — and more dangerous — when Franek, who, like his brother, has never before shown any sympathy for the Jews, starts investigating what really happened there sixty years ago, a dark, dirty secret that everyone else is determined will remain buried. In Aftermath, Pasikowski (Kroll, Pigs) adds horror-genre tropes to a Holocaust tale not seen on film before while evoking such wide-ranging fiction and nonfiction works as Marian Marzynski’s Shtetl, Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, and Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist. Aftermath is a thriller that is not so much about good and evil but about guilt, responsibility, and the choices people make, and then have to live with. Inspired by a true story documented by historian Jan T. Gross in Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, which stirred up major controversy when it was published in 2000, Aftermath has led to a heated polemic battle between the right and the left in Poland, as well as death threats against Stuhr, who was named Best Actor by the Polish Film Academy for his portrayal of the conflicted Józek. An important, well-made film that is able to avoid being swallowed by the swirling debate surrounding it, Aftermath opens November 1 at Lincoln Plaza and Cinema Village.
Winner of the Audience Award at the 2013 Brooklyn Film Festival, Cut to Black is a dark, gritty slice of neo-noir from writer, director, producer, and star Dan Eberle. Part brooding Mickey Rourke, part humorless Vin Diesel, Eberle (