Movie Blog: This Week's Best Bets
The MSPIFF is in its final stretch, and some of the biggest titles are still to come. So this week, make that your first movie priority. (To see the WCCO Movie Blog's complete coverage on the MSPIFF, click here. For the festival schedule, and a complete listing of all the movies being shown, click here. Ticket information is available here.) It's for that reason that this week's selection is a bit more modest than usual, because for God's sake get yourself to St. Anthony Main Theater's lobby and just pick something! But if your well of cinephilia ne'er runs dry, there are a few other options to check out this week. Here are the least 'plex picks:
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Monday, April 14: Interior. Leather Bar (EagleBOLT Bar)
James Franco is a poser, a tease and a flatterer. But few other allegedly straight celebrities have gone further out of their way to seek the approval of the gay community. Interior. Leather Bar. may be the coup de grâce of his mission to be the gayest movie star alive. Working in collaboration with director Travis Mathews (I Want Your Love), Franco's film speculates on what the 40 minutes supposedly edited from William Friedkin's still controversial 1980 thriller Cruising would've been comprised of. He and Mathews work to recreate the explicit footage and spout off at amusingly tiresome length about sexual representation. A must for artsploitation snobs, and an even bigger must for those who have bottomless reserves of bad faith. A $10 donation at the door or a sign-up for EagleBOLT's Team Minnesota AIDSWalk gets you entrance.
Trailer: Click Here To Watch (NOTE: Contains NSFW language.)
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Wednesday, April 16: The Defenders: Chris Grap (Trylon Microcinema)
It's that time again, when the Trylon invites someone prominent in the Twin Cities film community (or just prominent in the community at large) to step it up and, for one night only, be their guest programmer. And the more offbeat, the funkier, the downright grottier their choice is, the better. There's no way of knowing ahead of time what Mall of America theater programmer Chris Grap has up his sleeve for this week. But if the spectacular crap included in his "Trailer Trash" series is any hint, it'll be fantastically dry roasted. Proceeds go to the Minnesota Pit Bull Rescue.
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Friday, April 18 and Saturday, April 19: Casablanca (Uptown Theater)
Dude.
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Friday, April 18 thru Sunday, April 20: Big Trouble in Little China (Trylon Microcinema)
Most of John Carpenter's horror classics from his first dozen years in the business are tight, highly disciplined, ruthlessly efficient films, crafted like shocking little Swiss watches. Big Trouble in Little China is the exception, a ballsy, goofy, shaggy dog tribute to whatever common ground can be salvaged between Howard Hawks (a standard go-to for Carpenter) and, let's say, King Hu (who is hardly). It's a little bit as if you freebased Confessions of an Opium Eater, or maybe it's just not like anything else in Carpenter's or anyone else's oeuvre.
