UPATE: Due to bad weather in New York (the same storm we had yesterday) John Cameron Mitchell will not be able to attend tonight's screening of "Shortbus." His flight is delayed past the opportunity to meet any connecting flight to Fort Wayne.
He has generously offered to re-schedule for later in the Spring, and we will keep you posted on a new date.
We will screen the movie at 7PM this evening and have an informal discussion afterward.
If you have a ticket, please feel free to come tonight & hang on to your ticket for the rescheduled event. If you don't have a ticket, please come tonight and purchase one! You'll see what all the fuss is about and will be able to hang on to your ticket for the rescheduled event.
We apologize for any inconvenience, but we're sure the unpredictability of Winter weather isn't a surprise to anyone.
Thanks for supporting Cinema Center!
Shortbus
In "Shortbus," the impish writer-director John Cameron Mitchell does the unthinkable: He puts the joy back in movie sex. We live in a world where the pornification of popular culture is nearly complete -- where the satisfaction of every kink is an Internet click away and where a celebrity isn't really a celebrity unless an unauthorized sex tape is in circulation. We're a society who freaks out over a bared breast on the Super Bowl while stocking up on ``Barely Legal" DVDs. The result is a nation obsessed with the mechanics of carnality divorced from the soul-nourishing pleasures of desire. A handful of recent movies have tried to jump-start audiences out of this predicament, placing unsimulated sex in a ``real movie" context. Michael Winterbottom's ``9 Songs" insisted its characters were their sex lives, leaving us high and dry. The omnibus film ``Destricted" -- a festival favorite -- lets several directors try to find the place where art meets porn, with varying results. With “Shortbus," Mitchell (``Hedwig and the Angry Inch") reminds us that sex is what people do, especially when they're trying to connect with other people -- with anything beyond the imprisonment of their own skins. The many characters who wander through this dramatic comedy are seeking contact, and they know the micro of physical release is related to the macro of shared human experience -- if only they could connect the dots. They treat sex the way we do in our lives as opposed to in our browsers: with yearning, guilt, humor, delight, horniness, shallowness, profundity. They just do it where we can see it. Fine; if one has a problem with that, stay away. (The film is being released unrated, but it's easily the equivalent of an NC-17.) Mitchell frontloads ``Shortbus" with sex scenes, as if to give the pervs and the bluenoses what they crave before moving on to the business at hand. This is also his way of introducing us to his characters: Sofia, a sex therapist who has never had an orgasm; James, a glum auto-fellatio expert who's videotaping what may be a suicide note; his worried lover Jamie; a dominatrix named Severin who services everyone's needs but her own; a neatly pressed voyeur; an angelic gay innocent. Mitchell posits post-9/11 New York as a twinkly wonderland on the verge of burnout: His camera swoops over an immense dollhouse replica of the island, peeking into this window and that. Eventually the characters converge on the sex club/cultural salon of the title, a cheerfully transgressive dive where anything goes and where the talk is as impassioned as the action in the back rooms. The presiding Madame is played by Justin Bond, whose cynicism is leavened with sympathy and an enduring, pansexual curiosity. Sadness and a sense of missed chances hang in the air -- ``It's like the ' 60s, only with less hope," observes Bond -- but so does an embattled wit that results in the most blissfully obscene rendition of the national anthem ever committed to film. The score by indie-rock stalwarts Yo La Tengo sends you out on a cloud, and Mitchell builds to a climax (pardon the expression) that hardwires the whole thing together. Above all, he reclaims sex -- filming it, watching it, talking about it, doing it -- as something both deeply funny and transcendently human: a revolving door that leads to the senses and to the heart. ``Shortbus" is a very dirty movie that can make you feel oddly clean. "On one hand... it’s a libertine's dream; on the other, it's a deliriously moral film."-Newsday. "I kid you not, 'heartwarming' is the best word to describe it."-Denver Post. "A sweet, very funny, volcanically romantic comedy-drama about relationships in post-9/11 New York City."-Time. "John Cameron Mitchell's ode to the joy and sweet release of sex also manages to be a sincere, modest political venture that finds humor where you might least expect it."-New York Times. "Surprisingly sweet and unabashedly graphic."-Detroit Free Press. 102 min., Unrated.
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The best Oscar Party in town. This year’s party date is already set. So, save this date: Saturday, February 23, 2008. That’s the Saturday night before Oscar’s big night on Sunday, February 24. This party is tons of fun and features a silent auction with some local and celebrity items, Oscar voting, a trivia contest, a movie (usually an Academy Award nominated film), and all attendees take home a Cinema Center version of a swag bag.
Throughout the year, other parties will sneak on to the calendar. We’ll keep you posted here, but FYI as they say: look for “Lombardapalooza” in October, a Sister Cities film series in the fall, and when the Devil Music Ensemble starts taking dates for their next tour of the Midwest, it will include a date in Fort Wayne.