Mon - January 12, 2009

Flicks in the Sticks present "Mama Mia"


In a change to the schedule, Flicks in the Sticks are very please to present some light hearted fun to liven up a dull January, showing the widely acclaimed 'Mama Mia'. At the usual venue of WRVS, tickets £3.50, doors 7pm, film 7.30pm, unreserved seating, films subject to availability.


Posted at 10:47 am     Top  

Tue - December 9, 2008

Flicks in the Sticks announce Spring Season


Flicks in the Sticks finish their Autumn Season with the widely acclaimed 'Son of Rambow' on 13 December and, not to rest on their laurels, the Spring Season is already planned for your viewing pleasure;
17 January - Mama Mia
14 February - The Baker - filmed locally in Grosmont
14 March - St Trinians
11 April - The Popes Toilet
All at the usual venue of WRVS, tickets £4, doors 7pm, film 7.30pm, unreserved seating, films subject to availability.


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Wed - August 15, 2007

Flicks in the Sticks - Autumn 2007 Season announced


Flicks in the Sticks will be showiing a short season of films from October, dates so far are Saturday 6 October, Saturday 3 November and Saturday 1 December. More details when we have them.
Venue - Riverside Centre (WRVS), Vicarage Road, Hereford. Doors - 7.00pm. Unreserved seating and all tickets £3.50 on door. Films subject to availability. Contact 01432 358104


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Sun - January 28, 2007

Borderlines - Britain's biggest rural film festival - 23 March to 1 April


Britain's biggest rural film festival, Borderlines Film Festival opens at over twenty venues across the border country of Herefordshire, Shropshire and Powys from Friday 23 March to Sunday 1 April.

Borderlines celebrates its fifth year with a special BAFTA premiere of the utterly compelling The Loves of Others, recently named Best European Film of the Year. It also showcases a season of Bollywood blockbusters, marks the 25th anniversary of the Greenham women's peace movement, premieres the work of regional film makers like BBC Flog It!'s Mike Jackson, and expands on Borderlines' winning formula for taking feature film into the heart of the country.

Last year nearly 10,000 people attended the Festival. “The Borderlines programme has proved more and more popular and it’s great to see so many local people taking the chance to enjoy the best films from around the world,” says Borderlines Director, David Gillam. This year's top tips are the fantastic Pan's Labyrinth, the hilarious Running With Scissors and two excellent documentaries, China Blue, about how your jeans are made, and The Railroad All Stars about a group of prostitutes who form a football team.

Major new international releases, due for the big screens of Hereford, Ludlow or Shrewsbury, range from Patrice Chereau's emotionally complex Gabrielle (France, a follow-up to Chereau's Cannes-winner La Reine Margot); the French psychological drama, The Page Turner, and Miss Potter with Renee Zellweger.

Click on 'Read more' for more info and visit www.borderlinesfilmfestival.org for details.

Critical younger audiences meanwhile will be making up their minds about,Gary Winnick's film version, Charlotte's Web, and listening to the likes of
Kate Winslet, Ian McKellen and Bill Nighy in Bristol-based Aardman Animations' Flushed Away.

To celebrate 60 years of Indian Independence Borderlines’ Indian film season opens with the Satyajit Ray classic Pather Panchali. Also up for screening is the most popular Hindi films of all times, Aditya Chopra's Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and India's entry for this year's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Rang de Basanti, a brave piece of political cinema that has inspired protest marches across India.

In 25 Years Since Greenham, women directors will introduce Carry Greenham Home by Beeban Kidron, (director of Bridget Jones 2) and Amanda Richardson, and A Common Cause by Jane Jackson. Jackson's 1983 fly on the wall documentary followed women protesters from Chester to Greenham. As the Government debates a replacement for the Trident nuclear submarine, Several of the women featured will reunite for the Borderlines Debate to reassess what became the most significant women's protest movement since the Suffragettes.

Borderlines is an opportunity to showcase regional filmmakers.

While Worcestershire's Mike Jackson, location director on BBC 2's Flog It! premieres his fifteen minute short on the Hancock family's Bishops Frome farm, A Pocket of Hops, The Rural Media Company will screen their Costa del Marches, a film on global warming starring Robert Duncan (Gus in Drop the dead donkey).

The heart of the country is at the heart of Borderlines and the Flicks in the Sticks Festival programme will include the visually sumptuous Volver, which won director Almodovar the European Film Award for Best Director and Penelope Cruz Best Actress Award; Richard E Grant's tragic, moving and terribly funny Wah-Wah; Al Gore’s passionate and inspirational An Inconvenient Truth; and one of the finest dance documentaries ever made Ballet Russe.

It's this unique programme, which has persuaded the first pub in the country to turn itself into a film festival venue. Simon and Alison Durrant from the Green Dragon (voted Country Pub of the Year in 2006) at Bishops Frome plan to screen what they can - especially Mike Jackson's locally-filmed A Pocket of Hops. "Local film and real ales: what more could you ask for?" asks landlord Simon.

Borderlines Film Festival runs across the region from Friday 23 March to Sunday 1 April 2007. Venues confirmed to date include Hereford (The
Courtyard), Ludlow (Assembly Rooms),Leominster (Lion Ballroom), Ross-on-Wye (St Mary's Hall) and Abergavenny; villages include Ballingham, Bosbury, Brilley, Burghill, Clifford, Clun, Clungunford, Dilwyn, Garway, Gorsley, Kingsland, Ledbury, Leintwardine and Presteigne.

Posted at 05:54 pm     Top  

Sat - January 20, 2007

Flicks in the Sticks - Spring 2007 Season announced


SATURDAY 27 JANUARY- "PIERREPOINT"
Timothy Spall plays England's last hangman reflecting on his career

SATURDAY 24 FEBRUARY "THE QUEEN"
Helen Mirren is sensational in this film set around the time of the death of Diana

SATURDAY 7 APRIL "LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE"
A dysfunctional family's road trip to the eponymous beauty pageant.

SATURDAY 28 APRIL "THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA"
Meryl Streep gives another fine comic performance as a New York fashion nazi based on Vogue magazine.

Venue - Riverside Centre (WRVS), Vicarage Road, Hereford
Doors - 7.00pm. Unreserved seating and all tickets £3.50 on door. Films subject to availability. Contact 01432 358104


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Mon - December 5, 2005

2006 season of 'Flicks in the Sticks' films to be shown at the Riverside Centre


For those of you who haven’t heard about the wonderful scheme called Flicks in the Sticks let us enlighten you. The project first started 4 years ago as a pilot in 20 venues in Herefordshire and Shropshire, bringing big screen blockbusters as well as small budget films to rural areas with no cinema. It has now grown to include 70 venues, 300 screenings, with an audience of nearly 20,000 people. In our area the Flicks in the Sticks venue is the Riverside Centre, Vicarage Road and the details of the latest films to be shown in the new 2006 season will be announced shortly. Read more at our Flicks in the Sticks page.

Doors open from 7pm and films start at 7.30pm. Unreserved seating, all tickets £3.50 on the door. All welcome - For more information phone 350914 or email flicks@jaba.org.uk.

Dates for the 2006 season are below, please let us know if you would like to see any particular film.

Films confirmed for:

4 February 2006: The Big Celt, starring Gillian Anderson and Robert Carlyle. Cert 12A.
4 March 2006: Kinky Boots. Cert 12A.

8 April 2006: Constant Gardener. Cert 15. A man discovers a deadly secret when he tries to find out who killed the woman he loves in this suspense drama based on a novel by John Le Carré. Stars Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz.

There will be a new season of films starting in September, more films to be confirmed shortly, dates;

23 September 2006: "Mrs Henderson Presents". A recently widowed eccentric with money to burn and no intentions of settling down enlists the aide of a showbiz professional to transform a run-down theater in Soho into London's most innovative entertainment hot spot in director Stephen Frears' cinematic account of the groundbreaking Windmill Theater. The year is 1937 and, despite having recently lost her husband, 69-year-old Laura Henderson (Judy Dench) remains as ambitious and vital as ever. Aghast at her friend Lady Conway's (Thelma Barlow) suggestion that she take up a mundane hobby such as diamond collecting to pass the time, Mrs. Henderson instead shocks her well-to-do social circle by purchasing the ramshackle Windmill Theater in the heart of downtown Soho. Unafraid to take a risk in the venture, yet lacking the experience needed to run the theater, Mrs. Henderson brings in showbiz veteran Vivian Van Damm (Bob Hoskins) to line up an opening act that will set the stage ablaze. When the ever-curious Mrs. Henderson's intrusive spying begins to impede on Mr. Van Damm's creative progress, the frustrated theater manager has her banished from rehearsals. Though Van Damm's innovative idea to stage an unending stream of entertainment dubbed "Revudeville" proves a wild and profitable success, the Windmill begins to suffer when other local theaters quickly follow suit. Now faced with the prospect of seeing her once-lucrative endeavor fall by the wayside due to the unoriginality of the copycats who surround her, Mrs. Henderson decides to show audiences something they've never seen before by making the Windmill the first theater to feature nude female entertainers live on-stage.

21 October 2006: tbc
11 November 2006 :tbc
2 December 2006: tbc

Posted at 11:46 pm     Top  

Fri - September 16, 2005

Film review by Kate Williams - Super Size Me


Super Size Me is a documentary which follows the progress of US film maker Morgan Spurlock when he decides to live on nothing but McDonalds food for a month.
 
Why would he do such a thing I hear you ask? Well, Spurlock came up with the idea in 2002 while watching news coverage of a case in which two teenage girls were suing McDonalds for causing their obesity. In the case, McDonalds claimed that their food could form part of a 'nutritious diet'. Spurlock thought he would test the theory on himself. Read more ...

Spurlock, certified a relatively healthy and fit man at the start, sets out various rules for himself. He must eat and drink at McDonalds every meal time, he must eat everything on the menu at least once and if he is offered a Super-size meal (huge portions that were until recently available in America) he must take it.
 
You watch as the grim results of his experiment unfold. He gains 25lb in weight, his cholesterol jumps from 165 to 225, he suffers from heart palpitations, headaches, mood swings, nausea, sexual dysfunction and one member of the medical team monitoring him reveals that his liver has turned into pâté!
 
The film is a hilarious, graphic and thought provoking look at the US fast food industry, McDonalds in particular. It probes into the advertising strategies of the fast food giants and puts school dinners in the US under the spotlight. While eating, Spurlock travels across twenty US States interviewing experts and the public in an attempt to find answers to the growing trend of obesity in America. 

The film is a definite must see but, be warned, after you've watched Spurlock be sick after his first super-sized meal, you may not have the stomach for a repeat viewing!

Posted at 11:49 pm     Top  

Film review by Kate Williams - Contempt of Conscience


Contempt of Conscience, directed and produced by Bartonsham-based film maker Joe Jenkins, hit the big screen last month at the Borderlines Film Festival.

The documentary short examines whether or not we were all conscripted by the Government to fight the Iraq war, by paying our taxes. It looks at the history of conscientious objection through the eyes of veteran campaigners from WWII and then charts the Peace Tax 7 campaign to date. Read more .. .

The 12 minute film uses a mixture of historical footage, demo film, interviews and even an appearance from comedian Mark Thomas to examine the issues and follow the progress of six people who are refusing to pay for the Iraq war as a matter of conscience. They want their taxes instead to be put towards peace initiatives.
 
The only thing wrong with this film is that it leaves you wanting more; more information, more explanation, more footage?.more documentary! There are so many issues to explain and not enough time to cram it all in. I was left with the feeling that it only skimmed the surface and told half the story.
 
It is a useful film which documents the initial stages of an interesting campaign, with hopefully much more to come!

Posted at 11:47 pm     Top  

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