A master’s master!
Ricky Jay is a world-renowned magician, author, historian and actor (often a mischievous presence in the films of David Mamet and Paul Thomas Anderson) — and a performer who regularly provokes astonishment from even the most jaded audiences. Deceptive Practice traces Jay’s achievements and influences, from his apprenticeship at age 4 with his grandfather, to such now-forgotten legends as Al Flosso, Slydini, Cardini and his primary mentors, Dai Vernon and Charlie Miller. Featuring rare footage from his 1970s TV appearances (doing 3-card Monte with Steve Martin on The Dinah Shore Show) and told in Jay’s inimitable voice, this is a remarkable journey inside the secretive world of magic and the small circle of eccentrics who are its perpetual devotees.
Q&A with director Neil Berkeley after the Saturday (July 20) screening.
Beauty is Embarrassing takes audiences into the wildly eclectic creative and personal life of artist Wayne White. Before the documentary, Nitehawk’s Artist Film Club presents two TITMOUSE SHORTS.
If you’ve seen Pee Wee’s Playhouse or Smashing Pumpkins’ video Tonight, Tonight or have walked into an art gallery in the past decade, then chances are you’re familiar with Wayne White. Filmed over a period of two years, the Beauty is Embarrassing documentary takes us into the White’s world: from early success to total overload to his relationship with his family to growing up in the south. Always wholly original and driven to create amazing things, Wayne White’s story is one of true inspiration as is evident from the interviews with fellow animators, gallery dealers, art collectors, elementary school teachers, and his wife.
Playing before Beauty is Embarrassing is Nitehawk’s July ARTIST FILM CLUB featuring two animated shorts from Titmouse Animation Studio: Allison Craig’s Barko (2009) and Mike Roush’s The Hidden Life of the Burrowing Owl (2009).
Part of Nitehawk’s Art Seen signature series.
Be the first to see the hour-long premiere episode of The Venture Bros. Season 5 on Nitehawk’s massive silver screen and with stereo sound to boot!
Adult Swim comes to Nitehawk Cinema to screen the Season 4 Finale and the Season 5 Premiere FIVE days before it airs on TV! All attendees will receive a limited edition print but those who arrive early will have the chance to win original animation cels from past seasons of The Venture Bros.
Buying Nitehawk’s $10 food and beverage voucher saves you a seat to watch the premiere.
Spending the night in a haunted mansion with The Cat and the Canary and live music by Guizot, part of Nitehawk’s Live Sound Cinema Vamps and Virgins series.
A staple of the “old dark house” genre films in the 1930s-1950s, Paul Leni’s version of The Cat and the Canary is a blended expression of humor with horror. Annabelle (Laura La Plante) inherits her uncle’s fortune twenty-years after his death but when she and her family spend the night in his haunted mansion, a mysterious figure stalks them. Could it be the escaped asylum lunatic “the Cat” hiding amongst them? La Plante’s virginal Annabelle faces these unseen horrors with only her honor to project her. For the audience, it’s fun watching these shield of virginity battle against the forces of hell…and win!
Providing the live score to The Cat and the Canary is Guizot.
The Cat and the Canary is part of Nitehawk Cinema’s Vamps and Virgins series that explores the two sides of the leading lady spectrum in silent film.
A sales girl who has sex appeal in spades goes after a wealthy playboy in the third of our Live Sound Cinema Vamps and Virgins program – It with a live score performed by djangOrchestra.
In the cinematic silence of the roaring twenties Clara Bow personified the flapper- a modern woman who wanted to be able to drive, drink and stay out all night if she wanted! She’s a flapper, more fun loving and decadent that the vamp who lures men to certain doom. In It, Clara Bow plays a shopgirl who has her eye on the handsome owner of the department store she works in. Clara has ‘It’ and ‘It’ holds the promise of many happy nights and sleep-in mornings in the mind of a weak willed prosperous man. Miss Bow’s tangled sleepy-time hair and fleshy bounce is the epitome of Brooklyn sass, manic Jazz Age energy and guilt-free sex appeal. You will love It.
Mary Alouette (award-winning singer, composer, and bandleader) leads djangOrchesta. Together with her four gypsy jazzmen, she’ll orchestrate hot acoustic jazz guitar and blazing horns in the style of legendary guitarist Django Reinhardt that calls forth a sound that can be described as beautiful music and dangerous rhythm.
It is part of Nitehawk Cinema’s Vamps and Virgins series that explores the two sides of the leading lady spectrum in silent film.
Fritz Lang’s science-fiction masterpiece Metropolis is a Vamps and Virgins Live Sound Cinema event with a live score by Black Lodge.
The utopian society of Metropolis unravels when the son of the city’s main planner realizes there is an entire network of underground workers/slaves. Subsequently, he falls in love with the leader of the underground workers movement in society “Maria” who prophetically claims a savior will come to send the class war. Helm masterfully portrays a double role of “virgin” and “vamp” in Metropolis as the angelic “Maria” who is a prophet/mother to her followers with elements of both the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist. Helm also plays the false Maria, a robot whose role is to destroy Maria’s revolution. The false Maria is nothing less than the “Whore of Babylon”, the apocalyptic figure of Revelation, rousing the workers into acts of violent sabotage.
Providing the live score to Metropolis is Black Lodge.
Metropolis is part of Nitehawk Cinema’s Vamps and Virgins series that explores the two sides of the leading lady spectrum in silent film.
An abused waifish woman finds solace in the arms of an immigrant to tragic consequences in Broken Blossoms; part of our Live Sound Cinema Vamps and Virgins series featuring a live score by Gersh/Reed.
Before the Jazz Age, it was the dark ages for women. In D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms Lillian Gish plays a girl living in poverty with a violent and abusive father. Seemingly her only escape is the questionable freedom of a life of prostitution or the squalor and slavery is in the form of a loveless marriage. She discovers a middle path through a chance meeting with an outsider: Cheng, a Chinese immigrant shopkeeper. But she is a white, virginal and underage. Their relationship is impossible in the time and place they live. There love is an illicit and tragic but because of this it is also transcendent and beautiful.
Broken Blossoms is part of Nitehawk Cinema’s Vamps and Virgins series that explores the two sides of the leading lady spectrum in silent film.
Bradford Reed & Geoff Gersh have been collaborating together for almost 20 years. During that time, there have been many performances together with various bands as well as working together on projects for dance and film. They have been accompanying silent films at Nitehawk Cinema on a regular basis since July 2012.
An alcoholic ex-pilot has to help land the plane in this legendary “Airport” series spoof!
This off-the-wall comedy takes the already insane plot from the straight film Airport 1975 to a whole new level. Basically, the entire flight crew takes ill and the only person who can fly the plane is a former pilot/alcoholic (Leslie Nielsen) who is deathly afraid to fly and hates to be called “Shirley”. With deadpan deliveries and cultural spoofing, Airplane! launched a whole new phase of Nielsen’s career and we’re all thankful for that. Singing nuns, sick children, and aging movie stars are on the craziest flight you’ll ever witness on the big screen.
Starring: Fred Willard, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Jennifer Coolidge, Parker Posey, Michael McKean, John Michael Higgins, Christopher Guest
Mostly improvised, Best in Show is full of quotables by the links of Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy and Jennifer Coolidge (“we can talk or not talk for hours”) as the dirty politics of the dog show circuit comically play out. Whether a rich trophy wife, a country fisherman, a yuppie couple, a gay couple, and your average couple, these people are obsessed with the relationships with their best friends… and winning. To quote Fred Willard, “To think in some countries these dogs are eaten.”
Starring: Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman, Ian Holm, Milla Jovovich, Chris Tucker, Luke Perry
Luc Besson’s Fifth Element is an over-the-top space adventure that straddles comedy and action. It’s the twenty-third century and Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) is a cabbie in a colorfully futuristic New York who, as fate would have it, has the lovely orange-haired Leeloo (Milla Jovovich) land on his car one afternoon. But Leeloo has some troubles, she was escaping from a laboratory who was trying to insert DNA from the recently deceased Fifth Element who, you know, comes to Earth every five thousand years to protect humans. So you can imagine what happens next: space travel, singing aliens, martial arts and two lovers saving the world.
