Can you remember a time before Nirvana? In August of 1991 New York’s Sonic Youth invited Los Angeles filmmaker David Markey along on a two week summer festival tour of Europe. The band was excited about their opening act, a little known band from the Pacific Northwest called Nirvana. Along the way they would cross paths with Dinosaur Jr., Babes In Toyland, Gumball, and The Ramones. 1991: The Year Punk Broke also features Mark Arm, Dan Peters and Matt Lukin of Mudhoney and roadie Joe Cole, who was murdered in a robbery three months after the tour ended. The film is dedicated to him.
Hatched
Ace in the Hole
Starring: Kirk Douglas, Jan Sterling, Porter Hall, Bob Arthur, Richard Benedict, Frank Cady
Kirk Douglas is a cynical, disgraced reporter who stops at nothing to try to regain a job on a major newspaper in Billy Wilder’s ACE IN THE HOLE.
Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole is one of the most scathing indictments of American culture ever produced by a Hollywood filmmaker. Kirk Douglas gives the fiercest performance of his career as Chuck Tatum, an amoral newspaper reporter who washes up in dead-end Albuquerque, happens upon the scoop of a lifetime, and will do anything to keep getting the lurid headlines. Wilder’s follow-up to Sunset Boulevard is an even darker vision, a no-holds-barred exposé of the American media’s appetite for sensation that has gotten only more relevant with time. -Criterion
The Passenger
A frustrated war correspondent finds himself on an unexpected journey after assuming the identity of a deceased arms dealer in Michelangelo Antonioni’s THE PASSENGER. A 35mm presentation!
British/American television journalist David Locke (Jack Nicholson) runs into trouble with making his documentary on post-colonial Africa after being unable to find the rebel fighters involved in Chad’s civil war. Returning to his hotel one day, he finds his new friend Robertson has passed away. Tired of his work and personal life, Locke steals Robertson’s identity for a fresh start but only to find that he was a gunrunner for the rebels. Joining up with architecture student (Maria Schneider), Locke can’t shake his journalistic tendencies as he follows appointment dates in leads from the dead man’s diary. In classic Antonioni’s style, The Passenger shows a lonely despondent figure making his/her way through an expansive landscape in search of the truth.
Part of the Journalists in Film series by VICE News and Nitehawk Cinema.
The Green Berets
John Wayne stars as a tough colonel who leads a squad of Green Berets and a liberal war correspondent on a dangerous mission to capture a Viet Cong general. A 35mm presentation and introduction by Andrew Kirell, Editor-in-Chief, Mediaite.
Loosely based on the novel of the same name by Robin Moore, The Green Berets is an anti-communist and pro-Saigon film produced at the height of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. It shows the conflicts and complications of warfare as cynical war correspondent George Beckworth, who works for a liberal newspaper, becomes complicent in the violence towards the Viet Cong. He joins tough-as-nails Col. Mike Kirby (John Wayne) on a special mission in South Vietnam and while he initially protests the U.S. torturous interrogation strategies, he transforms into a gung-ho fighter after witnessing the Viet Cong atrocities. In its heightened cinematic way, The Green Berets gives a voice to the stories that, at the time, people were only witnesses through media produced newsreels.
Part of the Journalists in Film series by VICE News and Nitehawk Cinema.
Network
Starring: Faye Dunaway, Peter Finch, William Holden, Robert Duvall, Beatrice Straight, Wesley Addy, Ned Beatty
I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore! Fired after twenty-five years as an anchorman on UBS, Howard Beale proclaims on his last broadcast that he was going to commit suicide and, although he doesn’t, his on-air rant of self destruction becomes an unexpected ratings sensation. Fueled by the ambitious programming executive Diana Christensen, the focus of the network takes on a new trashy but lucrative turn that is to the disappointment of the news division president Max Schumacher (Beale’s longtime friend and Christensen’s occasional lover). Forty years after release, Sidney Lumet’s satirical film about the exploitative nature of trash news television is more relevant than ever.
Medium Cool
VICE News and Nitehawk’s Journalists in Film series launches with Haskell Wexler’s MEDIUM COOL, a film about a television news reporter who becomes involved with the political power of imagery during the violence of the late 1960s.
Special recorded introduction by Robert Forster and in-person introduction by Jason Mojica, Editor in Chief of VICE News.
It’s 1968, and the whole world is watching. With the U.S. in social upheaval, famed cinematographer Haskell Wexler decided to make a film about what the hell was going on. Medium Cool, his debut feature, plunges us into the moment. With its mix of fictional storytelling and documentary technique, this depiction of the working world and romantic life of a television cameraman (Robert Forster) is a visceral cinematic snapshot of the era, climaxing with an extended sequence shot right in the middle of the riots surrounding the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. An inventive commentary on the pleasures and dangers of wielding a camera, Medium Cool is as prescient a political film as Hollywood has ever produced. – Criterion
Part of the Journalists in Film series by VICE News and Nitehawk Cinema.
The Great Flood
ART SEEN presents weekend screenings of THE GREAT FLOOD, a film-music collaboration by Bill Morrison and Bill Frisell. Bill Morrison in person for a Q&A following the Saturday, May 17 screening! With frieze video: at home with Jonas Mekas.
The Great Flood is based on, and inspired by, the catastrophic Mississippi River Flood of 1927 and the ensuing transformation of American society. Using minimal text and no spoken dialog, filmmaker Bill Morrison and composer/guitarist Bill Frisell have created a powerful portrait of a seminal moment in American history through a collection of silent images matched to a searing original soundtrack.
The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in American history. In the spring of 1927, the river broke out of its banks in 145 places and inundated 27,000 square miles to a depth of up to 30 feet. Part of it enduring legacy was the mass exodus of displaced sharecroppers. Musically, the “Great Migration” of rural southern blacks to Northern cities saw the Delta Blues electrified and reinterpreted as the Chicago Blues, Rhythm and Blues, and Rock and Roll. Music performed by Bill Frisell, Guitar; Ron Miles, Trumpet; Tony Scherr, Bass; Guitar Kenny Wollesen, Drums.
Film courtesy of Icarus Films. In partnership with frieze. Featuring Absolut vodka cocktails.
Spoons, Toons & Booze Gone Wild (May)
SecretFormula presents…
Spoons, Toons & Booze Gone Wild
Your Favorite Saturday Morning Cartoons + Booze & Free Cereal + a Special Menu of Cartoons Featuring the Sexiest & Most Scantily Clad Toons on TV!
Do you miss your childhood Saturday mornings of waking up early to gorge on cereal and cartoons? If so, Secret Formula has the ultimate brunch for the kid in you…Spoons, Toons & Booze! We’ve got all your favorite Saturday morning cartoons, delicious cocktails and a free all you can eat sugar cereal bar, not to mention Nitehawk Cinema’s delicious brunch menu.
Before the FCC ruined everything, cartoons got away with some pretty sexy stuff on television. This month, we’re screening episodes featuring sexy babes and beefcakes, beach bodies, scantily clad toons and even more sexiness that was almost too hot for TV! If you’re turned on by anthropomorphic mice in tight jumpsuits, this is the show for you.
– Over 80 cartoon series from the 1930?s through the 90?s and YOU get to choose what we watch!
– A special menu of episodes featuring the sexiest and most scantily clad toons on Saturday morning!
– A free all you can eat cereal bar filled with all the sugary, marshmallowy, fruity, chocolaty cereal you crave! Soy and regular milk available.
– Special cereal-themed cocktail menu including “The Sonny”, a White Russian topped with Cocoa Puffs, and the “The Complete Breakfast” with Cinnamon Toast Crunch-infused rum, Bailey’s Irish Cream and iced coffee!
– Cereal Shots! Drop a shot of Baileys or Kahlua in to booze up your cereal bowl!
– Compete in contests to choose which cartoons we watch and win sweet prizes from Nitehawk Cinema!
Dark City
A man wakes up with no memory in a nightmarish world without sun in DARK CITY.
In a city perpetually shrouded in night, a man named John Murdoch wakes up in a motel room with total amnesia. He is immediately accused of a series of brutal murders (none of which he remembers), a woman who claims to be his wife and a very mysterious doctor. In his quest for the truth about his memory, why the city is always dark, why no one notices, and why people walk around comatose after midnight, Murdoch discovers an underworld run by telekinetics called “The Strangers” who possess the ability to alter the city and its inhabitants. Can he stop them before they destroy him and his mind completely?
Part of Nitehawk’s FUTURE NOIR midnite series.
Liquid Sky
Invisible aliens in a tiny flying saucer come to Earth looking for heroin and find it in the early 80s new wave scene. 35mm presentation!
This independent science fiction films uses the new wave downtown scene of the early 1980s to show a rather dystopic and ugly version of the future. Campy and stylish with a heavy dose of depressing, Liquid Sky shows a world where tiny aliens descend to feed their heroin-like addiction of a “drug” produced after sexual climax. They use real heroin addict Margaret as their tool to score but she doesn’t mind it when her partners are vaporized because they’re all jerks anyway! With great production design and a heavy dose of punk attitude, Liquid Sky paints a rather dismal portrait of this scene as Marget kills, a scientist tracks the aliens’ intentions, and society falls apart around them all.
Part of Nitehawk’s FUTURE NOIR midnite series.
