Film | by Shane Hnetka
Lumsden is getting a drive-in movie theatre. Moonlight Movies opens May 5 and 6, and will play on weekends throughout the summer. It won’t be playing brand new movies (yet) but it will be cool to see films out on a big screen out in the country.
BENJAMIN IS A LITTLE WORRIED ABOUT HIS FUTURE
Hard to believe but Mike Nichols brilliant 1967 classic The Graduate turns 50 this year. To celebrate it will be playing at the Cineplex on April 12 and 23 this month. The movie has become entrenched in pop culture since it first debuted, and even after all the parodies, homage’s and knock-offs the movie still stands as a brilliant classic.
If you sadly have never see The Graduate, here’s the deal: it stars a young Dustin Hoffman as Benjamin. A recent college grad, Benjamin doesn’t quite know what to do with his life despite everyone congratulating him. He ends up having an affair with an older married woman, Mrs. Robinson (played by Anne Bancroft), and wackiness and poignancy ensues. The film has aged pretty well and it’s worth seeing on the big screen. From the great performances to the classic soundtrack from Simon and Garfunkel, the movie is a classic that shouldn’t be missed.
SECRETS OF THE NIGHT
This is pretty awesome. A lost 1924 silent comedy murder mystery has been found in Ontario, via Winnipeg. Apparently a man named Richard Scott has had the film since the 1940s. Way back in the day, Scott’s dad bought a projector from Eaton’s. Eaton’s also had movie library but when they got rid of it, Scott’s Dad took 15 movies home and they’ve been with Scott’s family ever since.
The movies are in pretty good shape, so Scott contacted the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman Museum, and they put him in touch with a media archivist at the University of Toronto. The archivist is now restoring and digitizing all the movies. To top it all off, they discovered that one of the 15 films happened to be the long-lost Secrets of the Night. The movie has been restored and digitized and it was screened at the University of Toronto for the first in decades.
I kind of want to know what else is in the stack of movies. It will be awesome if someone releases these on DVD or Blu-ray, but the fact that these films have been found is pretty fantastic news.
Shane Hnetka is a made-in-Saskatchewan film and comic book nerd.