‘Tis the season for great movies! Christmas films can be a bit iffy; a lot of times they just seem to be churned out to capitalize on the season, and so we end up with insipid silliness like the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle “Jingle All the Way” or “I’ll Be Home for Christmas (with Johnathan Taylor Thomas). On the other end of the spectrum, however, we have classics like “Home Alone” and “Die Hard.”
Tomorrow, Wednesday the 14th, the Louisville Film Society presents their Holiday Cine-Club triple feature, showcasing three well-known and much-loved Christmas classics at the Dreamland Film Center.
First up at 6:30 is A Charlie Brown Christmas, the classic Peanuts cartoon about the true meaning of Christmas. Charlie Brown laments the growing commercialism of the holiday (a theme that is still, depressingly, as relevant as ever), but with the help of a runtish Christmas tree and his friend Linus, everybody learns a valuable lesson about what Christmas is really all about.
Next, at 7:30, is everybody’s holiday favorite: “A Christmas Story”! Christmas is the most exciting time of year for a young boy, and all Ralphie wants is a “Red Ryder BB gun with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time.” He is thwarted at every turn, however, by his mom, his teacher, and even Santa Claus informing him that he will just shoot his eye out.
Finally, they are showing “Scrooged” at 9:00. Frank Cross (Bill Murray) is a modern-day Scrooge who runs a TV station which is planning an adaptation of “A Christmas Carol.” In a twist of art-imitating-art, he encounters the ghosts of Christmas’ past, present, and future, who urge him to change his ways.
Dreamland Film Center Cine-Club screenings are free for Louisville Film Society members only. Membership information can be found at their website.
Free and open to the public, however, is a showing of the documentary “Troop 1500” on Thursday the 15th: “TROOP 1500 follows five young Girl Scouts whose mothers are serving time. Filmmakers Ellen Spiro and Karen Bernstein, who volunteered with the girls for two years before making TROOP 1500, gained unprecedented access to Girl Scouts of the USA, Gatesville Prison and the families themselves. The filmmakers trained the girls in videography, so they could conduct their own interviews and tell their own stories-asking some difficult questions and getting some tough answers.”
Following the screening is a Q&A discussion with Andrea Houston and Angela Wilson, who have worked with the Girls Behind Bars program, and Brigid Adams and Paige McGuire from the Kentucky Division of Corrections.
The Dreamland Film Center is located at 810 E. Market Street.
Graphic courtesy of the Louisville Film Society website.
