Monday, January 21, 2008

Purple Coat Club schedule

This is the provisional schedule for Purple Coat Club meetings for the next few months. We meet at Imperial College's South Kensington campus, in the evenings (usually 8 pm). Meetings are free and open to anyone (not just students from Imperial). To be put on the mailing list to receive a reminder e-mail shortly before each event with further details of time and place, please e-mail me.

7 February Sicko
The inimitable Michael Moore takes on the American health system in this acclaimed documentary. Apparently this film will make you feel much better about the NHS – and let’s face it, we could all do with a bit of that!

6 March The Barbarian Invasions
This Quebecan film won the audience’s favourite award at Cannes, along with a host of other gongs. It is billed as a quirky comedy/drama about a father and son who re-explore their relationships, and society, in the face of a crisis.

3 April Away from her
Based on Alice Munro’s short story, ‘The bear that came over the mountain’, this film about Alzheimer’s stars Julie Christie. It’s received amazing reviews.

8 May Donnie Darko
This genre-defying, highly acclaimed, cult movie stars Jake Gyllenhall as a disturbed teenager. According to the comments on Amazon, it has multiple layers of meaning, so it’s an ideal movie for Purple Coat Club – we can all contribute our interpretations and hopefully collaboratively make some sense of it.

5 June Black
Described as an Indian version of the Helen Keller story, this is one of the reviews on Internet Movie Database: ‘Few are the number of viewers who could experience this film and not leave better people, if only because it succeeds in allowing us to recognize the value of caring for one another as the greatest triumph, if not the most important ingredient in all of our other successes as a species.’ Expect great cinematography and wonderful performances.

3 July Rainman
‘Rainman’ has got to be one of the most influential movies ever – it brought autism to public attention, and also delivered career highlights for both Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman. Twenty years after it was made, how does it shape up against what we now know of autism?

7 August Body Art by AS Byatt
This is a fabulously provocative short story which explores the boundaries of medical professionalism, patienthood and art.

4 September Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Can the movie ever live up to the brilliance of the book? Only one way to find out…

2 October The Painted Veil
It’s not often that a starring role is taken by a bacteriologist. Based on a story by Somerset Maugham, this is a hauntingly beautiful movie about love in the time of cholera.

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