Notes From The Program Director | Week of August 9th, 2024

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Notes From The Program Director

Week of August 9th, 2024

Melissa Tamminga

Rich Text

August 9-15, 2024

Hi all!

This week, the smash hit CatVideoFest 2024 continues, along with the hugely entertaining Kneecap and the wonderfully creepy Longlegs (for two shows only, Sat/Sun).

We’ve also been rather unexpectedly able to add additional showtimes of the new, thought-provoking documentary Lynden, a local film with immense national resonance and a film that is taking Whatcom County by storm, having sold out every previous screening here so far, as well as filling up other county screenings located at WWU and Lynden Middle School. It was a great pleasure to have been able to host a Q&A for the film on July 31, welcoming co-directors Bryan Tucker and Chris Baron, producer/cinematographer Brian Lee, and film participant (and real life hero) Amsa Burke here to share their thoughts and experiences, and the film itself invites conversation and deep thinking. It’s one you won’t want to miss. Tickets for the new shows are going fast, so be sure to snag one before they’re gone.

New this week, we've got a film I've been hoping to book ever since I saw it in January at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award and the Special Jury Prize for Best Ensemble Cast: Dìdi (弟弟), from writer-director Sean Wang. Wang, who is just 29 years old, was also nominated for an Oscar this past year for his short documentary film "Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó" (“Grandma & Grandma”), a film about his two grandmas, and Dìdi, his first feature, indicates he is force to be reckoned with.

Dìdi was six years in the making and comes from a very personal place for Wang as the narrative is loosely based on his own life: a coming of age story set in 2008 about a 14 year old boy, Chris, growing up as a second generation kid in a Taiwanese immigrant family and struggling to find his place both among his peers and within his family.

The film is evocative and funny, not shying away from the most adolescent of embarrassments and the passionate rebellions of a boy trying to figure the world and himself out, but it's poignant and tender, too, depicting a wonderfully realistic relationship between siblings, Chris and his older sister, and between Chris and his mother, played by a marvelous Joan Chen (attention Twin Peaks fans!), who struggles to understand her son.

The film feels adjacent to documentaries like Bing Liu's brilliant Minding the Gap (a coming of age story featuring skateboarding) and recent hits like Everything Everywhere All at Once, with its intergenerational conflicts in another immigrant family. But it's fully its own film and as beautifully resonant as the best films about growing up can be. It’s also, quite simply, one of the year’s best.

We’ve also got four special events lined up this week:

The riotous comedy classic Raising Arizona is this month’s staff-curated Third Eye selection from our beloved former House Manager Meghan Schilling (now working just down the road from us with our friends at La Fiamma!). It’s hard to beat an evening with the Coen brothers unless it’s an evening with the Coen brothers and Nicholas Cage, Holly Hunter, John Goodman, and Frances McDormand and the funniest diaper car chase scene in cinema history.

Join us on Saturday at 10 pm!

Cary Grant is back, this time with Rosalind Russell and Ralph Bellamy, in another of the most iconic screwball comedies of all time, His Girl Friday, a part of our continuing Screwball Sundays series. There were few directors like Howard Hawks for directing comedy, and this cinematic gem of fast-talking wit perhaps surpasses even the genius of Hawk’s earlier film Bringing Up Baby. Here, Grant plays an editor and Russell plays a reporter and Grant’s ex-wife, who’s about to leave her job to marry another man (Bellamy). Hijinks ensue when Grant, in an effort to win back his best reporter and his ex, proposes they cover one last story together. It’s a brilliant, high-energy film with the laughs coming a mile a minute, making it, truly, one of the all-time greats.

Join us Sunday at 11 am for mimosas and screwball hilarity!

Also playing this week, we have the wonderful new documentary Break the Game, a film I hoped to include last year for Doctober, but we just didn’t have the room. One of the heartbreaking things about Doctober is we have only so much space, never enough to book all the brilliant films available. So I was thrilled to learn Break the Game was picked up by PBS's prestigious POV series, where it will find a much-deserved home in November, and all the more thrilled to learn about the opportunity now to participate in its grassroots theatrical tour this summer.

Break the Game, which has some poignant overlaps with this year’s I Saw the TV Glow, tells the story of Narcissa Wright, a record-holding video game speedrunner, who built up a huge following on Twitch, a following she lost when she came out as trans and then endured targeted harassment. Narcissa documented much of that experience via live streaming (thousands of hours worth), and the film, in a phenomenally impressive feat of editing, curates Narcissa's videos in order to help tell her story, while also adding in new pieces of her experience that I think even those familiar with her story will deeply appreciate. Director Jane Wagner's cinematography, particularly when Narcissa ventures out of her room away from the computer screen and connects with another gamer she had fallen in love with, is visually gorgeous and emotionally profound.

The story is ultimately deeply affecting and while at times painful, it is also a beautiful and hopeful one, a film about identity, about living in a world mediated by screens, and about finding love and community.

Break the Game plays on Tuesday at 7:45 pm.

Finally, Nine from the 90’s, our weekly summer series, also continues, this week bringing us the terrific thriller, Primal Fear, starring Richard Gere (who was in this past week’s Pretty Woman) and Edward Norton (who will be in the upcoming Fight Club). If you’ve never seen the film that launched Norton’s career and earned him a Golden Globe, an Oscar nomination, and a BAFTA, you’re in for a treat. In addition to Gere and Norton, it’s got an all-star cast with Laura Linney, John Mahoney, Alfre Woodard, Frances McDormand, and it’s the deeply satisfying twisty-turny sort of legal thriller they just don’t make anymore. If you’ve not seen it, avoid spoilers! The journey is half the fun. Join us Thursday at 8:15 pm!

See you at the movies, friends!

Melissa