The 5th annual Hawaii International Spring Film Festival will be running from April 19th-28th with the 3rd annual Student Film Festival running April 26th-28th at the Signature Dole Cannery Theatres. Twenty-one films will be presented during the week-long event, screening two films nightly, and opening with Peter Bogdanovich's The Cat's Meow.

　　The Hawaii Spring Opening Night Gala concludes with Take Care Of My Cat, by South Korean director Jeong Jae-eun. Winner of the NETPAC Award for Best Asian Feature at the Pusan Film Festival, the film has garnered critical praise worldwide, for its poignant, often funny, and truly meaningful look at the hopes and passions of the modern, young Korean woman.

　　Other entries include last year's Audience Award Winner at the Sundance Film Festival, the humorous and off-kilter Dogtown and Z-Boys, directed by US' Stacy Peralta and narrated by Sean Penn, which chronicles the humble beginnings of the skate/surf movement in Dogtown, a grungy area of Santa Monica, in the '70s to its eventual mainstream success into the American lexicon. Many of the original Z-Boys and producer Agi Orsi will be in attendance at the screening.

　　The festival will close its run with Mexico's biggest moneymaking film of all time, Y Tu Mama Tambien, a sexy road trip movie from hot Indie director Alfonso Cuarón. .

　　Established in 1981, the Hawaii International Film Festival is dedicated to advancing understanding and cultural exchange among the peoples of Asia, the Pacific and North America through the medium of film. In addition to showcasing a full slate of feature films, documentaries and short subjects, the festival will conduct seminars, workshops, special award presentations and receptions with top Asian, Pacific and North America filmmakers participating.

　　THE CAT'S MEOW （United States）

　　In November 1924, during a weekend party aboard the yacht of legendary tyrannical media mogul William Randolph Hearst, one of Hollywood's most famous movie-makers, Thomas Ince, met his death in mysterious circumstances. Novelist Elinor Glyn recalls the events that were subsequently hushed up and involved such darlings of the day as Marion Davies and Charlie Chaplin…

　　Director, producer, screenwriter, Peter Bogdanovich was born in Kingston, NY in 1939 and studied acting with Stella Adler. By 1959 he was directing plays off Broadway. In the 60s he published books on film monuments such as Fritz Lang, John Ford and Orson Welles. He entered filmmaking as an assistant director with none other than Roger Corman. In 1968 he made his first film, Targets, starring Boris Karloff and it was The Last Picture Show in 1971 that brought him his first commercial and critical success. Other familiar titles include Daisy Miller in 1974, At Long Last Love in 1975 and Mask in 1984.

　　Review

　　For his first feature for the cinema in seven years, Peter Bogdanovich has lost none of his flair for comedy, timing, and ironic juxtapositions and he brilliantly choreographs the riotous Jazz Age proceedings with the same precision that he brought to his filming of the hit stage farce Noises Off. Here, his characters are among the greats of the day and he has cleverly cast mostly great English comedians of today.

　　Joanna Lumley is absolutely fabulous as that grande dame of semi-erotic semi-literature Elinor Glyn, who is the audience's witty but none-too-wise guide at the birthday party from hell. Meanwhile, Eddie Izzard, a stand-up cult comic in the UK and occasionally in France, makes a quite unusually convincing Chaplin —— not at all a mustached caricature but still somehow evoking the restlessness —— and certainly randomness —— of the fabled English-born movie-star. As Thomas Ince, Cary Elwes is marvelously credible as an American, and makes a very attractive portrait of the pioneering Hollywood movie-maker then facing something of a fatal career crisis. On the Stateside side, Jennifer Tilly is wonderful as the gossip columnist Louella Parsons who turned her presence at the party to her evident advantage and Kirsten Dunst simply sparkles as Hearst's mistress the would-be actress but natural comedienne Marion Davies, and even the minor participants are permitted to turn in nicely polished cameos.

　　With its stage origins evident in the principal setting aboard the luxury yacht, Bogdanovich manages to give all the major and minor scenes a filmic fluidity and the production looks as rich as any of his previous, more expensive Hollywood excursions.-Yet, incredibly, it was entirely filmed in studios in Berlin, and not even in the grandiose Babelsberg complex but in the more modest Adlerhof Studio in East Berlin. The California coast and watery sequences were briefly recreated on locations in Greece.

　　As the jokes, insults and wry allusions come thick and fast in the excellent dialogue, there is a wealth of period music and classic songs that point up the emotions and intrigues that underpin this voyage of the damned. It is a definite feast for cinephiles and fans of the darker corners of public and showbusiness life, but so spot-on are the performances and so sharp the humor that it could well appeal to a wider audience with a taste for the naughtiness of the past that is still very much at play in the present.

　　Wordlist：

　　mainstream n.主流

　　participant n.参与者

　　incredibly  adv.不可置信地

　　Comprehension Questions：