Hudson Valley Crucial Viewing: Jan 17-30

Happy mid-January everyone, Bel here. I hope everyone’s been surviving the brutal flu-season, and if you haven’t been, I hope you’ve been watching a lot of movies at home. Tis the season, right? When the temperature starts dropping below freezing, there’s not much better than to lay low and watch all the movies you keep saying you’ve been meaning to see for the last couple of years. We’ve got some really fun stuff coming up in our own programming this year (one of which is featured below!) and we’re excited to see you all out at the movies this year. We’ve got that, and some other great repertory cinema to recommend to you below. Before that, just a reminder that Kingston Film Foundation is working towards establishing a permanent space in the Hudson Valley, and to do that we need support from folks like you! Now, on to the movies!

Joel and Ethan Coen’s BLOOD SIMPLE 40th Anniversary
Story Screen, Hudson – Saturday, January 18, 8:00pm

There’s so much to love about Blood Simple it almost seems pointless to get into it here. Essentially everyone involved in this movie is someone I’ve talked about ad infinitum in this newsletter over the past year. It was the Coen brothers’ first feature, and it perfectly encapsulates early experiments with what has become their iconic sensibility as a directorial pair. It was Barry Sonnenfeld’s first major film as a cinematographer, and you get a glimpse into the onus of what was (in my opinion) one of the more important behind the scenes relationships in the early part of the Coens’ careers. It was Frances McDormand’s debut film. She is young, stunning, and carries a majority of the emotional weight. It also ticks a lot of boxes for me that we don’t see much in contemporary genre-lite fare. It has an extremely small cast (just five principle actors!) and was shot entirely on location in Austin and Hutto, Texas. It captures the neon drenched, southwestern darkness that has become so iconic in Americana imagery, without sacrificing an urban, penny-novel noir grit. It also manages to synthesize this new noir aesthetic with hillbilly splatter slashers of the 70s. There’s an urban Texas Chainsaw energy to the framing and tension of the film. Part-horror, part-crime thriller, I think it represents a synthesis of two of the cultural obsessions of the mid-80s. It could be schlocky, but it isn’t. It’s dead serious, and truly terrifying (that climactic sequence? You know what I’m talking about… Frances McDormand, pressed against the wall, her face half shadowed, her eyes shining with terror. You can’t forget it.) The Coen Brothers are the easiest filmmakers to recommend to people who already know them. What they do here is eerie, cynical magic. It’s hard to tell people who aren’t familiar why they should want to fall into the shadows they create. But you’re doing yourself a disservice not to. I love them for their unflinching relationship to American failures and, as Nathaniel Rich put it in his essay for Criterion: “...the cosmic fatalism that defines their sensibility, which is to say, their style.” They’re some of the easiest filmmakers to engage with who really have something to say. We tend to shy away from films that feel mired in the darkest edges of human potential, but that’s what makes them important. The Coen Brothers continue to challenge us, but they do it with humor and style. Take some time to remember where that all started. (1984, 96 min)

Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s BOUND
Unicorn Bar, Kingston – Sunday, January 19, 7:00pm

I hadn’t seen Bound until a few months ago. Frankly, I wasn’t even aware of its existence. My relationship to the Wachowski sisters has always been fraught as a viewer. I understand intellectually why they inspire such fervent attachment (and fervent hate, frankly). I love it when their movies become disastrous (I’m looking at you Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending) because even though the movies can be unforgivable, they’re also ambitious, entertaining, and a wild ride from start to finish. Bound is not really what you would expect when you think about them. The Matrix Trilogy is just too big, too culturally relevant, too rife with politics and allusions. It’s been co-opted and commented on a million times over. The Wachowskis are, unfortunately, secondary to their most influential work. Bound is a much more grounded film, even in its noir-ish fantasy. There’s something kind of Lynchian to Jennifer Tilly’s character too. The va-va-voom little black dress and 60s-esque hair style, her whispery, pouting tone. She reminds me a bit of Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet, this cypher for a version of femininity that is boxed into the clothes and the presentation and the aura. I love that this movie so intentionally plays with these tropes. We’ve got Gina Gershon playing the stone butch straight out of prison, and Tilly playing the “straight” femme who’s pulling the strings. The 90s were such an exciting time for movies, we were pushing so many boundaries in independent and commercial cinema. Bound straddles the line between the rise of the erotic thriller in populist cinema and the New Queer Cinema movement in the international and independent sectors. If you’re at all interested in that era, or consider yourself a connoisseur of genre cinema, be it queer, erotic, noir, or thriller, you’ve gotta get this one under your belt. Plus, what’s more fun than watching a sexy, queer thriller at a gay bar in your own neighborhood? Not much. (1996, 108 min)

Paul Michael Glaser’s THE RUNNING MAN
Sleepover Trading Co. presents @ Avalon Lounge, Catskill – Wednesday, January 22, 7:00pm

Okay so we just talked serious 80s independent cinema, and fun, genre straddling 90s drama, but let’s get real. The 80s were wild, man. Some of my favorite movies came out of this decade, but it also produced some truly ridiculous stuff. And don’t get me wrong! Ridiculous? Not a bad thing at all. I love 80s action movies. Everyone loves 80s action movies. There’s a reason it’s like a genre reference unto itself. It was the decade for them. Running Man is no exception. This came hot off the success of Terminator, so Arnold Schwarznegger is in peak form here. Just check out the outfit they put him in after the opening sequence. It’s pretty amazing. My understanding is that they initially intended this movie (an adaptation of a Stephen King novel) to have significantly darker themes but, after a slew of changes in the crew behind the camera, it became the rompy, straight-shooting action film we have now. I always love to think about how our relationships to dystopias have changed over the last 100 years. Running Man is set in 2019 LA, and though it’s unserious about its setting, watching it now there are themes that ring scarily true. Police brutality, gamifying the entirety of culture, race and class based ghettos in major metropolitan areas, etc etc. I don’t wanna get too in the weeds about it here, but we could have some serious conversations about what this movie doesn’t say, but gestures at. But it is also a bizarro, wild, entertaining romp. Paula Abdul choreographed the dance sequences for the movie! What else do you want me to tell you? Plus, Edgar Wright is remaking it (and I think it comes out this year) so why not refresh yourself on the original. (1987, 101 min)

Ted Kotcheff’s WAKE IN FRIGHT
Orpheum, Saugerties – Wednesday, January 29, 8:00pm

Australia can really do no wrong when it comes to the arts. They’ve turned out some of the best bands, genre be damned (shout out to Surprise Chef, one of my favorite Australian units), and we really sleep on their film scene. In the 70s and 80s there was a serious renewal in their film industry, known as the Australian New Wave. There’s some films from down under that most people are at least passingly familiar with. Picnic at Hanging Rock is one of the movies from this era that comes up most frequently on lists of Australian films. Wake In Fright isn’t as subtle as Picnic. It’s situated pretty squarely in the “Ozploitation” genre (think Hills Have Eyes hillbilly horror with a Hostel brutality). This movie reminds me a lot of the Wrong Turn franchise, but with quite a bit more filmic integrity. A man gets lost in the outback and has to struggle to survive while being tortured and pursued by the residents of an isolated outback town. It’s a simple premise rife with opportunity and this movie takes it far. It wants you to think about the depravity we can be driven to in dire circumstances, a theme a lot of the best horror movies often gesture at. If these kinds of movies are your thing, then you’re going to love this. Wake In Fright was also thought to be lost for years. Its original negative was rescued from incineration and restored. It feels like we’re just now entering the era where we give horror films their due when it comes to their historicity in the greater landscape of film. This is a perfect example of that. Twenty years ago I don’t think anyone but die hard horror fans and film historians would have cared about finding and restoring a movie like this. But the increasing populism of films has made the preservation of movies like this possible. Plus, Martin Scorsese allegedly loved it so much when he first saw it, he could barely contain his delight. Get scared, and watch out for kangaroos. (1971, 109 min)