New releases, rep picks, double features, film festivals, and movie marathons all demand your popcorn crunching, babysitter funding, brain whittling attention this November. But what if you can only make it to the cinema a measly few times? Stand By For Mind Control suggests you prioritize these five best of the Bay Area cinema events.
Purple Rain / Amadeus
Castro Theatre, San Francisco : Saturday 11/16 at 2:30, 4:40, and 8:00 pm
Purple Rain is almost wholly unwatchable but it isn’t close to Prince’s worst film. Plus, its all about the listening anyway. This film’s soundtrack made your adolescence extra tingly (or, if you’re youthful, it still can). When paired with Milos Foreman’s excellent Amadeus — another story of battling (and batty) musicians — what you’ve got is one wriggly earworm for your eye holes.
Nebraska
Opens November, or see it at the Napa Valley Film Festival on 11/12
Director Alexander Payne is a nipple tweaker. That means he’s happy grabbing you somewhere sensitive just so he can watch your face pucker — metaphorically, of course. If you loved his films Election or About Schmidt or Sideways or The Descendants, then his latest — featuring Bruce Dern and Will Forte in a story about a crotchety codger who mistakenly thinks he’s hit the jackpot — will almost certainly get you all squirmy.
Wild at Heart
Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley : Thursday 11/21 at 7:00 pm
Actor Nic Cage is one of a rare breed, both totally bonkers and utterly brilliant, sometimes in the same film — such as this one, David Lynch’s Southern Gothic conflagration: Wild at Heart. Watch Crispin Glover stimulate himself with cockroaches and Willem Dafoe get his rotten grill all up in Laura Dern’s for scenes that will make you reconsider what exactly it means to be ‘hot and bothered.’ Introduced by Oscar-winning sound designer Randy Thom for a bonus lesson on sonic incitement.
Dallas Buyers Club
Opens November
I’ll be honest. Matthew McConaughey exposing himself as a talented actor is about as shocking as Matthew McConaughey exposing himself to your grandma during Thanksgiving dinner. And yet… here he is, throwing down hard in films like Magic Mike, Bernie, and Mud. This tale of an HIV+ cowboy who teams with a transvestite Jared Leto to smuggle FDA-unapproved drugs to AIDS patients in Texas is hard to ignore. Will it be schmaltzy, feel-good Erin Brockovich bait or something better? Let’s find out.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
Opens wide 11/22
I agree. The Hunger Games wasn’t anything too exciting for those of us who weren’t already fans of Katniss Everdeen and her foolish disregard for flame retardant fabrics. Still, there are a whole lot of people who think Jennifer Lawrence can do no wrong and they might be right. Having read the books, I’m fascinated to find out just how they’re going to make their seriously unpalatable occurrences safe for the preteen hordes to swallow. If you think the first film took itself far out on thin ice, just you wait.
Have a tip for next month’s Best of Bay Area Film? Don’t be shy.
Cool post. Looking forward to seeing more like it.
Just watched Dallas Buyers Club. My evaluation: It’s an intriguing first two minutes, then a slow descent into a factually misleading, dramatically uninventive, one-dimensional, play-it-safe and by-the-numbers treatment of a complicated moment in recent history. Great work by Matthew McHoosananny and Jared Leto. Those characters should have been in a much better movie–like, one that made us actually care about them.
That’s exactly the sort of movie it looks like. Which is why I’ve yet to get around to seeing it. I’m suspecting I will continue to not see it for the forseeable future,
I fear it will have to be watched anyway since I disregarded my own advice in November and missed it. McConaughey is proving to be a lot more than we first suspected. Have you watched True Detective on HBO? I’ve actually got Mud waiting to be watching now, too.
I haven’t seen those, or anything else he’s done in the last few years, actually. But I’ve always liked him and never thought he was bad in anything. Never thought he would churn out award-winning performances, either.
you should take another look, then. i haven’t been a fan but he’s become quite compelling in the last few years. better projects, maybe…
Will do.