***CRITIC’S CHOICE***
Monday, Oct. 20 through Sunday, Oct. 26: The 29th Annual Milwaukee LGBT Film Festival continues through the week and concludes on Sunday
All @ UWM Union Theatre – check here for schedule, ticket pricing/information and showtimes
The Milwaukee LGBT festival continues through this week and provides another seven full days of high-quality programming that would otherwise never find its way to the big screen. Let me point out a few of the options available this week that I find particularly interesting. Tuesday screens the Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey picture San Diego Surf. Edited according to Warhol’s notes after he was shot in 1968 this story of a couple whose troubled marriage is tested when they open their beach house to a bevy of surfers is a film well-worth checking out. Thursday sees the ‘poetically realized’ Moroccan film Salvation Army that details a young gay man’s coming of age through a series of strikingly quiet vignettes, and closing night sees the Australian picture 52 Tuesdays come to town. Shot sequentially (only on Tuesdays for 52 weeks) with a non-professional cast, this could appear to be a gimmick, but its story of a transitioning mother and the daughter with whom every Tuesday for over a year is set aside for is said to have a cumulative power that is quite moving. There are many other options playing this week, so please do check out the website’s schedule and treat yourself to one of many wonderful evenings of great LGBT cinema!
Wednesday, Oct. 22: Waterloo Bridge
7:30 p.m. @ Charles Allis Art Museum ($7/Adults, $5/Seniors & Students, Free/museum members)
Charles Allis continues its fall/winter ‘Remembering World War I’ programming with this melodrama starring Robert Taylor and Vivien Leigh as a soldier and ballerina respectively. Their favorite work completed together, it tells the story of love at first sight only for Leigh’s character to become despondent when she learns of Taylor’s death and turn to prostitution due to a lack of options only to discover later that he is still alive. It’s your classic ‘boy meets girls, boy allegedly dies, girl turns tricks to stay alive, girl finds boy who didn’t actually die, girl must decide whether or not to reveal her unsavory actions to not-dead boy’ story.
Friday, Oct. 24: John Wick, Quija, St. Vincent and Dear White People all open in wide release locally
Check local listings for showtimes and pricing
We’ve got a handful of movies I am very enthusiastically anticipating (and Quija) hitting the multiplexes this weekend. Would you think less of me if I told you John Wick was one of my most heavily anticipated movies dropping this fall? Keanu Reeves plays the titular Mr. Wick, a former assassin drawn back into the game when a foolish young son of a crime boss makes the mistake of stealing Wick’s car and killing his dog, a dog that happened to be a gift from Wick’s terminally ill wife. Headshots ensue. I love a good action picture, and this looks like (and has been confirmed by numerous critics to be) a blast.
Quija, on the other hand, looks to continue the fine tradition started by the adaptation of Battleship in grafting a completely unrelated story onto the body of a relatively narrative-free board game experience. I’m curious if Quija even has the name/brand recognition necessary to have begun this franchise, as the movie itself looks like your traditional ‘exorcising a house demon’ story that we’ve seen plenty of times recently, but even derivative horror has a chance to unsettle me, so we’ll give it a chance.
Speaking of giving a chance, although we’ve seen Bill Murray play a curmudgeonly, emotionally distant character numerous times before, he’s so good at it that St. Vincent appears to be worth checking out because of it. The story appears pretty paint-by-numbers (Melissa McCarthy plays a new neighbor whose socially awkward son befriends the Murray character), but when you have performers as capable as these (the film also co-stars Chris O’Dowd and Naomi Watts) they’re often able to overcome the generic quality of the source material.
Finally this week, first-time filmmaker Justin Simien’s Dear White People expands to local theaters and I couldn’t be more excited. A lot of hay is made out of the fact that we live in a ‘post-racial’ America despite the endless amount of indicators that this certainly is not the case – Milwaukee being a poster child for that particular fact – and Simien’s story of a group of black students banding together at a predominantly white Ivy League college to commiserate about their shared experiences in the aftermath of an ‘African American’ (see: Blackface, Racism, etc.) party thrown by white students. Unanimously loved by critics, Simien’s story looks to be provocative and complex, asking tough questions without professing to know the answers. I can’t wait to see it.
Friday, Oct. 24: Scream
Midnight @ Times Cinema ($5!)
If you plan on attending this weekend’s midnight screening of the ‘90s horror classic Scream, you’re clearly answering in the affirmative to the Ghostface killer’s early-asked question, so I don’t need to sell you on the bonafides of Wes Craven’s film. Although it led to sequels with increasingly dwindling returns and it was the godfather of a whole self-aware era of horror filmmaking that largely proved unimpressive, this particular film combines the whodunit and slasher genres together ably in telling its story of a small town plagued by a series of grisly murders. Featuring a cast that exemplifies the ‘90s (Neve Campbell! Skeet Ulrich! Matthew Lillard! Jamie Kennedy!), it is the first and best of its ilk and a fun way to spend the evening leading up to Halloween.
Saturday, Oct. 25: The Scarlet Claw
7 p.m. @ The Church in the City, 2648 N. Hackett Ave. ($3)
The Focus film society returns this week with a Basil Rathbone-led Sherlock Holmes picture, one that is considered by many to be the best Sherlock Holmes picture made by Universal studios. Not a specific adaption of any Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story (although it has shades of Baskervilles in its DNA), this Holmes/Watson take is perfectly suited to the holiday season with its tale of murder thought to be from a supernatural force in a remote village setting. It’s the perfect spooky capper to a great week of movie options!
