Movie Blog: This Week's Best Bets
It's no secret that new movie offerings as of late have been pretty subpar. In fact, they've been that way for many months. Today marks the turn of the seasons, and what better way to cap off what almost everyone agrees was one of the lamest summer movie slates since the concept of "summer movie" was first coined than to head to a smaller-scale movie with bigger ideas? OK, actually a lot of this week's limited run and retrospective screenings actually boast some impressively pea-brained concepts, but at least they're not attached to $200 million budgets. Check 'em out:
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Tuesday, Sept. 23: David Bowie Is (Lagoon Theater)
The Lagoon in Uptown is holding a special one-night-only screening of this new documentary look at David Bowie. Well, technically, it's a documentary look at an exhibition about David Bowie. "The film takes the audience on an extraordinary journey through the David Bowie is exhibition with special guests, including legendary Japanese fashion designer Kansai Yamamoto, Pulp front man Jarvis Cocker, and other collaborators, to explore the stories behind some of the key objects that document Bowie's artistic career. The exhibition curators, Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh, provide fascinating insight into the most memorable music videos and original costumes, as well as more personal items such as never-before-seen handwritten lyrics, album cover artwork, set designs and diary entries, which reveal the creativity and evolution of Bowie's ideas." OK. It's not that fans of Ziggy Stardust will mind, but my only hope is that the movie takes a major detour at some point to discuss Bowie's performance as the Goblin King menacing a teenage Jennifer Connelly in Labyrinth.
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Wednesday, Sept. 24: Plan 9 from Outer Space (Pioneers and Soldier Memorial Cemetery)
It's not every day you get to hear gales of laughter emanating from graveyards, but another screening at dusk is planned for the atmospheric cemetery off of Lake Street and Cedar in Minneapolis, and this week's selection is the ultimate anti-masterpiece from director Ed Wood, so.
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Wednesday, Sept. 24: Abominable (Trylon Microcinema)
Trash Film Debauchery is getting all Minnehaha beardo this autumn, with an especially hipster-friendly slate of sasquatch cinema that kicks off this week with the little-known but well-regarded 2006 horror movie Abominable, directed by Ryan Schifrin. The movie depicts a Bigfoot no longer willing to settle for ducking behind branches and brush, but instead going on the offensive. (FYI, next month's TFD selection is the, um, legendary Legend of Boggy Creek.)
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Thursday, Sept. 25: The Apartment (Heights Theater)
Billy Wilder's Oscar-winning, astringent rom-com (well, more or less) was a trend-setting hit, and one of the films explicitly referenced in AMC's Mad Men. So of course it's opening the Heights Theater's month-long series "Behind Mad Men: 1960's Corporate America at the Movies." Jack Lemmon is at his most Lemmon-y as Bud Baxter, an aspiring suit who decides to let business execs use his apartment for, well, what Mad Men has assured us all every man who ever wore a suit used to do in the '60s: cheat on their wives.
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Thursday, Sept. 25: Night of the Creeps (Theatres at Mall of America)
"The good news is your dates are here. The bad news is they're dead." Thanks to the similar fonts, I grew up thinking Night of the Creeps was somehow aligned in the same cinematic universe with Creepshow, a movie I absolutely loved as an 8-year-old. It's not an anthology, but it does share with that George A. Romero-Stephen King collaboration a campy dialogue with the creature features of the '50s. It's somewhere at the nexus of Night of the Living Dead, The Blob and Back to the Future. And it was recently selected by Fangoria as one of their "30 for 31" movies that best represent the Halloween spirit. It's screening as part of MOA's "Horror for the Holidays" series on ... International Ataxia Awareness Day?
