Movie Mondays: The All-New Classic Movie Mondays 3.0

By John Semley

Living in this town, there are some weeks where the lineup of flicks is so great that it makes you want to spend your whole week at the movies: taking it all in Ludovico-style, sustaining yourself on popcorn, Dr. Pepper, and Junior Mints. Of course, we can’t actually recommend such a regimen. It’s probably bad for your health/social life/sanity. The reasonable thing to do would be to just choose one or two. So here are this week’s picks, presented in the retro-vintage classic, super user friendly Movie Mondays format you asked for.

The Royal (608 College Street West)

Since the late 1990s, Argentina has nurtured a new generation of young filmmakers (Lucrecia Martel, Daniel Burman, Lucia Puenzo) who make a habit of turning out bold, socially relevant, and artful features. The counterpoint to this so-called “New Argentine Cinema” is blockbuster filmmaking like The Secret in Their Eyes, which garnered all kinds of critical acclaim without having to make its rounds on the festival circuit. One of the biggest box office successes in the history of Argentine cinema, and winner of this year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, The Secret in Their Eyes flashes between 1999 and the politically volatile Argentina of the mid-‘70s in telling the story of a federal justice agent-turned-novelist coming to terms with the results of a rape investigation he was once entangled in. Gripping and expertly crafted (including a jaw-dropping continuous long take of a soccer match), The Secret in Their Eyes is a thoroughly absorbing manhunt picture. Its limited engagement continues Monday at 9 p.m. at The Royal.

The Fox (2236 Queen Street East)

At the highest echelon of endlessly quotable, never-not-funny cult comedies is the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski, ranking right up there alongside Life of Brian and FUBAR. In the past decade-plus, the Coens’ 1998 caper has given rise to everything from midnights screenings across North America to action figures, an online religion (the quasi-Taoist sect of Dudeism), and a renewed interest in drinking White Russians. Equal parts stoner comedy and homage to hazy late-noir films like Altman’s The Long Goodbye and Michael Winner’s The Big Sleep, Lebowski casts Jeff Bridges as Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski, a hard-bowling L.A. slacker who gets ensnared in a (needlessly) complicated web of extortion, nihilism, toe-amputation, and porn after some thugs urinate on his valued Persian rug.

Besides being consistently hilarious and intermittently surreal, it’s hard to imagine how anyone who grew up in the ‘90s could even communicate with people they met after high school without quoting this film. So if you never know what people are talking about when they tell you that you’re out of your element, it’s not only proof that you really are out of your element, but that you positively need to get your act together and finally see The Big Lebowski. And guess what? The Fox in the Beaches is screening it Tuesday at 9 p.m., providing you with the perfect opportunity to get with the program already.

Toronto Underground Cinema (186 Spadina Avenue)

What are the odds that Michael Winner’s name would pop up twice in one week? Not all that great, probably! But here you have it, against all hypothetical odds. This Friday at 7 p.m., The Underground is screening Death Wish 3, the last of the grisly urban avenger flicks to be helmed by—who else?—series creator Michael Winner. While 1974’s original Death Wish is a real movie (possessive of things like conflict, character development, and a discernible, and rabidly conservative, thematic undercurrent), its sequels seemed to glaze over these things in favour of just showing Charles Bronson coldly wincing before icing thugs with an oversized magnum. Still, with his entire family wiped out at the end of Death Wish 2, the third film in the series offered Bronson’s Paul Kersey a chance to just troll the street and shoot gang members (including one memorable kill where he drops an ice cream bar to shoot a guy in the back for stealing his camera, and then strolls away as if nothing happened). It’s probably the most over-the-top of the Death Wish films (with the ostensible exception of Death Wish V: The Face of Death, in which someone gets killed by an exploding soccer ball), and it’s also the most fun. So do the responsible thing and go see it. For one thing, it’ll get you off the streets and out of the sights of any would-be Bronson-style vigilantes Toronto may be harbouring.

The Revue (400 Roncesvalles Avenue)

If you were kind of cool in the late ‘90s and somebody said “TRL,” you’d probably assume they were talking about Total Request Live, MTV’s Much on Demand knockoff program. But if you were really cool in the late-‘90s and somebody said “TRL,” you’d probably respond: “Oh, The Thin Red Line? That movie is amazing!” (At which point the person you were talking to would look at you cockeyed and start prattling on about how dreamy Carson Daly is.) Well, all you cool cats can finally congregate on Sunday at 3 p.m. when The Revue on Roncesvalles screens Terrence Malick’s 1998 humanist war epic.

Besides marking Malick’s return to filmmaking following his twenty-year hiatus since Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line is a strong candidate for best war film ever made, best American motion picture of the ‘90s, and best Nick Nolte mad dog tirades. As part of the Revue’s new Great Cinematography in Revue series, the screening will be followed by a Q&A with the film’s Oscar-winning cinematographer, John Toll. Not to be missed.

Theatre photos by Eugen Sakhnenko/Torontoist.