Friday Jive 10-12-12

Over at Café Nine in New Haven tonight, the happy hour features Billy Calash & Friends, followed by Rosie Ledet and the Zydeco Playboys. Saturday’s Afternoon Jazz Jam will be hosted by Gary Grippo and Friends, followed by the Manic Productions presentation of the David Liebe Hart Band of Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show and Adult Swim. Sunday afternoon brings Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School to Café Nine: What do you get when you combine art school and alcohol? A great time and some creative drawings. Come down and enjoy a fun three hours of life drawing. That’s followed at 8 by the Sunday-After-Supper Jam, with host Kevin Saint James and the Legendary Café Nine All-Stars. More info can be found at cafenine.com.

Up in Hartford at Blackeyed Sally’s tonight, the Eric Gales Band takes the stage. He plays his blues guitar upside-down and left-handed in the style passed down by his grandfather Dempsey Garrett, Sr, who was known to jam with Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. And on Saturday at 9, it’s the Bluegrass Hoedown with three bands for the price of one: Too Blue; Cornfed Dogs; and Chasing Blue. More can be found at blackeyedsallys.com.

Now let’s take a look at cinema off the worn-down, over-trodden paths in central CT:

At Real Art Ways, tonight begins seven days of the documentary film “Bill W.,” the story of the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Saturday’s screening of “Bill W.” is followed by a one-time showing of “Breaking the Maya Code.” The complex and beautiful Maya hieroglyphic script was until recently the world’s last major undeciphered writing system. Its decoding has unlocked the secrets of one of mankind’s greatest civilizations. That’s followed by “The Room.” Called “the best terrible movie ever,” it’s booked for monthly late shows at Real Art Ways. Then Sunday begins the series, “The Story of Film: An Odyssey.” Prodigious, poetic, and unlike any other “history” of cinema, Mark Cousins’s The Story of Film: An Odyssey is, as the title promises, a thrilling journey. Cousins’s personal voyage—complete with side-trips and retraced steps—is an illuminating, idiosyncratic tour of the emotional and intellectual pleasures of cinema. Offered in 15 weekly chapters, with a combined running time of 15 hours, the film is a treasure trove of clips from films both famous and underappreciated, interviews from a global who’s-who of filmmakers, and passionate, provocative commentary. Sunday’s chapter covers the “Birth of the Cinema” (from 1900–1920); and “The Hollywood Dream” (the 1920s.) More can be found at www.realartways.com.

Tonight at Cinestudio, Trinity College’s movie theater,  screenings of “Beasts of the Southern Wild” begin. Armed with a 16mm camera and a limited budget, a New Orleans collective of filmmakers took off for a Louisiana bayou to make a movie (with non-professional actors) about a 6-year-old girl named Hushpuppy and her father Wink, living on the economic edge. What they came back with is homegrown magical realism and two astonishing performances – along with the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and the Cannes Film Festival prize for Best First Film.
Sunday, there’s also a matinee feature, National Theatre Live presents The Last Of The Haussmans, a three-generational drama set in a crumbling Art Deco cottage on England’s Devon coast. The matriarch, in a show-stopping turn by Julie Walters, has summoned her children and grandchildren as she recovers from cancer. No tea and scone-serving Granny, she is an alternately hilarious and selfish survivor of the 1960s, whose radical journey has brought an angry next generation home to roost. Tickets and information at www.cinestudio.org