David Thomson's the Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood

1/13/05 to 1/30/05

  • The Bad and the Beautiful|January 29|

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
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  • Selected
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  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • The Last Tycoon

    Thursday, January 13 7:00pm
    Lecture & Booksigning by David Thomson. Robert De Niro stars as a Thalberg-like producer in Elia Kazan and Harold Pinter's adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, which "saw Hollywood as a crucial cultural battleground for America."-David Thomson
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  • Shanghai Express

    Friday, January 14 7:00pm
    Introduced by David Thomson. Josef von Sternberg created an impossibly glamorous imaginary China as backdrop for luminous love goddess Marlene Dietrich in this hypnotic melodrama.
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  • Only Angels Have Wings

    Friday, January 14 9:05pm
    Introduced by David Thomson. Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, and Rita Hayworth in Howard Hawks's adventure about fliers in a Latin American backwater. "As with all the great Hawks movies, it could have been shot yesterday."-David Thomson
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  • Pierrot le Fou

    Saturday, January 15 6:30pm
    Godard is a brilliantly jaundiced tourist in the stylistic universe that is Hollywood. Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina play "the last romantic couple," and Sam Fuller puts in an iconic appearance.
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  • The Shining

    Saturday, January 15 8:40pm
    Stanley Kubrick reinvents horror as a new kind of screwball comedy and does a hatchet job on American domesticity as Jack Nicholson terrorizes Shelley Duvall at a mountain retreat.
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  • My Man Godfrey

    Sunday, January 16 5:30pm
    In Gregory La Cava's cynical screwball comedy of New York socialites in search of authenticity, "it is the speed, the wit, and the insolence that are so rich."-David Thomson
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  • Sullivan's Travels

    Sunday, January 16 7:25pm
    Preston Sturges skewers Hollywood's desire for respectability and relevance in "just about the funniest, wittiest, and wisest movie ever made by Hollywood about Hollywood."-Village Voice
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  • Greed

    Thursday, January 20 7:00pm
    Judith Rosenberg on Piano. Two men, a woman, and a surprise lottery win add up to greed in Von Stroheim's infamously chopped-down 1920s epic, filmed in San Francisco and Death Valley. "Even at two hours plus (a shadow of its original self), Greed is still a thunderous experience and a great picture."-David Thomson
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  • The Crowd

    Friday, January 21 7:00pm
    Judith Rosenberg on Piano. A young couple experience the heights and depths of crowded 1920s New York in this marvelous silent from King Vidor. Astonishing location camerawork, from skyscrapers to Coney Island, frames a very human story of a very American anxiety.
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  • Sunrise

    Friday, January 21 9:00pm
    F. W. Murnau brought German Expressionist aesthetics to Hollywood with this startlingly stylized tale of city and country, love and destiny. "Murnau introduced something best known as 'atmosphere' to American films."-David Thomson
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  • Heaven's Gate

    Saturday, January 22 7:00pm
    Michael Cimino's monumental treatment of the Wyoming Range Wars provocatively inserted class war and immigrant rights into the Western genre, and flopped so grandly it bankrupted United Artists. "Is this the last great Western, and maybe the first that actually wrestles with the politics of America?"-David Thomson
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  • The Shop Around the Corner

    Sunday, January 23 5:00pm
    Bickering Budapest shop employees become anonymous love-letter writers in this Lubitsch romance, starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. "Close to perfection-one of the most beautifully acted and paced romantic comedies ever made."-Pauline Kael
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  • Shampoo

    Sunday, January 23 7:00pm
    This "rich, complicated comedy" (Newsweek) stars Warren Beatty as a well-coiffed Beverly Hills hairdresser oozing his way through the swinging '70s and Nixon-era politics.
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  • Magnolia

    Thursday, January 27 7:00pm
    Multiple stories intertwine in the San Fernando Valley. "If Jean-Luc Godard had been thirty in 2000, and if he'd lived in Los Angeles instead of Switzerland, maybe he'd have made Magnolia."-David Thomson
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  • Daisy Kenyon

    Friday, January 28 7:00pm
    Joan Crawford has man trouble, this time with army gunner Henry Fonda and married lawyer Dana Andrews. "A Preminger gem and quintessential 'choice' film."-Molly Haskell
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  • Men in War

    Friday, January 28 9:00pm
    A Korean War platoon, led by Robert Ryan, is stranded in a beautiful but hostile landscape. "A shattering parable on combat...fit to be compared with Stendhal or Hemingway."-David Thomson
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  • Meet Me in St. Louis

    Saturday, January 29 6:30pm
    Introduced by David Thomson. Judy Garland croons her way through well-heeled St. Louis society in this deceptively gay Minnelli musical that "was open to the depth of America, to tragedy and anxiety as much as feeling good."-David Thomson
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  • The Bad and the Beautiful

    Saturday, January 29 9:05pm
    Introduced by David Thomson. Hollywood on Hollywood, with Kirk Douglas as a suitably oily producer. "One of Tinseltown's most fluidly graceful and lovingly merciful self-portraits."-Village Voice
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  • Heat

    Sunday, January 30 5:00pm
    Introduced by David Thomson. Al Pacino and Robert De Niro are cop and criminal dueling wits on the streets of Los Angeles. "An action film with an intellectual grip that never once lets go."-The New Yorker
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