The blog and the Community

Hi all !!
Welcome to the Cinema-Club blog. We have decided to open this as our own web space and to invite all of you to participate actively in the organisation of the Welcoming Cinema Club.
You can enter and add all your opinions about the viewed movies and also make suggestions for the forthcoming. We hope that you will take the best out of it !!
See you at the screenings!

Friday 20 August 2010

26th Aug "Mediterraneo" (1991, Italy)

In 1941, one year after Italy joined Germany against the Allies in World War II, a small group of misfit Italian soldiers is sent to a small Greek island in the Aegean Sea for four months of lookout duty. The soldiers include a lieutenant who likes art, a macho sergeant, a farmer accompanied by his beloved donkey Silvana, and other quirky people. They are not very good soldiers, but a cross section of average, independent men.


The soldiers anticipate attack from outside and on the island and take all sorts of inept precautions. They find a small town with no people. They see bombing on the horizon and realize that the ship that would pick them up has been destroyed. Then mysteriously, people reappear in the village: the villagers say they hid because the Germans had taken all the men. They have decided to accommodate the Italians. It isn't long before everyone's sunny nature appears. The Italian soldiers are absorbed into the life, heat and landscape of the idyllic island.

The local priest asks the lieutenant, a Sunday painter, to restore the murals in his church. Two soldiers, who are brothers, befriend a lovely young woman, a shepherdess, who believes that three is the perfect number for an affair of pure sexual fun. The sergeant takes up folk dancing and the shyest of the soldiers falls profoundly in love with the island's single, very overworked, prostitute. Click here for more info.

Friday 13 August 2010

19th of August: "The Divine Bell and the Butterfly " (2007, French/ American)

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (French: Le scaphandre et le papillon) is a French/American biopic/drama film based on the memoir of the same name by Jean-Dominique Bauby. The film depicts Bauby's life after suffering a massive stroke, on 8th December 1995, at the age of 42, which left him with a condition known as locked-in syndrome. The condition paralyzed him from the neck down. Although both eyes work, doctors decide to sew up his right eye as it is not irrigating correctly and they fear it will become infected. He is left with only his left eye, and thereafter communicates only by blinking his left eyelid. The film was directed by Julian Schnabel, written by Ronald Harwood, and stars Mathieu Amalric as Bauby. It won awards at theCannes Film Festival, the Golden Globes and the BAFTA Awards, as well as four Academy Award nominations.


Will be hosted by Kathleen

Monday 9 August 2010

12th of August: "Goodbye Lenin" (2003, Germany)

Plot: Two traumatic events affect the life of East Berliner, Christiane Kerner. First, in 1978, her husband, Robert, runs off to freedom and another woman in the west, leaving her to take care of their two adolescent children, Ariane and Alex, by herself. Always a good Socialist, Christiane devotes her life to the cause as a symbol of anger toward her husband. And second, in 1989, she sees a now grown Alex marching in an anti-Berlin Wall demonstration and being hauled off by police. As a result, she suffers a heart attack and goes into a coma. While Christiane is in her coma, Germany drastically changes with the Wall coming down and the imminent official reunification of East and West into one. The Kerner's personal life also changes with all aspects of the new found capitalist world infiltrating their home. When Christiane emerges from her coma eight months later, her health situation is still tenuous. Any shock she experiences could possibly lead to another heart attack and certain death. To protect his mother, Alex decides not to tell her of the new Germany in which they live. He feels he can better protect her at home, where he can control to what she is exposed. Although most around him don't support the idea - including Ariane and Lara (Alex's Russian immigrant girlfriend who is also Christiane's nurse) - they go along with the extreme measures Alex goes to to recreate East Germany in their home. How long can they keep up the ruse?