9 minute read
Film
WAREHOUSE CINEMAS NEWS AND EVENTS:
$7 TUESDAYS
Any movie, including Dolby Atmos. All day. Anytime.
SPECIAL EVENT
Daily showings of “Coraline” between October 14th - 20th and showing “Beetlejuice” all month long!
FILM LEAGUE
"Lost Boys" Wednesday, October 26th 7 PM & 7:30 PM
BRUNCH CLUB
"Practical Magic" Sunday, October 30th 11:30AM, 12:30PM, and 1:30PM
Courtesy of 72 Film Fest
NEW MOVIES
Opening this week: "Halloween Ends"
Warehouse Cinemas is an independently owned cinema that offers a unique, premium movie going experience by providing first-run movies + retro films, leather recliner seating w/ seat warmers, high-quality picture and sound, including Dolby Atmos, a modern-industrial décor, and premium food and drink options, including movie themed cocktails, wine and a 28-tap self-serve beer wall. Visit us at warehouscinemas.com or scan
the QR Code for this week’s feature films.
72 Film Fest winners awarded for creative collaborations
This year’s 72 Film Fest asked filmmaking teams to collaborate with fellow teams. Some chose to have shared worlds or simple connective elements, and some chose to share scenes and characters. Congratulations to every team that dove in without knowing the theme, with special kudos to those who were able to turn in a film.
WINNERS OF THIS YEAR’S FEST
BEST OF THE FEST: Shrug BEST OF THE FEST PAIRING: Bright Boy Alert and Beez Kneez AUDIENCE CHOICE: Shrug AUDIENCE CHOICE PAIRING: Down to Fetch/Shrug BEST STUDENT FILM: Lemonhead BEST AMATEUR FILM: Screenburn BEST PRO FILM: Star Wipe BEST EDITING: Star Wipe BEST ACTING: Team Bebop BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Shrug (wife) BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Raven Lost BEST COSTUME/SET DESIGN: Sedated Spaces BEST SOUND: Star Wipe BEST WRITING: Crowded Elevator Pictures BEST UNDER 5 MINUTE: Team Bebop
Learn more about the annual Frederick festival and competition at 72fest.com.
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FILM
‘Amsterdam’: True-ish shaggy-dog tale from 1933 with echoes of 2022
BY ANN HORNADAY
The Washington Post
“A lot of this actually happened” is the opening epigram of “Amsterdam,” David O. Russell’s kaleidoscopic riff on the curious case of Gen. Smedley Butler, who in 1933 became involved in what would be known as the Business Plot, wherein he was allegedly approached by a cabal of wealthy business executives to be the figurehead for an attempted coup in which they were planning to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Russell’s fantastical take on the episode, in which he mixes fact and fiction with extravagant abandon, can’t be called a success. It’s too scattershot, too much in its own manic, mannered head to qualify as a coherent, much less compelling narrative. But in its own blessthis-mess way, “Amsterdam” pays appropriate homage to the eras it invokes, both past and present. It’s so wild, so dreamlike, so utterly preposterous that it could only be a little bit true.
Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) is a physician in 1933 New York, where his practice is dedicated to easing the suffering of World War I veterans like himself. When his war buddy and best friend, Harold (John David Washington), approaches him to perform a mysterious medical procedure on one of their military leaders, the two are plunged into a bizarre and increasingly convoluted scheme, one that will introduce them to a couple of enigmatic birdwatchers (Mike Myers and Michael Shannon), an eccentric millionaire and his saucer-eyed wife (Rami Malek and Anya Taylor-Joy), and Gen. Gil Dillenbeck, a Butler analog played by Robert De Niro with a convincing combination of gravitas and bewilderment.
The shaggy-dog tale Burt and Harold find themselves in will also plunge them back to the Great War, when they met a captivating nurse named Valerie (Margot Robbie) while recuperating in a Belgian hospital. “Amsterdam” takes its title not from the New York of old, but from the European city where Burt, Harold and Valerie found personal liberation in the postwar era of exploration and artistic ferment.
Russell and his crack design team (the production design is by Judy Becker; J.R. Hawbaker and Albert Wolsky designed the costumes) bring impressive energy and detail to building a world immersed in surrealism — the only conceivable aesthetic response to the irrationality and suffering that was supposed to have ceased with the war to end all wars. There are moments, as “Amsterdam” toggles between 1918 and 1933, when it resembles “Ragtime” on psilocybin. Russell, who wrote the script, engages similar issues of race, class, social mobility and power, albeit in an imaginative space where dream logic is at constant odds with the story at hand. Characters appear without explanation; lines of dialogue are repeated for no reason; flights of fancy bump up against moments of graphic gore; coincidences, red herrings, tics and dog legs pile up with promiscuous abandon. “The dream repeats itself before it forgets itself,” one character says, before concluding: “This is the good part.”
There are some good parts in “Amsterdam,” which Russell has populated with some of the screen’s greatest faces — especially the women. In addition to Robbie and Taylor-Joy, he has enlisted Zoe Saldana to play a pathologist who serenely flirts with Burt over an open chest cavity; Andrea Riseborough plays Burt’s wife, Beatrice, a ruthless social climber with the claws to prove it.
It’s all diverting, if not ultimately sustained. Although the cast is thoroughly committed, as “Amsterdam” wends its way to its hysterically pitched climax, it sometimes feels like it’s two very different movies. Bale’s performance is particularly hard to parse: It’s no surprise that he can so completely submerge his British accent to play a streetwise naif, but the accent and characterization become distractions. Is he channeling Peter Falk? Al Pacino? John Turturro? Willem Dafoe?
Such are the distractions of “Amsterdam,” whose curlicues and circumlocutions are genuinely interesting but grow more self-conscious and indulgent with time. The movie’s saving grace is its contagious passion, and Russell’s unavoidably true thesis is that, as historical loops go, the one we’re in right now a doozy. The demagogues are on the rise again, and it’s hard to know who can fight them off when we’re all the walking wounded.
From left, Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and John David Washington in “Amsterdam.”
Merie Weismiller Wallace/20th Century Studios
TICKET to the ARTS
FAC'S SKY STAGE
59 S. CARROLL ST.
FAME OPEN MIC
Friday October 14th, 7:00pm FAME (Frederick Acoustic Music Enterprise) hosts Open Mic night every hosts the last Sky Stage open mic of the season. Come to listen, play, or both! Please sign up with FAME prior to the event to participate as a performer. Donations appreciated. FAME Concert Saturday October 15th, 7:00pm Michelle Swan, with Sammie J The final installment for the 2022 season of a new 4-show series curated by FAME (Frederick Acoustic Music Enterprise).
For more art news, visit FrederickArtsCouncil.org
Cumberland Valley Artists and Cumberland Valley For more art news, visit FrederickArtsCouncil.org Photographers exhibitions
The Washington County Museum of Fine Arts has announced a call for entries for the Cumberland Valley Artists and Cumberland Valley Photographers exhibitions. Entries will be accepted until 3 p.m. Nov. 9.
An annual tradition since 1933, the Cumberland Valley Artists and Cumberland Valley Photographers exhibitions showcase, celebrate and support artists of the Cumberland Valley region. Each year, hundreds of works are submitted for consideration for inclusion by exhibition jurors. The exhibitions will be on view from Feb. 11 to April 23, 2023.
Entries are to be submitted online at smarterentry.com/callsforentry.
The Best of Show Award for the Cumberland Valley Photographic Salon includes a $1,000 cash award.
Each photographer may submit up to four photographs. The Best of Show Award for the Cumberland Valley Artists Exhibition includes a $1,000 cash award. Each artist may submit up to four works.
This year’s jurors are Mary Morton for CVA and Leo Hsu for CVP.
Morton is curator and head of the French paintings department at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She received her bachelor’s degree from Stanford University in history, and her doctorate from Brown University, concentrating on 19th- and early 20th-century European painting. Morton began her curatorial career in the European art department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, later becoming associate curator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Her exhibition projects prior to arriving at the NGA include “Courbet and the Modern Landscape” (2006), “Oudry’s Painted Menagerie” (2007) and “The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme” (2010).
Hsu’s life has been spent with photography. He is the interim executive director of Silver Eye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh and is an instructor in the photography program at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a managing editor for the online photography resource Fraction Magazine and was the director of online development for the photojournalism/documentary photography magazine and website Foto8. Hsu holds a doctorate in anthropology from New York University and a certificate in the program in Culture and Media (New York). He has written extensively about photography and worked as a newspaper photographer.
More information can be found at https://wcmfa.org/call-for-entries. For questions, contact the museum at 301-739-5727 or info@wcmfa.org.
Now thru November 6, 2022
5 WILLOWDALE DRIVE | FREDERICK, MD BOX OFFICE: (301) 662-6600 www.WAYOFFBROADWAY.com
Vendors sought for Holiday Mart
Vendors are sought for the Holiday Mart at the 13th annual Gingerbread Celebration, presented by the Adams County Arts Council. Vendor products must be handmade or artisan pieces.
The public is invited to shop for these items at the Mart while viewing, voting and casting bids on the gingerbread houses and silent auction baskets.
The event will be held from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Dec. 2 and 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Dec. 3 at the Arts Education Center, 125 S. Washington St. Gettysburg,
The deadline for vendors to apply is Nov. 11.
Vendor fee is $75. Vendor entry forms as well as information to submit a house for the competition are available at adamsarts.org, by calling 717-334-5006, or at the Arts Education Center.
