Rural Cinema: Dark Waters 27/01/2022
In this gripping real-life thriller, Mark Ruffalo plays a lawyer who takes on the company that dumped toxic chemicals in West Virginia for decades.
Todd Haynes is such a distinctive authorial voice in American cinema, a genius from left field, notably addressing identity and sexuality, and with an interest in fantasy, pastiche and the vicissitudes of period detail. Dark Waters is in so many ways out of character for him: a straight-ahead, true-life legal thriller, fluently adapted by screenwriters Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan from a New York Times magazine article by Nathaniel Rich.
It plays out in the absorbing classic style, featuring the principled lawyer (played here by Mark Ruffalo) taking on the corporate bad guys on behalf of ordinary folks. There are no ironically self-aware stylistic touches, although – given that it is a film about bad things being hidden in the waters – the first scene with young people rashly swimming in a poisoned creek could allude to the opening of Jaws.
Rob Bilott (Ruffalo) is the besuited corporate lawyer from Ohio who has built a blandly prosperous career in the 1990s representing big, powerful companies. But then an angry West Virginia farmer called Wilbur Tennant (ferociously played by Bill Camp) gets in touch, because he is a friend and neighbour of Bilott’s grandma. (In real life, Tennant just called Bilott on the phone; the movie has him show up embarrassingly in the office in his dusty
farmer’s gear.) All of Wilbur’s cows are being horribly poisoned because of chemical firm DuPont’s nearby plant. Something truly evil is going on…
Village Hall Rural Cinema
Dream Horse
Thursday 28th October 7.30 pm film starts at 8.00pm
The true story of Dream Alliance, an unlikely racehorse bred by small-town bartender Jan Vokes. With very little money and no experience, Jan convinces her neighbours to chip in their meagre earnings to help raise Dream and compete with the racing elites. Their investment pays off as Dream rises through the ranks and becomes a beacon of hope for their struggling community.
Tickets are available on the door £4.00 per person
Mrs Lowry & Son
Showing at Village Hall Thursday 30th April Doors open 7.30pm
Cancelled
Bar Open 4pm with Full Menu
Vanessa Redgrave gives a shrewd and amusingly bleak performance here as Elizabeth Lowry, the cantankerous and bedridden mother of the artist LS Lowry – played by Timothy Spall.
He is exasperated by her imperious mood swings, her refusal to take his art seriously and then by her capricious decision to like some of his work – a sudden spasm of approval that is no less disconcerting than her contempt. Through it all is Elizabeth’s deadpan gloom: Lowry patiently asks her to be cheerful and she replies acidly: “I haven’t been cheerful since 1898.” Lowry himself is shown living a musingly melancholy and apparently asexual existence that comes alive with this verbal sparring with his grumpy old mum, and with hints that the impossibly exotic London art world might just be starting to appreciate him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTOiVivEmwo