Movies You Need To See: I Saw The TV Glow & The Pit and the Pendulum

I SAW THE TV GLOW (PG-13)

The first all-caps GREAT movie of 2024 has finally reached New Orleans screens.

I Saw The TV Glow”, the sophomore effort from writer/director , is baroque cinema at it’s finest; born as much from personal experience as the collective unconscious, a story as familiar as it is alien, with a well of emotion as singular as it is universal. This film feels more dreamlike than actual dreams, an experience that probes the depths of desire and terror in ways you haven’t felt since you were a small child and the world felt mysterious, magical, and dangerous because it was.

The story follows two teenagers who share a mutual appreciation for a niche TV show called ‘The Pink Opaque’. Owen, played with heartbreaking vulnerability as a seventh grader by and as an adult, in the finest performance of his career, by Justice Smith (“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves”), is enticed into the sapphic tinged supernatural world of the show by the older, mysterious Maddy, an ethereal Brigette Lundy-Paine (“Bill & Ted Face the Music”). Together, this pair find solace in the low fi world of ‘The Pink Opaque’ and in each other; a kinship that feels otherworldly and somehow shines through the cracks of the disappointing reality they seem to be existing within. When a plan to run away together from their abusive households is self sabotaged, Owen is left alone with nothing but the VHS tapes of the show Maddy made for him and a yawning lifetime of banality to look forward to. Or so he thinks. The world of ‘The Pink Opaque’ turns out to be more real than imagined, in all its wonderful, terrible, penetrating magnificence.

It is rare that a film leaves me breathless through multiple sequences and has me wishing the projector could start over the moment the credits are done running. I was bowled over not just by the visuals, the music and the performances, but the filmmaking mastery exhibited by Schoenbrun. While their first film, “We Are All Going To The World’s Fair,” showcased a generational storyteller on a shoe string budget, “I Saw The TV Glow” allows Schoenbrun to run wild and paint with colors before undiscovered.

A film steeped in internet culture, back room core, lost media fetishization and burgeoning gender self identity; “I Saw The TV Glow” is a unique collage of dreamscapes and nightmares that pulls you along like the gentle hand of a sharp toothed siren. Sure you’ll drown in the briny depths, but alas what bliss.

I cannot wait to watch this film again.

“I Saw The TV Glow” is playing the Broad Theater and Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.

THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM

Last week, the film world lost one of its luminaries. And this week, we have a chance to celebrate him at The Prytania Theater Uptown.

Roger Corman is a man most folks don’t know, but the wake of his career runs the length and breadth of the last fifty years of cinema. He was instrumental in kickstarting the careers of Jack Nicholson (“The Raven”, “The Terror”), Peter Fonda (“The Wild Angels”), Martin Scorsese (“Boxcar Bertha”), Francis Ford Coppola (“Dementia 13”), Joe Dante (“Piranha”), James Cameron (“Battle Beyond The Stars”), Peter Bogdonavich (“Targets”), and so many more. His company American International Pictures was instrumental in the Drive In Theater and Grindhouse boom of the mid-twentieth century, kickstarting the “New Hollywood” movement by fostering and promoting filmmakers with vision and tenacity who spun wildly inventive films from no money and unfettered imagination.

Corman was a titan as a producer, but was equally seismic as a writer/director. With a run of classics that span from civil rights era protest films like “The Intruder” to sci-fi shlock fests like “It Conquered The World”, Corman was as synonymous with cinema as popcorn. But it was his run of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations that probably leave the longest tail. A five film run that spans from “House of Usher” in 1960 to “The Tomb of Ligeria” in 1964, these colorful spectacles starring the inimitable are scrumptious depictions of gothic horror; displaying Poe’s mesmerizing defilements of prose for the big screen in ways that would ultimately inspire generations of filmmakers from Stephen King to Steven Spielberg.

To this writer’s mind, “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1961) is the height of this collaboration’s success. Written by genre icon Richard Matheson and also starring John Kerr with the haunting Barbara Steele, “The Pit and the Pendulum” is the platonic ideal of a Poe adaptation; bathed in torchlight, overflowing with murderous machines of malice, and bookmarked by dueling high collar camp performances by the greatest leading man in horror history, Vincent Price.

Come out this Sunday and bid bon voyage to Roger Corman, whose likes will never be seen again, in the manner he would appreciate most: screeching and cackling at the bloody decadence of his life’s work in a grand movie palace on a big silver screen.

You’ll be glad you did.

“The Pit and the Pendulum” is playing for ONE NIGHT ONLY at the Prytania Theater Uptown Sunday, May 19, at 7:30 p.m.

 

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