The Sounds of Summer 2008
All showings at the Acadamy of Music
274 Main Street, Northampton, MA

Featuring the now classic Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack, Director Mike Nichols's THE GRADUATE is the satirical coming-of-age comedy that became an emotional touchstone for an entire generation.

In the mid-1960s, Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), a confused college graduate, is pulled in myriad directions by family, friends, and associates just days after receiving his degree. Seduced by Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft), an older friend of the family, Ben carries on an affair with the married woman even as he falls for her daughter, Elaine (Katharine Ross). However, Ben and Elaine's attempts at romance are threatened by the spiteful rage of Mrs. Robinson, who proceeds to hastily arrange Elaine's marriage to someone else, leading up to one of the most memorable endings in cinema history.

With its striking photography and clever editing, THE GRADUATE established Nichols as a major director. The film also made a star out of young Hoffman, who gives an understated portrayal of the perplexed Ben--the actor's first role in a Hollywood film, which he almost didn't get because he wasn't Waspy enough. Outstanding performances by the rest of the cast are highlighted by Bancroft's sexy, embittered turn as Mrs. Robinson and Ross's endearing presence as the gorgeous yet innocent Elaine.

The film's impact on popular culture is immeasurable: "Plastics" will live on eternally as depressing but solid career advice, and older women will never eye younger men without fear of becoming a "Mrs. Robinson." Buck Henry (who appears briefly in the film) cowrote the influential screenplay, based on the novel by Charles Webb, and the soundtrack by Simon and Garfunkel remains a movie classic.

Where: Academy of Music
When: Saturday, May 31
Time: 7:00 (Box Office opens at 6:30)
Ticket Price: $8.00 or $4.00 with Main Street Motion Media Movie Pass
*50% of ticket price benefits MSMM community development projects.

L'Chaim! Life itself, joyous and tragic, is the subject of the boisterous, comic, heartbreaking vision of FIDDLER ON THE ROOF.

In this tale of rural life in a Ukrainian village on the eve of the Russian Revolution are faith and struggle, happiness and suffering, passionate youth and tired old age, idealism and practicality, money and poverty, compromise and conviction, and, above all, constancy and change.

From the joyous opening celebration of "Tradition" to the tart one-way dialogues with God (including the raucous "If I Were a Rich Man"), but also traditional piety in "Sabbath Prayer," the joyful psalm-like recounting of God's saving acts in "Miracle of Miracles," and the eternal verities of Ecclesiastes in the haunting chorus of "Sunrise, Sunset", Fiddler is almost unique in daring to combine humor and buffoonery with genuine moral outrage at the tragedy and horror of anti-Semitic persecution (about the only other films to pull it off are Benigni's Life is Beautiful and Chaplin's The Great Dictator). It's a risky strategy, but in Fiddler laughter and romance help reach past the defenses we often bring to a serious "message" film, and enable us to see Tevye and his family and neighbors not as characters in a tragedy but as ordinary people like ourselves.

Where: Academy of Music
When: Saturday, June 7
Time: 7:00 (Box Office opens at 6:30)
Ticket Price: $8.00 or $4.00 with Main Street Motion Media Movie Pass
*50% of ticket price benefits MSMM community development projects.

Woody Allen finished his first decade of filmmaking, the 1970s, with one of his greatest and most deliberately artistic films, his love song to his home city of MANHATTAN, his search for splendour in human relationships and his passion for Gershwin's quintessential RHAPSODY IN BLUE.

Allen plays Isaac Davis who finds himself suffering from a mid-life crisis. Unhappy in his career as a variety show comedy writer and newly divorced from a woman who has since come out as a lesbian, Isaac waffles between two relationships: that with emotionally honest and open, but far too young, Tracy (Mariel Hemingway in an Academy Award nominated performance) and with pseudo-intellectual, neurotic Mary (Diane Keaton).

Allen uses these two women to contrast the naiveté and lack of pretension of youth with the growing cynicism of middle age. Although the acting and writing is some of the sharpest of Allen's filmmaking career, what is truly memorable and endearing about MANHATTAN is its romantic view of New York. The images are backed by the songs of quintessential New York composer George Gershwin, setting a tone of romanticism and grandeur that underlies Isaac's (and Allen's) inherent dissatisfaction with the mundane aspects of his life. The magnificence of the city of New York is the backdrop to the search for a similar splendor in human relationships in MANHATTAN.

Where: Academy of Music
When: Saturday, June 14
Time: 7:00 (Box Office opens at 6:30)
Ticket Price: $8.00 or $4.00 with Main Street Motion Media Movie Pass
*50% of ticket price benefits MSMM community development projects.

Fosse's finest cinematic achievement with powerhouse numbers like "Take Off With Us" and the infamous "Bye-Bye Love" (easily the longest on-screen death rattle of all time), ALL THAT JAZZ brings a unique style of rhythmic, dance-like film editing, one Fosse initiated with CABARET, to its apotheosis.

On the surface, the movie is the autobiographical story of Bob Fosse (Joe Gideon) going through a physical and emotional breakdown during the making of the original stage version of Chicago in the mid-1970s. But Fosse rips apart the standard showbiz puff piece right from the start, by dropping viewers right into the frenzied mess of Gideon's life, and mixing it up the already-fractured storyline with a recurring sequence where Gideon talks over his life with a glowing, radiant Muse figure (Jessica Lange).??In a squirmy bit of verisimilitude, Ann Reinking - a longtime Fosse dancer/worshipper who was not only his mistress for years while he was married to dancer Gwen Verdon, but also won a Tony for her choreography of the Chicago stage remake in 1990 - plays Gideon's primary girlfriend, who he goes back to when he's not sleeping with chorus girls or ignoring his ex-wife.

All That Jazz literally cracks open Gideon's life, a metaphor brutally realized when he finally collapses under the stress of working on the play and editing his last movie. As an examination of an artist at war with himself and unable to ever quite finish a piece of work, Fosse outdoes Fellini here: it's 8 1/2 with a pounding heartbeat. Narcissistic and self-indulgent to a fault, it's also like nothing you've ever seen before and probably never will again.

Where: Academy of Music
When: Saturday, June 28
Time: 7:00 (Box Office opens at 6:30)
Ticket Price: $8.00 or $4.00 with Main Street Motion Media Movie Pass
*50% of ticket price benefits MSMM community development projects.

**Text sourced from selected critics @ rottentomatoes.com