Playing Soon at the Guild

Mikaela says:
Join us this Friday @ 8:30 to see:

Paradise Now: On a typical day in the West Bank city of Nablus, where daily life grinds on amidst crushing poverty and the occasional rocket blast, we meet two childhood best friends, Saïd (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman), who pass time drinking tea, smoking a hookah, and working dead-end menial jobs as auto mechanics. But Saïd and Khaled may be be living the last 48 hours of their lives... they’ve been recruited for a strike on Tel Aviv. When they are intercepted at the Israeli border and separated from their handlers, a young woman who discovers their plan causes them to reconsider their actions. Winner of multiple prizes at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival, the film was written by Hany Abu-Assad (FORD TRANSIT, RANA’S WEDDING) & Bero Beyer.

And next week (March 10-16) for:
MARCH 10 - 16 (ONE WEEK)
RICHARD PRYOR - 1940 - 2005 - A MEMORIAL TRIBUTE
RICHARD PRYOR LIVE ON THE SUNSET STRIP is one of his best-known concert documentaries, and WATTSTAX, the acclaimed music concert documentary, features Pryor just before his career took off.

RICHARD PRYOR LIVE ON THE SUNSET STRIP (3:30, 7:15)
Dir. Joe Layton - 1982 - 82m
We celebrate the life of the late comic genius with one of his best concert films, one which departs from the standup schtick with an unsentimental glance at his near-death accident while freebasing cocaine.
“As is his way, he provides voices - often whining, quarrelsome ones - to inanimate objects, including parts of his body, at no time with more eerie effect than when he sets out to tell the audience the entire truth about the accident in which he was so badly burned that he almost died. This, too, begins as a series of gags. ‘Before going to bed,’ he says, ‘it’s my habit to have a glass of no-fat milk and cookies. When I put them together, they exploded. Scientists are still trying to figure out what happened.’ His stories about the accident itself, the long days in the hospital and the therapy he went through are not funny, but they have an honesty that doesn’t for a minute disturb the dramatic line of his singular comedy.”
- Vincent Canby, New York Times



WATTSTAX (5:10, 9:00)
Dir. Mel Stuart - 1973 - 102m
The legendary “black Woodstock” finally gets its due with a restored 35mm print of Mel Stuart's documentary of the epochal 1972 concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which drew over 90,000 people. Featuring incendiary performances by Isaac Hayes, Albert King, Rufus and Carla Thomas, the Staple Singers, the Emotions, the Bar-Kays and other greats of soul, R&B, and gospel— plus biting humor from a then little-known Richard Pryor — WATTSTAX is more than a concert film. It also captures a heady moment in mid-1970s, “black-is-beautiful” African-American culture, when Los Angeles’s black community came together just seven years after the Watts riots to celebrate its survival and a renewed hope in its future.