Movie Blog: This Week's Best Bets
It's Pride Week in the Twin Cities, and LGBT themes pop up in at least a few of the next seven days' worth of recommended screenings. Here are your best bets for the week:
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Monday, June 24: It's a Gift & International House (Heights Theater)
W.C. Fields hated kids. He hated women. He hated sobriety. A man after my own heart(lessness). Catch him in all his misanthropic glory at this double feature at the Heights. (And, no, his initials stood for "William Claude," not "water closet.")
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Monday, June 24 through Thursday, June 27: Berberian Sound Studio (St. Anthony Main Theater)
Movie blogger Jonathon Sharp took a peek at Peter Strickland's highly buzzed-about psychological thriller centered around the filmmaking world of 1970s Italian giallos. His review will be posted shortly, so keep an eye out. Until then, gaze upon the nutsy trailer.
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Wednesday, June 26: The Hunger (Trylon Microcinema)
Catherine Deneuve romances Susan Sarandon in Tony Scott's sexy, stylish vampire thriller, and David Bowie serves as extremely photogenic window dressing. With a luxurious classical score (including an unforgettable deployment of Maurice Ravel's haunting "Le Gibet" from the Gaspard de la Nuit cycle) and unabashedly steamy lesbian imagery, The Hunger endures as a classy but hedonistic blood-sucking classic.
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Saturday, June 29: Rock 'N' Roll High School (Parkway Theater)
Almost every straight male or lesbian woman with any passing interest in cult films from the late '70s and early '80s is likely in love with P.J. Soles. They'll get their chance to see the legendary star of Carrie, Halloween and Stripes when she appears at the Parkway Theater at a special screening of her indelible collaboration with The Ramones -- the 1979 time capsule Rock 'n' Roll High School, which kick's Grease's tail eight ways to Sunday.
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Saturday, June 29: The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Uptown Theater)
You can never see this one too many times, but as Uptown brings the film back to do "The Time Warp" again just in time for Pride Week, the question remains whether repeat views dull its impact. The hyper-sexualized antics of Rocky Horror have helped it remain a pillar of the midnight flick community, but ... well, when a movie has become fodder for the likes of Fox's Glee, you know something in society has shifted. What was once underground has moved above and is now firmly mainstream. What does that mean? Has movie society been subject to erosion? Does it take more to shock away the blue-haired brigade the same way Rocky Horror used to? Maybe not. Thanks to Tim Curry's titanic central performance as the irrepressible Dr. Frank-N-Furter, Rocky Horror is less a monument to disobeying authority as it is a love letter to living your life the way you see fit. Strip away the fishnet stockings, and you're looking at the central theme of almost every single episode of Oprah's defunct talk show.
