[Reel Pizza] schedule

Good afternoon
As promised, here is the new Reel Pizza schedule.  It runs Friday October 17 through Monday November 10th. 

First some notes.  We hope you have time to come by in the next several weeks and check out the brand new, beautiful menu boards by Brendon Pringle of Chalk Art Design in Freeport.  We think they are quite striking, and give us an air of respectability that we didn't have before.  Plus we think they are much easier to read, even though they contain all the same information as we had on our old, tired chalkboards. 

Oh, No! ITS THAT TIME AGAIN...  OUR LAST NIGHT IS MON NOV 10
Please check our website or our ads in the local papers or call us to learn which two films we will show on our closing weekend.  (or just stay tuned, for I will send you all an e-mail)  Our currently booked films only run through November 6.
- but never fear -
WE WILL REOPEN FRI DEC 26  "for the season"
As always, our gift certificates and Big Ticket passes are available for holiday giving.  Give your loved ones something they are sure to use with pleasure this winter.  Call us at 288-3828 (and leave a message), or  write us at POBox 625 Bar Harbor, or e-mail lisa@reelpizza.net, or stop by when you see any of our cars in the lot by the side door. 

We are looking forward to our break time, going to Florida to sit on the beach for a little while, but we won't be gone long.   THANKS (big time) for everything you have done for us this year.  Please know we so appreciate all your phenomenal support, and we hope we return the love. Happy Holidays to all and we'll see you soon, at the movies!

-Chris, Lisa, Pierce and Chloe

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Friday Oct 17 - Monday Oct 20
ELEGY (R) 108min
Celebrated NPR culture critic and part-time college professor David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) abandoned any desire for commitment years ago when he left his wife and young son for the sexual freedom of a string of casual encounters with former students.  This year he has his eye on a beautiful Latina grad student (Penélope Cruz), a tryst which to his surprise, turns into a passionate, long-term relationship.  But, overwhelmed with her beauty and his much greater age, he becomes a jealous lover, and remains distant, believing they have no future together.  The fine supporting cast includes Patricia Clarkson as a long-time occasional lover, Dennis Hopper as his Pulitzer-prize winning best friend and Peter Sarsgaard as his now grown son.  Spanish director Isabel Croixet has made an intelligent, affecting and unforgettable adaptation of Philip Roth's short novel The Dying Animal.

Tuesday Oct 21 - Thursday Oct 23
THE POOL  (NR)  98min  [partly in Hindi with subtitles]
The impressive range of the creative gifts of documentarian Chris Smith (The Yes Men, American Movie) are proven in his dramatic feature debut.  Using a story by Randy Russell, set in Iowa but transplanted to Panjin, a city in India's western state of Goa, he focuses again on the gulf between rich and poor, sharing insights, observations and universal truths with a deceptively simple narrative.  Young Venkatesh is a poor room boy at a hotel with dreams of becoming a successful business man.  He has found the personification of those dreams in a shimmering swimming pool in a luxuriant walled garden of a seemingly empty house that he can see from up in a nearby tree.  Thinking that if he could just swim in that pool, all his troubles would be washed away, he offers his services to the gruff owner.  This incisive portrait shows how Venkatesh's curiosity of the world around him changes the shape of his future. 

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Friday Oct 24 - Monday Oct 27
FROZEN RIVER (R) 97min
Involving and gripping, this Sundance winner follows two ordinary women, both single-moms driven by severe economic hardship and a desperate love of their young children, who form an unlikely partnership to make ends meet.  These women, one white, one Native American, uneasily join forces to smuggle illegal immigrants across the frozen St. Lawrence River from Canada into the Mohawk Reservation in upstate New York.  Melissa Leo (21 Grams) and Misty Upham both give powerful performances in the debut feature film by Courtney Hunt.  This dramatic, entertaining film is a complex portrait of family bonds and struggling women facing ethical choices in an authentically unforgiving world.
 
Tuesday Oct 28 - Thursday Oct 30
MAMMA'S MAN  (NR)  94min 
Mikey (Matt Boren) is a 30 year old new father, who, having just spent some time visiting with his parents at their cluttered Manhattan loft, his childhood home, suddenly refuses to return to his family in Los Angeles and moves back in to his old room.  Unsure of his motivations, he makes up excuses for why he is staying; his doting mother (Flo Jacobs) happily enables his procrastination, while his artist father (legendary experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs) is suspicious, and his wife becomes increasingly unsettled. Becoming more and more entrenched in his adolescent sanctuary, he eventually comes to a point where he must choose between life as it is and life as it was.  This touching, insightful dramatic comedy by young independent filmmaker Azazel Jacobs, following in the footsteps of early Jim Jarmusch, features his actual parents and their home.  It was produced by MDI resident Hunter Gray.

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Friday Oct 31 - Monday Nov 3
I SERVED THE KING OF ENGLAND  (R)  118 min  [in Czech and German with subtitles]
With slapstick comedy and homage to silent films and vaudeville, peerless Czech director Jirí Menzel (Oscar winner for Closely Watched Trains, and nominee for My Sweet Little Village) fancifully and playfully adapts Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabal's 1974 story about a short and clownish waiter who dreams of being a millionaire, and was lucky until he wasn't.  Told in flashback by the elder Jan who has just been released from years in prison, this hilariously entertaining story follows young Jan (Bulgarian clown Ivan Barnev) as he recklessly works his way from hotdog stand vendor to head waiter at a luxury hotel, all the while seducing the ever increasingly beautiful ladies and poking fun at the rich.  Even as he plans to open his own luxury hotel, first the Nazis and then the communists take over his country, and his choices have serious consequences.
 
Tuesday Nov 4 - Thursday Nov 6
TROUBLE THE WATER  (NR)  96min
Winner of the Grand Jury prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival, this astonishingly powerful and unforgettable documentary and redemptive tale is both horrifying and exhilarating.  Directed and produced by producers Tia Lesson and Carl Deal (Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine), they use astonishing and never before seen footage of New Orleans residents Kimberly Rivers Roberts, a young charismatic rap artist, and her husband Scott who use her new video camera to film Hurricane Katrina beginning the day before the storm ravaged their Ninth Ward home, and continuing even as their world becomes increasingly harrowing as the storm bears down on them and their neighbors.  The film then documents the couple's return to the devastation that was their home, and follows the appalling repeated failures of the government in the aftermath.   This essential, extraordinary film is one of the most acclaimed documentaries of the past year, for good reason.

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NOTE We will have two more films (perhaps from the list below?) showing the weekend Friday November 7 - Monday Nov 10.  I will send you an email when we know, or you can check our website or the ads in the three local papers, or call the machine at the theatre 288-3811 to learn what it will be, once we get to November.

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Coming on our second screen?
FLASH OF GENIUS (PG-13)  119min
How timely.  This crowd-pleasing movie is about the big corporation (here it is Ford Motor Company) ripping off the little guy (here it is small time inventor and engineering professor Robert Kearns).  Back in the 1960's Mr. Kearns (Greg Kinnear) in his basement invented the intermittent windshield wiper.  With his buddy (Dermot Mulroney) they set up a manufacturing plant, and sell Ford the devise that Ford's people have been working on for years without success.  Soon after getting a prototype, Ford withdraws from the deal and Kearns is astonished to find his invention on the next year's models.  He sues with the help of a crusading lawyer (Alan Alda) but his principled stand destroys his family, and his lawyer resigns when he realizes that Kearns is not interested in financial gain, but in an admission of guilt from the big guys.  It even takes his sanity yet he will not waiver.  This is the directing debut from producer Marc Abrahams (The Commitments, Air Force One).
 
CITY OF EMBER (PG)  95min
Based on the very popular novel by Jeanne Duprau, this heart-pounding, edge-of-your-seat adventure boasts an impressive cast and crew.  It stars Saoirse Ronan (Atonement), Bill Murray, Tim Robbins, Martin Landau, Mary Kay Place, Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Secrets and Lies), and Harry Treadaway (Control).  The screenplay was written by Caroline Thompson (Edward Scissorhands) and the film was directed by Gil Kenan (Monster House).  Set in an underground city that for generations has depended on a massive generator to power their lights, but now the generator is failing and the city is falling into darkness, the story follows two teens in their new jobs as messenger and pipeworker, armed with a mysterious box full of cryptic papers follow clues, maneuver around corrupt politicians and other unsavory characters and race the clock as they try to restore the light to their beloved city.
 
APPALOOSA (R)  114min
In his second directing effort, following his Oscar-winning Pollock, actor Ed Harris brings a strong cast of familiar faces to tell the suspenseful story, based on the novel by Robert B. Parker, of two gunfighters attempting to bring peace to a small mining town in the Wild West of 1882's New Mexico territory.  Viggo Mortensen and Harris (both in A History of Violence) play two marshals hired to bring to justice a murderous vigilante rancher (Jeremy Irons) who has run roughshod over the town.  Matters are complicated with the arrival of a provocative, mysterious widower (Renée Zellweger) who flounces into town and woos all three men; her unconventional manner threatens to undermine their progress and destroy the lawman's partnership.
 
BODY OF LIES  (R)  129min
Director Ridley Scott's new dramatic thriller, based on Washington Post CIA journalist David Ignatius' critically acclaimed novel, follows the frantic search for a Middle Eastern terrorist before he can strike.  Leonardo DiCaprio plays a CIA soldier in the war on terrorism who comes up with a dangerous and elaborate scheme to infiltrate the cell of a master terrorist and get the ringleader to walk into the waiting arms of the CIA.  Russell Crowe is the cynical, arrogant and impatient CIA veteran back in the states and Mark Strong is the charismatic but suspect head of Jordanian intelligence who both must approve the manipulative plan before it gets set in motion.  But are these men trustworthy?  This multi-layered spy thriller is convincing and gripping.
 
THE DUCHESS  (PG-13)  109min
Keira Knightley is stellar as the Duchess of Devonshire, a headstrong woman from two centuries ago, who wanted to be a player in the wider affairs of the world.  The direct ancestor of Princess Diana, and like her, this Duchess was ravishing, glamorous and adored by her country.  But even with her power and popularity, she was unable to seduce her own boorish husband the Duke (Ralph Feinnes).  When she tried to find her own way and be true to her heart and loyal to her duty the resulting controversies left all of London talking and paid the price.  This ravishing costume drama, directed by Saul Dibbs, also stars Dominic Cooper (The History Boys) as the duchess' childhood sweetheart, and Charlotte Rampling (Swimming Pool) as her appalled mother.

Also maybe RELIGULOUS or W. or NIGHTS IN RODANTHE

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Coming December into January? 

Rachel Getting Married  -  new from Jonathan Demme
Happy Go Lucky  - new from Mike Leigh
Synecdoche, NY  - new from Charlie Kaufman
Quantum of Solace  - new James Bond
Australia  - new from Baz Luhrman
Milk  -  new from Gus Van Sant
Slumdog Millionaire  - new from Danny Boyle
Tale of Despereaux  - new animated adaptation of a wonderful children's story

...and we are sure there will be many more!

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