This spring the Roxie Theater (16th St. at Valencia) presents an ambitious program on its dual screens (Big Roxie, Little Roxie), films mostly devoted to the far edges of human experience. The lineup includes a selection of experimental auteur David Lynch's best work, and kicks off with Donnie Darko, a leap into the darkest regions of the human mind.
Donnie Darko About 12 minutes into this extraordinary fantasy-nightmare, writer-director Richard Kelly has Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal), asleep on a golf course, awoken by two gents playing through. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, Donnie falls down a kind of rabbit hole, meeting a six-foot-tall rabbit in the process. The film mixes black humor with a unique dystopian vision. It also marks a leap forward for Gyllenhaal as an American icon, with a special talent for playing boyish men with unusual powers, and a knack for snappy dialogue that makes him a throwback to an earlier age of American film comedy. (4/27)
David Lynch: The Art Life Sketching and smoking in his home studio, David Lynch is a lifelong artist whose fixation on the concept of moving, audible paintings begat cinematic masterworks. He credits mysterious sensations and surreal encounters in his childhood with coloring a lifetime of the work we know well, work that explores, challenges, subverts and celebrates the darkness inherent within American normalcy. This is the rare bio-pic that lets the subject, and his eerie, thrilling art, speak for itself. Directed by Jon Nguyen.
Eraserhead (1978) Lynch's feature film debut concerns a zombie-like humanoid and the half-human creatures he dwells with. (both 4/28)
Mulholland Drive (2001) Naomi Watts headlines this eccentric Lynch exploration of a fantasy that's set in the movie capital but that reaches deep into the dreamscape that underlies all works of the imagination. (4/29)
Sister Act 2: Back In the Habit (1993) Whoopi Goldberg headlines this sequel to an off-beat Disney comedy. (5/10)
Peyton Place (1957) This 157-min. soap opera, hugely popular in its day, still contains themes �" adultery, illicit sex, small-town hypocrisy �" that resonate.
Blue Velvet (1986) Writer-director Lynch made one of the best films about our messy human nature ever hatched on these shores. This exploration into the Id of young North Carolinian Jeffrey Beaumont (a low-key triumph for Minnesotan Kyle MacLachlan) kicks off when Jeffrey discovers a severed ear in the fields outside Lumberton, his deceptively sleepy hometown. Jeffrey is a Huck Finn-like figure who can, when inspired by his devil mentor Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), morph into a polymorphously perverse being who can respond to young women and, more shockingly, to Frank, in a disturbing tryst that defies screen taboos. (both 5/11)
Run Lola Run (1998) This German film from Tom Tykwer is a fascinating one-trick-pony. A young woman races the clock to raise a large sum of money to save her drug-addicted brother. Franka Potente needs to gather 100,000 marks in 20 minutes, a kind of updated version of High Noon, whose marshal hero has 90 minutes to kill three outlaws coming to town on his wedding day. (5/27)
My Dinner With Andre (1981) This singular film experience begins with a nebbishy Wallace Shawn scampering across Manhattan to meet his hyper-articulate mentor, Andre Gregory. The two men converse over a fancy meal. Not for all tastes (pun intended), but a remarkable two hours not soon forgotten. The Shawn-Gregory chat is sublime at combining Eastern philosophy with Western ennui. (5/30)