This January, we bring 007 back the Mayfair with our 4th Annual James Bond Film Festival. But the excitement doesn’t stop there! 

Celebrate the 50th anniversary of Bond…

2012 marks the golden anniversary of the first James Bond movie, Dr. No, starring suave Sean Connery. The NAC Orchestra salutes the notorious secret agent as well as other famous and infamous spies, detectives, and men-to-the-rescue. In this fabulous concert of movie and TV music, you’ll be thrilled as the orchestra performs favourite themes from 007 films Goldfinger, Diamonds are Forever, and From Russia with Love, as well as music from The Pink Panther, Peter Gunn, and Mission: Impossible.

For more information, click HERE

4th Annual James Bond Festival:
The Mayfair Theatre renews its license to thrill with its third annual screening of original 35mm prints of James Bond classics.
January 8 – 31

You might know Josh Stafford as the Mayfair’s resident “geek” who has provided y’all with several of our Geek Night feature presentations, with a little help from Lost Marbles.

Culture Magazine has done an interview with him in which he discusses this month’s diverse must-see programming as well as shed some light onto what makes the Mayfair the perfect home for movie geeks with an insatiable appetite for all things cinema.

Check out the article here!

This August we are proud to present our Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Woody Allen* Festival! Throughout the month, we’ll screen some of Woody Allen’s best films, including his latest — and most successful – Midnight in Paris.

We’ll have everything from his sci-fi screwball comedy Sleeper to his signature classics Annie Hall and Manhattan to later Oscar-winners Bullets Over Broadway and Mighty Aphrodite — plus many others!

Meanwhile, check out this interesting  interview with Woody in which he discusses his personality (quite a subject!) and how he got into show business.

*Remember, 80% of success is showing up!

FAKE TRAILERS/REAL FILM FESTIVAL!

Friday June 24 at 9:30pm

The Mayfair challenges you to produce and submit a fake movie trailer for a non existent film, 2 to 3 minutes in length! The trailer cannot be for a pre-existing film or for a film that  the filmmaker intends to make. It’s all pretend folks!

Deadline for submissions is Friday June 3rd.

Submissions can be handed in on DVD. Preferred format for final assembly for the screening is Quicktime (to be really specific, export as apple pro res HQ. At a frame rate of 24p, if possible).

Please send submissions to either address:

Mayfair Theatre

1074 Bank St.

Ottawa, Ontario, K1S 3X3

OR

Josh Stafford

473 Gladstone Ave – Apt #1,

Ottawa, Ont, K1R 5N7

For more information, please email Josh Stafford at batturtle@gmail.com!

Have fun and good luck!

Several luminaries from the world of rock–Ozzy Osbourne, Dave Grohl, Slash, Joan Jett, even Billy Bob Thorton, share their love for the hard living and long reigning king of metal. Come see a tribute to a man who made his own rules.

See the trailer here.

Is The Room really, as Entertainment Weekly called it, “the Citizen Kane of bad movies”?

Pretty much, yeah.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not enjoyable. Quite the opposite, really. Read on and learn how to participate!

Stuff to yell at the screen:

“Spoon!”

Nearly all of the artwork in the film features spoons. Whenever one of the works appears on screen, you yell “Spoon!” and hurl plastic picnic spoons at the screen. Fourth row from the screen essentially makes the whole project self-replenishing, because most spoons land there. You literally throw a handful and another handful falls in your lap. It’s like being part of a plastic-cutlery salmon migration. As the film trudges on, people start throwing spoons out of boredom, even if the scene doesn’t require it.

Spoon!

“Sestosterone!”

You can pretty much yell it any time lost Brawny Quilted Picker-Upper spokesman Greg Sestero is on screen. It is particularly fitting when he’s about to be manly about something.

Sestosterone!

“Cancer!”

Lisa’s mother alludes to having it once and then never mentions it again. Also, when she touches Lisa on the nose, some people shout “I put my evil inside you!”

“Hi, Denny!”

Used to herald the arrival of the tragic kidult. Also, every time Denny leaves the scene, it is proper to shout “Goodbye, Denny!”

Hi, Denny!

“One!” “Two!”… (counting bff allusions)

Sestero’s character alludes to being Tommy’s best friend between five and seven times in the movie. The number is uncertain because whenever he alludes to it, everyone yells out which number they think it is. Usually, people are hammered enough that by “Three!” or “Four!”, two-thirds of the theater has no idea, or thinks they have fallen ahead or behind.

“FOCUS! UNFOCUS!!”

The film is constantly going in and out of focus. (“Damn you Todd Barron!” He’s the director of photography, and that’s what you shout when his credit pops up) Whenever the film goes out of focus, people shout “Focus!” Of course, when it does come back into focus during a sex scene, it is necessary to shout “Oh God. Unfocus!”

“Shoot her!”

Yelled during Lisa’s protracted neck-twitch scene. (It’s a reference to the opening of Jurassic Park.) Also appropriate: “Quaid, get to the reactor!”

Yelling “‘Cause you’re a woman!” after pretty much anything that regards a female character.

Started off as a dig at the film’s casual misogyny (there are half a dozen places where it works and is hilarious), but quickly spiraled into a non sequitur that can be dumped after anything. It is the Room equivalent of adding “in bed” to a fortune-cookie fortune. Every time I watch it, I am forced to ask myself: “Who is the woman that broke Tommy’s heart? Who is the evil bitch responsible for this movie?”

Things to yell over B-roll (that is, shots or scenes not involving characters):

“Alcatraz!”

For Alcatraz, or anything framed with bars

“Go! Go! Go! Go!”

Used to cheer on tracking shots of the bridge. Celebrate when it makes it all the way across the bridge. Express your disappointment when it doesn’t.

“Everywhere you look, everywhere you look!”

Sung over houses that look like the ones from the opening of Full House.

“Meanwhile, back in San Francisco!”

Whenever a shot uses the iconography of the city to verify that, yes, we have not left San Francisco.

Go! Everywhere! Meanwhile...

Things to do:

Saying “Hi” to Tommy when he appears to look down at the corner of the screen during the party scene. This entails running down to the screen and hanging out toward the bottom-right-hand corner and then shouting as his eyes acknowledge you.

As Denny eats the apple which might be the most heavy-handed and irrelevant action in the film, I enjoy shouting “Oh, shit! Metaphor!” (Seriously, just what the hell is eating the apple supposed to signify? That Denny has given in to temptation? What temptation? What the hell does Denny giving in to temptation have to do with anything?)

When the characters throw the football back and forth, you do the same thing with your friend(s). Since you are drunk and in a darkened movie theater, this usually goes awry. One of my friends accidentally beaned Tommy this way. Another time, someone hit the screen and the theater ownership got pissed.

At one point, two characters will show up in Tommy’s apartment. They will be fucking. No one will know who they are, thus it is appropriate to shout “Who the fuck are you?” whenever they appear onscreen.

It is also appropriate to shout this when the actor playing Peter (the psychologist) disappears (maybe he was looking at the camera too much?), only to be replaced by another actor who looks nothing like him. Yes, just “Who the fuck are you?”

Tommy’s deranged giggle, which he delivers at inappropriate moments (“He beat her up so bad, she wound up in a hospital on Guerro St.” “HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!”) should be mocked mercilessly.

“The Seventh-Inning Stretch” is what we call the longest of the film’s gratuitous sex scenes. This is where you piss/smoke/stage a mock walk out. Pros know it’s coming and beat the traffic.

Singing along to “You Are My Rose” and lifting one’s phone/lighter. Let’s not forget that we are all part of the same wave of undeniable good. A friend noted that they should’ve used “You Are My Rose” instead of “Hallelujah” in Watchmen.

You Are My Rose.

On that note, breaking into the “Yes We Can!” chant sometimes works, especially after Tommy’s speech about “If everybody loved each other, the world would be a better place.” This chant started during the election and has continued since. I like to think that’s it one of those rare moments where irony and sincerity collide, neither quite dominating the other.

Being open about one’s revulsion during any of the sex scenes. Includes graphically describing the act and hurling the cruelest jokes about the actors’ bodies/movements that one can conceive. Breaking into the Free Willy theme is sometimes done. Notice how it looks like Tommy is fucking her belly button? Yeah, you’re doing it wrong!

You got all that? Okay, then.

“Enjoy.”

CUT

KILL THE IRISHMAN, a new mobster thriller based on the true story of Irish gangster Danny Greene, a man who the Italian mafia found very hard to kill, starts this Friday. It’s fantastic cast includes Ray Stevenson, Christopher Walken, Vincent D’Onofrio,Val Kilmer and Paul Sorvino.

Check out Salon.com’s rave review of the film and don’t miss our engagement of it that runs this Friday and Saturday at 9:20pm and continues April 6 & 7.

Review by Andrew O’Hehir

You might feel like you’ve seen enough mobster movies to last you a lifetime, and you might be right about that. But the secret of writer-director Jonathan Hensleigh’s highly enjoyable “Kill the Irishman” is that it doesn’t try to out-dazzle or out-splatter the Coppola-Scorsese-David Chase tradition. This is a movie with grime from the streets of Cleveland under its nails, which tells the more or less true story of Danny Greene, an Irish-American longshoreman who rose to become a 1970s crime boss in that oft-derided Lake Erie metropolis. (Much as I love Baltimore, it’s gotten enough pop-culture love recently to last a generation. With Drew Carey’s sitcom long off the air, maybe Cleveland is ready for its close-up.)

I don’t know what strange kismet has brought us two ’70s-flavored crime flicks that feel like half-finished Quentin Tarantino projects right on top of each other — this one and “The Lincoln Lawyer” — but I’m certainly not complaining. Hensleigh and cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub even shoot the film in period style, with lots of screwed-up, semi-industrial locations, an awesome soundtrack of vintage soul and rock, and muddy, subtly desaturated colors. (Maybe those are meant to suggest the notorious pollution of Cleveland, where the Cuyahoga River’s surface infamously caught on fire in 1969.) But “Kill the Irishman’s” most surprising asset is the out-of-nowhere performance of Ray Stevenson, a big, shaggy, brawling hunk of man-flesh who plays Danny as an elemental force of nature, sometimes crude and violent, sometimes kittenish and mild.

There’s an irresistible, Cleveland-esque, underdog quality about this whole production, in fact. Stevenson is a 46-year-old British actor of Irish ancestry who’s been kicking around action-movie and TV roles for many years, without ever getting any closer to stardom. Playing Titus Pullo in the BBC/HBO series “Rome” appears to have raised his profile considerably, but this part — as a half-sympathetic, half-repellent crime entrepreneur who essentially brought down Cleveland’s Italian Mafia by himself — is something else again. (He has upcoming roles in “Thor” and the unfortunate 3-D “Three Musketeers” film.) As for director Hensleigh, his two previous films are “The Punisher” and a straight-to-video cannibal film called “Welcome to the Jungle,” and he’s spent most of his career as a mid-level screenwriter and script doctor. I mean, which is worse: That Hensleigh did uncredited rewrites of “The Rock” and “Con Air,” or that he actually took credit for writing “Jumanji”? Nothing about him suggests that he was likely to make something with this degree of sheer crazy cinematic bravado, and damn it all, that’s inspiring.

Hensleigh’s large and delightful cast is loaded with actors eager to prove they’re still kicking, from Val Kilmer as Danny’s cop nemesis to Vincent D’Onofrio as an Italian Mafia turncoat who becomes Danny’s right-hand man and Christopher Walken as a snaky, sinister Jewish restaurateur. All these people, and many more colorful ethnic stereotypes besides, collide in the notorious summer of 1976, when America’s long-running mob wars brought near-total chaos to Cleveland (where there were nearly 40 bombings that year). This is a gangster movie, not a history lesson, but I always approve of teaching the young ‘uns important truths, such as this: The ’70s were completely freakin’ nuts, and you’re basically lucky you weren’t there. Maybe the secret weapon of “Kill the Irishman” is that grizzled veterans like Hensleigh and Stevenson know this for real.

Unfortunately, The Mayfair’s scheduled screenings of The King’s Speech (March 11-14 & 17) have been cancelled.

Why?

In early February, we booked The King’s Speech from distributor Alliance Atlantis.

On February 27, The King’s Speech won four Oscars.

On March 8 (three days before we were scheduled to start showing The King’s Speech), Alliance Atlantis informed us that they would NOT be sending us the print of the film. They feel they can make a little more money if they continue to play it at The World Exchange, instead of at your neighbourhood cinema.

In its place, we’re presenting Sofia Coppola’s critically acclaimed drama, Somewhere. (Which is brilliant, and you should definitely see.)

We sincerely regret any inconvenience.

If you’d like to let Alliance Atlantis know how you feel about the situation, you can leave a message on their Facebook page or call them directly at 416-967-1164.

We’re sure they’d be happy to hear from you.

CUT.

Say you’re planning to come see Planet of the Apes on March 12 (and if you’re not, you should be). Just scroll down to the bottom of the film listing, and you’ll see an additional social media menu that looks like this:

Now, you can add the movie to your calendar, share it on Twitter, invite friends to it by email or share it on Facebook — all with a single click.

And then, come March 12, all your friends show up and thank you profusely for inviting them to one of the greatest science fiction films of all time. And you’re a hero.

I think that sounds pretty good. How about you, Mark?

Cut.

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