Go back to prison with Orange Is the New Black, find Love & Mercy with Brian Wilson, cut up with Leatherface, and more must-sees
Thursday 6.16
Bone up on the backstory of the Beach Boys’ all-time classic album Pet Sounds in advance of Brian Wilson’s July 20 show at Kauffman Center. In the most invigorating scenes of last year’s Love & Mercy — available now on Amazon Prime — Paul Dano plays a troubled yet single-minded Wilson in 1965 as the music courses through his brain, and he tries to realize it accurately for the rest of the world to enjoy. It’s one of the best films to ever take you inside the mind of a creator.
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Friday 6.17
Orange Is the New Black is back for its fourth season on Netflix, so map out some binge time for the women of Litchfield Penitentiary this weekend. Last season found creator Jenji Kohan moving even further away from Piper (Taylor Schilling) being the main character and more towards strong ensemble work. Considering the show’s been renewed up to season seven already, we can expect more backstories and detours with other characters this time around.
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Saturday 6.18
The 1996 made-for-TV movie Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? stars Tori Spelling as a girl whose perfect boyfriend becomes a nightmarish stalker. It’s been rerun on Lifetime hundreds of times and become a cult classic, which of course means James Franco was bound to remake it with lesbian vampires. To honor its 20-year legacy, Franco’s campy, gory re-imagining premieres tonight on Lifetime, which is clearly trying to update its image lately.
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Sunday 6.19
The following is a statement of fact: There can be no greater Father’s Day gift than taking dad to see the Sergio Leone spaghetti-western classic The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly on the big screen while being served special whiskey flights from Union Horse Distilling. Thankfully, the Alamo Drafthouse Mainstreet is doing just that at 6 p.m. Spend three hours with Tuco, Angel Eyes, and the Man With No Name — and witness Leone’s widescreen vision as it was meant to be seen.
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Monday 6.20
I’m not sure what a 4K-remastered digital print of the grainy, low-budget 1974 Tobe Hooper film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, will add to the experience, but Film Society KC screens it tonight and tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Screenland Crossroads. If you are one of the lucky few who have never seen one of the countless remake, sequels or ripoffs, I can only imagine this would warp your mind like it did mine when I rented it on VHS from the local video store that didn’t check IDs.
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Tuesday 6.21
Sacha Baron Cohen’s spotty, profane action comedy The Brothers Grimsby hits Blu-ray today, and perhaps its better enjoyed at home anyway. The pacing is so fast and the cutting so furious that you may need the rewind button to keep up. A strange mix of boundary-pushing gross-out humor and straightforward wannabe sentimentality, it clocks in at 83 minutes, which means there are some pretty funny deleted scenes and alternate takes.
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Wednesday 6.22
Finished with Orange Is the New Black yet? Good, because I have a new obsession for you. Season 3 of the BBC series Peaky Blinders, which spotlights a family of gangsters in post-WWI Birmingham, England, debuted on Netflix a couple weeks ago. Including one and two, that’s a total of 18 hourlong episodes of gritty period detail, backstabbing and power plays — a kind of British version of Boardwalk Empire — with Cillian Murphy as the thickly accented leader. In fact, the accents are so strong, you may need subtitles.
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Eric Melin is the editor of Scene-Stealers.com and president of the KC Film Critics Circle.
