Triumph returns, The Strain tries to catch on, and Heat is around the corner
Thursday 8.25
You’ve probably already seen the glorious viral video clip in which outrageously offensive fake Trump ads are tested on his real supporters in a focus group, but you may not have known it was Triumph the Insult Comic Dog behind the prank. The man behind the poop — Robert Smigel — was Emmy-nominated for his spring election special on Hulu, and his vulgar hand puppet returns for more fun with Trump, the RNC and other targets in the new Triumph’s Summer Election Special 2016, available now on Hulu.
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Friday 8.26
The artifice-heavy neo-noir Too Late enjoyed a brief 35mm run in theaters this spring, which is a tough sell for an indie movie, even one with a novel idea like this at its core: It’s made up of five 22-minute (the length of one reel) single takes, placed strategically out of chronological order. The dialogue is cringe-worthy sometimes, but star John Hawkes can sell anything. He plays a private detective in this enterprising experiment, which is now available on VOD, including iTunes and Amazon.
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Saturday 8.27
Woman in the Dunes was an art-house sensation in 1964 for its stunning black-and-white cinematography and erotically charged atmosphere, and it earned director Hiroshi Teshigahara an Oscar nomination. It’s as sturdy as ever today, but I also admire the film — which portrays a man and a woman trapped in a cabin at the bottom of a sand pit — for its skillful blending of naturalism and the surreal. The Criterion Collection’s recent restoration, with lots of bonus content, is new on Blu-ray.
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Sunday 8.28
Last season, the Guillermo Del Toro horror series The Strain, starring Corey Stoll as a CDC scientist trying to save the world from some kind of supernatural vampire plague–slash-conspiracy, felt like it was treading water. Season 3 premieres tonight on FX, and I’m hoping the show tightens up and regains some focus. The fact that this season is three episodes shorter than the last two is a good sign.
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Monday 8.29
The understated 1995 drama Heavy, starring Liv Tyler as a college dropout and Pruitt Taylor Vince as an overweight fry cook, marked the directorial debut of James Mangold, who would go on to helm Walk the Line and 3:10 to Yuma.It’s newly streaming on Netflix, and worth a revisit. Heavy is a small, personal film — the kind of indie fare that emerged in that decade, only to fall away in recent years — and it’s a fine way to spend a mellow Monday night. Bonus: It co-stars the unlikely trio of Debbie Harry, Shelley Winters and … Evan Dando?
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Tuesday 8.30
It’s not an exaggeration to say that there has never been another movie quite like the 1984 flop The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension. Taking the notion of a 20th-century renaissance man to the nth degree is the title hero, a physicist, neurosurgeon, rock star and intergalactic celebrity played by Peter Weller. After Banzai’s newest invention shows him a secret world hidden within solid matter, a hammy, hilarious John Lithgow tries to steal the device in order to return his fellow aliens (the Red Lectroids) to Planet 10. A new Shout Factory Blu-ray with freshly produced making-of content is out now. Understand, monkey boy?
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Wednesday 8.31
The PR campaign for Michael Mann’s crime classic Heat pretty much exclusively revolved around the fact that two iconic badasses of 1970s cinema, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, were, in 1995, finally sharing their first scene together. Since then, Heat has aged well, revealing itself to be a tense, slow, methodical epic about men on both sides of the law and the codes (and obsessions) that consume them. Let the 170 minutes wash over you in widescreen glory at the Alamo Drafthouse tonight at 7.
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Eric Melin is the editor of Scene-Stealers.com and president of the KC Film Critics Circle.
