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Sunday Movie - "Manchester by the Sea" (2016) - 1pm in the Hex Room Coffee Lounge in the BCP Center


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As many of you know, the La Villa Coffee Lounge is no more, but BCP is working on finding new proprietors for the facility and its restaurant / coffee lounge.  In the meantime, volunteers are helping by providing the basics and keeping the facility open. 

The movie starts at 1pm.  No more comfortable sofas for now, but if you like, you can bring cushions for the hard restaurant chairs, or folding / camp chairs for more comfort.  There is no admission charge, but we ask for voluntary donations to support the program and help pay for the video system.  

 

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Upcoming movies - details about each film will be sent out during the week before the screening.  

March 12: Manchester by the Sea (2016 - U.S.)

March 19:  Buena Vista Social Club (1999) 

March 26:  Tracks (2013 - Australia) 

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From Rolling Stone:  "Kenneth Lonergan's story of New England handyman coming to terms with his past – and raising his nephew – is a stone-cold instant classic  The drama starring Casey Affleck is one of year's best movies"
 

You can't really prepare yourself for the emotional powerhouse that is Manchester by the Sea. And you shouldn't let big-mouth critics and friends tell you too much about what's ahead in writer-director Kenneth Lonergan's transcendent benchmark. No film this year has moved me more with its humor, heart and humanity.

Lonergan's script...is a model of exceptional screenwriting without being tidy, timid or tactful – concerns the ramifications of a family tragedy, one that extends from those directly involved to the community that alternately offers and withholds nurturing support. Engrave the name Casey Affleck on the Oscar for Best Actor right now {Affleck did indeed win the Oscar] , so extraordinary and engulfing is his performance as Lee Chandler, a Boston janitor called back to his Massachusetts hometown of Manchester-by-the-Sea when his older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler, superb) dies of congestive heart failure. In the recent past, Lee had been brutally whacked by life, seeking escape in the rote duties of fixing sinks, unclogging toilets and starting bar fights with strangers who look at him sideways. His one human connection is his brother, who runs a commercial fishing boat and tries to raise his son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges, in a livewire, star-is-born performance), a randy 16-year-old whose main concerns are sex, hockey and his rock band. Patrick's alcoholic mother (Gretchen Mol) had long ago deserted her family. Now Lee has been named the boy's guardian, a job for which this self-loathing, self-punishing handyman is singularly unsuited.

In an ordinary movie, these plotlines would converge with aching familiarity. Not here. Lonergan fills Manchester with disorderly sprawl, a sense of life as it's lived and not manufactured by Hollywood. With brilliant contributions from cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes and composer Lesley Barber, the film lets us experience Lee as he closes himself off from the world. Affleck has been outstanding before, notably in Gone Baby Gone and his Oscar-nominated turn in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, but these are his finest two-plus hours on screen. In flashbacks that allow Lonergan to double back in time and viewers to see characters before trauma defined them, Lee is introduced as a charming bad boy, a sexually playful husband to Randi (Michelle Williams) and doting dad to their three young children. Then the unthinkable happens, and their marriage ends. In a movie of shattering moments, a chance meeting on the street between Lee and Randi will wipe you out. It's a scene you won't forget. Ever. Williams, radiating ferocity and feeling, hits a new peak as a performer, and she and Affleck dig into their roles with every fiber of their being. This is acting of the highest caliber. 

David Van Harn 
Boquete Film Club Curator

Link to trailer 

Manchester.jpg.eb271df1b932c3bf7529a5c170d56f00.jpg

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