Clockwork Orange, The Terminator, Blade Runner: The Final Director’s Cut - all on the big screen

posted by friendsoftheloews on May 6, 2008 at 10:47 am

A Clockwork Orange
The Terminator
and
Blade Runner: The Final Cut

At the Landmark Loew’s Jersey Theatre
54 Journal Square, Jersey City, NJ 07306 Tel. (201) 798-6055
Fax. (201) 798-4020 Web. www.loewsjersey.org
A Not-For-Profit Arts Center

Rediscover the EXPERIENCE of going to the movies. The BIG screen. In a Grand Palace.

Friday, May 9 at 8 PM – A Clockwork Orange. Starring Malcolm McDowell, Patrick Magee, Michael Bates, Adrienne Corri, Aubrey Morris, James Marcus, Steven Berkoff. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. (1971, 137mins. Color. Rated R. Parental discretion advised. Contains graphic depiction of violence and sexual situations. Adult themes.) For more detailed description, see “Film Descriptions” below. Admission: $6 for adults. $4 for seniors (65+), students with I.D. and children (12 & younger).

Saturday, May 10 at 4 PM – The Terminator. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, Linda Hamilton, Paul Winfield, Lance Henriksen, Rick Rossovich, Earl Boen. Directed by James Cameron. (1984, 108mins. Rated R) For more detailed description, see “Film Descriptions” below.
Admission: $6 for adults, $4 for seniors (65+), students and children (12 & younger).

Saturday, May 10 at 8PM – Blade Runner: The Final Cut. Starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, William Sanderson, Daryl Hannah. Directed by Ridley Scott. (1982, 117 mins. Color. Rated R.) For more detailed description, see “Film Descriptions” below.
This is the version recently re-edited by director Ridley Scott to eliminate elements included by the studio in the original release. Several scenes have also been added.
Blade Runner: The Final Cut will be screened in a new, 35 mm print.
Admission: $6 for adults. $4 for seniors(65+), students with I.D. and children (12 & under).

Combo discounts are available for multiple screenings in a single weekend series.
All titles will be screened in 35mm.

The Loew’s Is Easy To Get To: The Loew’s Jersey Theatre, at 54 Journal Square, Jersey City, NJ, is directly across JFK Boulevard from the JSQ PATH Center with trains to and from Lower and Midtown Manhattan and Newark’s Penn Station, is minutes from the NJ Turnpike and is easily reached by car or mass transit from throughout the Metro Area.

Half-price off-street parking is available in Square Ramp Garage adjoining the Loew’s. Patrons present a coupon to garage attendant when they leave. Coupon is available at our box office.

What’s Special About Seeing A Movie At The Loew’s? The Landmark Loew’s Jersey Theatre is one of America’s grandest surviving Movie Palaces. We show movies the way they were meant to be seen: in a grandly ornate setting — on our BIG 50 ft wide screen! The Loew’s runs reel-to-reel, not platter, projection, which often allows us to screen an archival or studio vault print that is the best available copy of a movie title.

The Loew’s Jersey is managed by Friends of the Loew’s, Inc. as a non-profit, multi-discipline performing arts center.

For directions or more information: Call (201) 798-6055 or visit www.loewsjersey.org

Classic Film Weekends are presented by Friends of the Loew’s, Inc.

Press inquiries call Colin Egan at (201) 798-6055 or CEL (201) 344-7477. Or email

Film Descriptions

Blade Runner : The Final Cut

Imagine futuristic sci-fi colliding with dark and brooding film noir with ground- breaking special effects in eye-popping widescreen. That’s Blade Runner.

Director Ridley Scott’s vision of Los Angeles in 2019 is the ultimate movie dystopia: a fabulous hell of skyscrapers reminiscent of Mayan temples and monolithic Fritz Lang factories. The sky is cluttered with floating neon advertisements and is fuming with pollution. It never stops raining on the cramped and seedy streets, and most people, apart from Harrison Ford, smoke like chimneys. Society is a decaying culture of hyper-consumerism and big corporations, divided between those who, almost divinely, live amid the clouds in those Mayan-style skyscrapers and the exploited, poly-cultural masses living in the permanently dank streets.

Human-like androids, called replicants, are manufactured to assist Earth’s civilization in space colonization. Harrison Ford is a retired L.A. detective called back to hunt down and eliminate four rogue replicants. Ford’s search for the replicants moves the story and its considerable action scenes. But it also becomes a philosophical rumination on man, machine, life and the value of freedom in a late-capitalist society that’s consumer-driven and technology-obsessed.

Blade Runner’s striking production design and visual effects (supervised by FX maestro Douglas Trumbull) were very much ahead of their time and add enormously to the film’s “brilliantly dark” to coin a non sequitur atmosphere, making the high-tech/rundown feeling of the future seem palpable and adding terrible urgency to the sense of loss of humanity.

The film failed with most critics and audiences when released, but over the years has grown immensely in stature and is now recognized as a landmark in science fiction that blazed the trail for the post-modern sub-genre.

Last year, Director Scott released a revised version called The Final Cut, which eliminated a happy ending and a post-production narration that had been inserted to the original at the insistence of the studio. Several new sequences were added. Most impressively, new 35mm prints were struck restoring Blade Runner to its full visual glory.

Do NOT miss the chance to see this legendary masterpiece on the 50-foot-WIDE screen at the Loew’s Jersey Theatre.

The Terminator

The movie begins in the dystopic future: a post-apocalyptic 2029 when Los Angeles has been largely reduced to rubble and sinister machines rule. Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), a member of the human resistance movement, is transported back to 1984; his mission is to rescue Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), the mother of the man who will lead the 21st-century rebels against the tyrannical machines, from being assassinated before she can give birth. Likewise thrust back to 1984 is The Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a grim, virtually indestructible cyborg who has been programmed to eliminate Sarah Connor. Schwarzenegger’s pumped-up physical presence, sparse dialogue, and “I’ll be back” slyness rendered him both terrifying and charismatic.

Together with Blade Runner and Alien, The Terminator carved out a new post-modern niche in the Sci-Fi genre, embracing the 1980’s anxiety about technology and imagining a dark, dystopic future. With a time-bending romance to temper the perpetual violence, The Terminator became a sleeper hit, and has been endlessly imitated. It made the reputation of co-writer/director James Cameron and solidified Schwarzenegger as a major star.

A Clockwork Orange
After the visionary journey through space and time of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick offered a very different look at the future in A Clockwork Orange a darkly ironic, near-future satire adapted from Anthony Burgess' novel.
In its dissection of the nature of violence, the story first presents the calculated sadism of proto-punk Alex, played by Malcolm McDowell. But the state’s response is presented as a form of violence of its own, perhaps even more pernicious than Alex’s actions. A great deal of the violence walks a fine line between Looney Tunes absurdity and crushingly vivid brutality. And Kubrick throws in plenty of crude comic relief to emphasize the fact that his grim vision is set in an England where foolish absurdity is the order of the day. Kubrick’s future state is often garish and ugly, veering between an amusingly hideous riot of color and texture, and the decaying remnants of a cinder-block nation.
If one has to compare A Clockwork Orange to any of Kubrick’s other films, it comes closest to Dr. Strangelove; for all its horrific violence and troubling moral ambiguity, it is ultimately a satire, and, like Dr. Strangelove, it wrings a shocking amount of humor from situations that few people would think of as funny.
The film sparked considerable controversy in the U.S., originally earning an X rating (later edited for an R rating). Opinion was divided on the meaning of Kubrick’s detached view of this shocking future — but whether the discord simply drew the curious, or Kubrick’s scathing diagnosis spoke to the chaotic cultural moment, A Clockwork Orange became a hit, and remains a cultural touch-stone.

Theaters in this post

• Loew's Jersey Theatre