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Waking Dreams

By Administrator | 17 January 2013

I think it might be one of the side effects of getting older, but more and more I find myself drawn to movies that  take the accepted notions of reality, logic or coherence and just gleefully turn left and keep on going.

There's a lot of dreamlike, spacey films coming up over the next six months at SLQ, which I hope you'll enjoy.

Onibaba (20 Jan) is one of my personal favourite movies, it's a masterpiece of lighting, editing and creepy sound design. Taking it's cues from the Japanese "Demon Woman" myth, it's an immersive cinematic experience that deserves to be seen on the big screen.

The atmosphere and particularly the editing style of Onibaba would be heavily referenced in director William Friedkin's masterpiece The Exorcist over ten years later, a movie who's masssive critical and commercial popularity set the stage for a spectacular fall from grace that the confrontational auteur was never able to fully recover from. That catastrophe was the film Sorcerer a remake of The Wages of Fear, which had the bitterly unfortunate luck of being released in the same week as Star Wars in 1977. Not that the commercial failure of Sorcerer should be laid squarely at the feet of Luke, Leia, Darth and Obi-Wan; chances are that the morally shaky Sorcerer was never going to set the box office on fire. It's a gorgeous, murky tale of near-impossible levels of desperation, told (in much the same viewpoint as The Exorcist and Friedkin's other little-seen, unloved classic Cruising, which I vow to play here one day - let's make a date for 2014) through a lens focused on the grime and toil of the earthly plane, while overtly acknowledging the creeping influence of supernatural, otherworldly forces. It's a gripping piece of work, and we're especially happy to be presenting this rarely seen classic on the 10th of March.

Other forthcoming features that either drift gently from the tethers of reality, or just tear free completely, include Ken Russel and The Who's phantasmagoric collaboration Tommy (10 Feb), Mont Hellman's existentialist road trip Two Lane Blacktop, David Bowie as the ultimate outsider in The Man Who Fell To Earth (14 April), and the clinging nightmare of Christan Bale's tortured The Machinist (21 April). The full lineup of our films can always be found on here.

As 2013 progresses, we're seeing a large slew of amazing, insightful documentaries and true stories coming to the SLiQFlicks screens, but for now, we dream, knowing that reality lurks, patient as stone, for us to emerge blinking into it's glare, armed with the instincts learned from sleep.

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