Movie Blog: This Week's Best Bets
Some of you saw Pacific Rim last weekend. More of you saw Grown Ups 2. Only one of those two groups chose wisely, but odds are pretty good that neither group caught the new documentary More Than Honey, which continues this week at St. Anthony main. Click here for Jonathon Sharp's review. And also, consider checking out one of the following limited screenings around town, too.
(Note: If you choose one theater to see the new horror flick The Conjuring, opening later this week, make it the Mall of America. They've got it running old school, in 35mm with a vintage 35mm horror trailer pack running beforehand. Also, as per MOA rep Chris Grap: "We are having a sweepstakes drawing for one lucky person and four of their friends to win an overnight stay at what Travel channel has dubbed one of the most haunted locations in America, the Villisca Axe Murder House.")
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Monday, July 15: Ninotchka (Heights Theater)
"Garbo laughs." Most screwball comedy is filled with people overeager to make you laugh. Ninotchka's secret weapon is that it stars an actress who couldn't have been further from the template. She did, after all, just want to be alone. With Ernst Lubitsch at the helm, watch in awe as one of cinema's great ice queens melts into a puddle of good humor. Catch the last of the Heights' "Summer Screwball Comedies" series tonight, projected in a 35mm print from Warner Brothers.
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Monday, July 15 & Tuesday, July 16: Hellboy (Trylon Microcinema)
There's a reason everyone sitting around you at Pacific Rim erupted in cheers at the first appearance of Ron Perlman, and Hellboy is pretty much the reason. Forget Iron Man, forget The Dark Knight, and most definitely forget Man of Steel. Guillermo Del Toro's two Hellboy flicks are among the strongest contenders for the title of our generation's best superhero franchise.
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Wednesday, July 17: Ghost in the Shell (Parkway Theater)
Adapted from the manga series of the same name, 1995's Ghost in the Shell (and, to my tastes, its even more eye-popping 2004 sequel Innocence) is an expansive, dystopian animated masterwork, and something like a primary influence on the likes of The Matrix.
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Wednesday, July 17 & Thursday, July 18: Ride Lonesome and "An Evening With Actor James Best" (Heights Theater)
James Best, probably most widely known to the world at large as Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard, was a pretty smoldering piece of beefcake when he starred in Budd Boetticher's Ride Lonesome, one of the director's most highly regarded westerns. Best will be in person for both Wednesday's screening of that 1959 film, as well as on Thursday as he reminisces in person about his career and signs copies of his new book Best in Hollywood.
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Thursday, July 18: The Turin Horse (Walker Art Center)
One of my very favorite movies last year, catch this encore and free screening of what is supposed to be Béla Tarr's final film, which the Walker says is "in celebration of the book Béla Tarr, The Time After by Jacques Rancière, available this summer in an English translation from Univocal Publishing in Minneapolis." As I wrote earlier: You don't settle in for a Béla Tarr movie. You hunker down, even for the ones that aren't over seven hours long. Spinning off from the event that purportedly drove Friedrich Nietzsche to the madness he remained in for a decade until his death — he allegedly saw a horse being flogged and rushed over, throwing his arms around its neck in an attempt to save it — the B&W Horse is earthy, heavy, plodding, muddy, existential, depressed, abstruse, slow and uncompromising. In other words, an action flick for movie geeks."
