The Historic KiMo Theatre starts off annum 2013 by professing its continued commitment to motion picture entertainment. Throughout the month of January, every Thursday night, the venerable Downtown venue will be screening its way through the unprecedented 15-part documentary series “The Story of Film: An Odyssey.” Film historian Mark Cousins shot this in-depth cinematic master class on nearly every continent—from Thomas Edison’s New Jersey laboratory to Alfred Hitchcock’s London studio, from the neo-realism of post-war Rome to the wild-and-wooly cinema of modern-day Mumbai. Interviews with legendary filmmakers such as Stanley Donen, Gus Van Sant, Lars Von Trier, Wim Wenders, Abbas Kiarostami, Claire Denis, Bernardo Bertolucci, Robert Towne and Jane Campion take viewers from the earliest days of cinema to today’s blockbusters. On Jan. 3, starting at 7 p.m., KiMo will show the first three one-hour-long segments of “The Story of Film.” These segments cover the Birth of Cinema (1900-1920), the Hollywood Dream (’20s) and the Golden Age of World Cinema (’20s). Tickets are $5 for each segment or $12 for the entire night. The series picks up again on Jan. 10 with three more segments (’30s through ’50s). January 17 gets us up through the ’70s. January 24 takes us to the ‘80s. January 31 closes out the series with parts 13, 14 and 15, which cover today’s cinema and the future of moviemaking. I wasn’t kidding when I said this was a master class. If you’re a film fanatic, you owe it to your education to check out part, if not all, of this invaluable series. Tickets are on sale now at the KiMo box office and at kimotickets.com
Reel World: Was The Book Really Better? Was The Book Really Better?
The Albuquerque Bernalillo County Public Library system is set to crack the spine on another Books to Big Screen film series. This year’s series starts this Saturday, Jan. 5. At 12:30 p.m. That’s when Guild Cinema in Nob Hill will host a free screening of John Huston’s 1979 adaptation of the Flannery O’Connor novel Wise Blood. The series continues on Saturday, Jan. 12, with a 12:30 p.m. screening of the animated, 1979 adaptation of Richard Adams’ Watership Down at Guild and a 2 p.m. screening of 1973’s Charlotte’s Web at the South Broadway Cultural Center. Saturday, Jan. 19, will feature Ang Lee’s 1995 version of Sense and Sensibility at the Main Library (11 a.m.) and David Lean’s 1965 take on Doctor Zhivago at KiMo Theatre (4 p.m.). January 26 closes out this particular read-a-thon with 1994’s Little Women (Main Library at 11 a.m.) and 1958’s Vertigo (Special Collections Library at 2 p.m.). All screenings are free and open to the public—just be sure to bone up on your classics before you watch. Visit the ABC Libraries main site for more info.
