Film
Each week the folks at Cinema Circus show a series of short films on Wednesday evenings at the Chilmark Community Center. The films begin at 6 p.m. but at 5 p.m. the circus — complete with jugglers, face painters, stilt walkers, food and music — gets underway.
As for the movies, each week an advanced screening of the films is arranged with a young Island cineaste; in a world with few certainties, the kid critic is the critic to trust.
By PETER BRANNEN
For Jaws production designer Joe Alves, frights were in short supply on set during the early summer of 1974.
“My concern was the audiences might laugh at the shark,” he said in a telephone conversation from his Hollywood home on Tuesday.
The horror of the Civil War was the graphic and powerful subject of the 1989 Academy Award-winning film Glory, screened at the Katharine Cornell Theatre on Monday night. The event kicked off the Civil War Film Series, jointly sponsored by the Martha’s Vineyard Film Society and the Martha’s Vineyard Museum to commemorate the country’s most deadly war through movies, talks and exhibitions. The museum recently launched an exhibit titled We Are Marching Along: Martha’s Vineyard and the Civil War which continues until April 2012.
Each week the folks at Cinema Circus show a series of short films on Wednesday evenings at the Chilmark Community Center. The films begin at 6 p.m. but at 5 p.m. the circus, complete with jugglers, face painters, stilt walkers, food and music, gets underway.
An advanced screening of the films is arranged with a young Island cineaste, plucked from the age bracket of the target audience. In a world with few certainties, the kid critic is the critic to trust.
Denzel Washington was a relative unknown when he scored the role of Trip, an escaped slave who joined one of the first black units fighting for the Union in the Civil War in the 1989 film Glory. The New York Times called it a “beautifully acted, pageantlike movie” that tells the story of the Massachusetts 54th. That legendary African American volunteer infantry was led by a young white Bostonian, Robert Gould Shaw, who is played by Matthew Broderick.
Did the Green Lantern, last week’s supposed Hollywood blockbuster, fail to light up your life? Don’t despair, there are others here on the Island who also hunger for something more fulfilling on screen. Indeed, the Vineyard in summer is a movie lover’s paradise with numerous festivals bringing narratives and documentaries from around the world just a stone’s throw from your front porch.