Watch Preacher on AMC, see Can’t Hardly Wait outdoors at Cinder Block, and more must-sees
Thursday 5.19
The third Thursday of every month through October, Screenland Armour is showing a free movie outdoors at Cinder Block Brewery (110 East 18th Avenue, North Kansas City). Tonight’s showing of the 1998 teen movie Can’t Hardly Wait kicks off the series. It may seem like an odd choice, but to its generation, this last-day-of-high-school party movie — starring Jennifer Love Hewitt, Seth Green, and a ton of actors “before they were stars” — is an underappreciated classic. To me, it’s that movie that is weirdly named after a Replacements song.
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Friday 5.20
It’s hard to believe it’s been 30 years since Kyle MacLachlan found that severed ear outside the white-picket fences of picture-perfect suburbia. Lurking in the shadows was an underworld, populated by Isabella Rossellini’s tragic lounge singer and Dennis Hopper’s gas-huffing weirdo. Blue Velvet is all of David Lynch’s stylistic tendencies and fetishes jelled into a stunning, darkly perfect vision. The Alamo Drafthouse Mainstreet celebrates three decades with a new restoration, showing twice a night, today through Sunday.
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Saturday 5.21
Bryan Cranston won a 2014 Tony Award for playing LBJ on Broadway in All the Way, which examines the embattled president after JFK’s assassination and before his re-election. Jay Roach directs the new made-for-HBO movie adaptation, which premieres tonight, and early notices say that Cranston’s performance in the film is equally award-worthy — but the second half is a little unmanageable. Find out for yourself: After its airing tonight, All the Way streams at HBO Now.
Sunday 5.22
Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s ’90s cult-comic classic, Preacher, has long been one of the most famous “unadaptable” properties in Hollywood. Tonight, it comes to AMC in a TV pilot directed by producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. If it’s anything like the violent and sometimes blasphemous comic series, which casually exploits religious text for fantasy means, it should cause some serious controversy.
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Monday 5.23
Enough with the darkness! It’s time for an easy, laid-back family comedy. Newly streaming on Netflix are the multiple personalities of Eddie Murphy as the Klump family in The Nutty Professor. Re-watching this 1996 comedy (which spawned an unfortunate sequel), I remembered its No. 1 asset: an infectious sweetness. Janet Jackson may not be the most versatile actress, but she’s great here as Murphy’s romantic interest, and rarely has Murphy himself been so humble and delightful.
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Tuesday 5.24
Michael Mann’s 1986 Red Dragon adaptation, Manhunter, is an anomaly in the Hannibal Lecter film canon, with a style more similar to Mann’s sleek urban-crime sagas (Thief, Heat) than the grittier interpretations to come (excepting that over-the-top finale set to “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” of course). Today, it arrives on Blu-ray from Shout Factory, featuring new interviews with Joan Allen, Tom Noonan, William Petersen and Brian Cox — who first introduced film audiences to “Hannibal Lecktor.”
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Wednesday 5.25
If you’re one of those movie fans who wants to like foreign films more than you actually do, seeing the gorgeous 1987 Wim Wenders movie, Wings of Desire, on the big screen at Tivoli Cinemas tonight might help you turn the corner. It’s a lush, mediative rumination on what it means to be human that stays with you long afterwards. Don’t let the fact that is was remade into a horrid 1998 Nic Cage-Meg Ryan soap opera (City of Angels) stop you from going. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that at all.
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Eric Melin is the editor of Scene-Stealers.com and president of the KC Film Critics Circle.
