Who's putting Baby in a corner? Not us.

We have a tradition at Cinéma sur le toit, and it involves Patrick Swayze, who we love and miss dearly. Something about the man's filmography taps into the spirit of our little event, and so, for the past two years, we've shown one of his films. Ever since we started doing that, we've had more requests for one particular film than any other. And they've come, unanimously, from our female attendees.


So the ladies have spoken, and rooftop movies are listening: the movie is Dirty Dancing. Which seems appropriate, being a movie about the end of the summer, and, barring some more late-season heat waves, this being the last hurrah for this season of rooftop movies.

I've been trying to get around to this one for a few weeks now, but scheduling has been a bear. So now we find ourselves at the tail end of September, the very last days where one can generally spend two hours on a 10th story rooftop in this town without needing to huddle together for warmth by the end of the night. At the moment, it looks like the weather should be pretty OK this week, so we're going to take a shot at Wednesday evening, September 29. So come on out for one last evening on the roof; bring a drink, bring a friend, bring a snack, and -- if I can play the part of your mother for just a moment -- bring a jacket, just in case it gets chilly up there by the time Johnny finally rescues Baby from that corner. We'll get started around 9 or so.

He's Got a Gold Medal in Kicking Your Ass

On this week's installment of the always excellent Pop Culture Happy Hour on NPR, the PCHH foursome discuss "Tomorrow's Rediscoveries": former stars who are "either currently out of fashion or currently not taken seriously [that] might have an opportunity to rise from the ashes, as if by magic, to take what you might call a Rourke-ian journey to redemption."

After Linda Holmes makes an earnest plea for Tony Danza based on his upcoming reality series, regular Cinéma sur le toit attendee Glen Weldon trotted out a pick -- at 22:15 if you're looking for the clip -- that left his cohorts shocked and awed. Well, at the very least, amused. They laughed. A lot. I'll leave the description to Weldon:

I'm talking about a man who made but one film, and then vanished into Hollywood legend. That one film, that one man, is Kurt 'Gymkata' Thomas. Gymkata, a 1985 film, tagline: "Gymnastics Skills, Karate Kills". Kurt 'Gymkata' Thomas, who is a gold medal gymnastics guy, plays a gold medal gymnastics guy who is picked up by the S.I.A., the "Special Intelligence Agency" — see what they did there — and dropped into the fictional, remote, Himalayan country of Parmistan. What happens next is the best scene in the history of cinema, where our mulleted hero is being chased down an alley, which dead-ends into what else, of course, a pommel horse. Which he then proceeds to mount. These Parmistanians with scimitars are coming at him (one at a time), and he is dishing out, you know, your Rear Double Scissor, your Mushroom, your Direct Stockli, your Reverse Hecht, your Russian Wendeswing.

In other words, Gymkata has the one thing that I was expecting, but didn't get, from our last feature, Never Too Young to Die, which also had a gymnast turned secret agent in the lead, but which never delivered ANY pommel horse, rings, or parallel bar action from John 'Not Gymkata Material' Stamos.

In addition to that, we also get some additional nonsense about winning a Parmistanian competition that will get Thomas a wish, which the U.S. government wants to use to magically create some kind of satellite monitoring system as an early nuclear attack warning system. Yeah, sounds like the 80s, alright.

So, in the interest of getting what was missing from the Stamos film, and in the interest of making Glen 'Gymkata' Weldon's (Klimek tells me that we're now authorized to refer to him thusly) fondest rooftop movie dream come true, we'll be kickstarting (so to speak) the Kurt Thomas renaissance on the roof this Thursday, September 2, somewhere in the neighborhood of 9 p.m.

Bring a snack, bring a drink, bring a friend, but most importantly, bring yourself.

Uncle Jesse Rides His Pommel Horse Into the Sunset

There are really only a few things you need to know about Never Too Young to Die

1. Gene Simmons of KISS plays a transsexual criminal mastermind. The band actually had to cancel part of a tour to allow him to film the movie. In retrospect, they probably regretted that decision.
2. John Stamos, in his pre-Full House stardom days, stars as a college gymnast who is the son of a secret agent (played by George Lazenby, who played THE secret agent, James Bond, in On Her Majesty's Secret Service) who is killed by Simmons. Stamos must use his inherited secret agent skills and, presumably, his gymnastics acumen, to both avenge his father's death and save the world from the evil gender-bending menace.
3. Vanity, the Prince protégé who had cut ties with her mentor and dropped out of Purple Rain a couple of years prior, co-stars as a Bond-girl-style sidekick, whose name is, I'm not kidding, Danja Darjeeling. She probably sorely regretted ditching Purple Rain after this.
4. The future Freddy Krueger, Robert Englund, also turns up as Simmons' evil assistant.

What's that you say? I had you at Gene Simmons playing a transsexual criminal mastermind? That's what I thought.

Also, in keeping with the It Came From the 80's theme, we will be screening this movie without the benefit of a laptop, DVD player, or other digital source. Instead, we will be utilizing an archaic, late-20th-century piece of analog technology known as the "Video Cassette Recorder", which plays what was known as a "Video Home System" cassette tape. Some of you may even remember having these devices in your homes as children. Come one, come all, to watch this antique in action.

We'll be watching this classic this coming Wednesday, August 11, and we'll get things started around 9 p.m., or a little after, as per usual. Feel free to bring a drink, a snack, and/or a friend.

A Vision in a Dream...

After taking a couple of weeks off in deference to the all-consuming forces of the DC Fringe Festival, rooftop movies return this week, with one of the most legendary of camp classics, the movie that paired Greek mythology with roller disco, and Olivia Newton-John with Gene Kelly. Bad move for Kelly: he wouldn't work again after this until a Love Boat guest shot four years later, and he never worked in movies again. This was a just-barely-post disco musical that refused to believe that disco might be dead (or at least resting, pending late '00s reevaluation), and a film that probably ended up selling more copies of its soundtrack (devoting one side each to Ms. Newton-John and Electric Light Orchestra, respectively) than it did actual tickets to the movie.

For pure kitschy disco-musical awfulness, Xanadu still doesn't reach the heights of absurdity of The Apple (one of the best installments of the old Vision cinema's midnight kick-the-keg movie screenings, to be sure). But there's plenty of laughable badness here for everyone, in a brighter, glossier package.

Also of note: the director of recent lefty political documentaries such as Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price and Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism is the same director, Robert Greenwald, who brought us Xanadu (as well as that classic of 80s made-for-TV battered-wife-revenge flicks, The Burning Bed). See if you can spot the seeds of his future liberal activist filmmaking sandwiched in between the musical numbers and the desperate death throes of Gene Kelly's career.

Join us on the roof this Thursday, July 29, and we'll get started around 9pm. Roller skates optional. We'd bring up the disco ball, but we have nowhere to hang it.

Footy for freedom: Rooftop Movies World Cup edition!

We're putting the third movie in our planned trilogy of movies from the 80s being remade or sequelled this year in favor of something a little more timely, given the current tournament in South Africa.

Anyone who played any kind of organized soccer in the 80s probably watched Victory multiple times, being one of the few American films about the sport. Despite starring Sylvester Stallone, the film tanked in the U.S., not surprising given our general ambivalence about soccer when it was released in 1981. Still, youth soccer leagues of the decade formed a sort of a natural cult for the film, and everyone I've ever known who played as a kid has a love for the film, even if it is more than a little ridiculous.

I'm not sure how it did internationally, and whether the bizarre sight of Stallone as a footballer was outweighed for the rest of the world by a cast that included a host of international soccer stars, most notably Pelé, along with Michael Caine and Max von Sydow.

Stallone, Pelé, Caine, and all those soccer stars are a group of POWs in a German prison camp in WWII, and they play games of soccer, as a group of foreigners (excluding the one American in the group, of course) might be expected to do with time on their hands in the camp. The Germans decide it'll be a great propaganda opportunity to pit the prisoners against a German team in a massive stadium event, and the prisoners figure this will be a golden opportunity to escape.

Yeah, it's riddled with sports and war movie clichés, but it's still huge fun, directed with a sure hand by John Huston near the end of his career, and featuring some great footage on the field, with all the real players getting to show off their signature moves.

That's this Wednesday, June 30th, up on the roof. We'll get started around 9pm or so.

EDIT! We had to cancel this screening at the last minute. Make up date is now Thursday, July 8. See you there!

Governors ain't got time to bleed.

We've decided that after Tron, we're going to keep the theme going for a trilogy of 80s titles that are being either remade, rebooted, or sequeled here in 2010.

In 1988, John McTiernan revolutionized the action movie, making what is still, 22 years later, the gold standard for high-octane explosion-heavy thrillers, and a movie that is, as far as I'm concerned, as important a Christmas tradition as watching A Charlie Brown Christmas after trimming the tree. For years afterwards, no one could make a movie even remotely similar to his '88 opus without some critic declaring it "Die Hard on a _____" (fill in the blank with the appropriate setting: plane, train, bus, island, dentist's office, hot air balloon...the possibilities are endless).

Yeah, so now that I've set all that up, I should mention that we're not showing that movie.

What we are showing is the movie that McTiernan did immediately prior to that, which would improbably feature two future governors shooting invisible aliens with neon green blood. That would be Predator, which has inspired its own decendents, just as surely as the director's next film would. First up was Predator 2, which had a socially conscious agenda dealing with drugs and gang violence in Los Angeles, starring Bill Paxton (probably wishing he was in another James Cameron alien flick rather than this one), Gary Busey (just on the cusp of the coming insanity), and Danny Glover (who most certainly was too old for this shit when it came to battling bloodthirsty, trophy-seeking aliens alongside gangbangers). Then things got even worse with a pair of infuriatingly bad Alien vs. Predator flicks, which they really should have found a part for Bill Paxton in, given that he's the only actor to have been killed onscreen by both alien species.

Despite the failings of those movies, producers are going back to the well this summer for Predators, in which the titular beasties kidnap a group of the roughest, toughest hombres that Earth has to offer in order to hunt them on a game preserve on their own planet; their judgement has to be seriously called into question given that Adrien Brody and Topher Grace are among those supposed badasses. At least Danny Trejo is along for the ride.

In any case, there's really no room for improvement on the original. You've got future Minnesota head honcho Jesse "The Body" Ventura spitting tobaccy juice all over the jungle while unleashing an endless stream of macho one liners. Future governator Swartzenegger as the leader of this band of ultra commandos dropped into a jungle where they are about to become big game. Carl Weathers as Ah-nuld's former BFF, and a current pencil pusher gone soft...or has he???

Head on over and join us on the roof this Thursday, June 17. Chris Klimek, who claims to have seen this movie over two dozen times between the ages of 11 and 13, has volunteered to give us a brief introduction to the finer points of this sci-fi/horror/action near-masterpiece. We'll get the projector fired up after dark, around 9pm, but I'll be up on the roof from around 7pm onward, so feel free to show up and hang out whenever you like.

Second Verse, Same as the First

People out of town, people mired in the last week of the school year, people too tired, and people who just didn't know about it (due to my failed experiment of only "inviting" people via Twitter and Facebook) resulted in our scrubbing the launch of the 2010 rooftop movies.

So, we're going to try this again, and everything we said in last week's post applies again this week, except for the new date, which is Thursday, June 10. We'll see you up on top of the world.

"Are you a user?"

Many of you have been asking when the first rooftop movie of the season is going to be scheduled. I'm sure you've been sitting at your desk every day at work feverishly refreshing your browser on this blog, checking back through your RSS feed, making sure that you haven't missed the big announcement. I'm sure. But the debut is here, this Wednesday, June 2.

While I'd wanted to start a little earlier this year, being out of town for the last half of May ended up scuttling those plans. However, I did come out of Los Angeles with a short video to use as one of our standard weird short lead-ins. See, I'm still thinking of all you loyal rooftop cinema goers even when all the way across the continent. I'm not sure if we'll show said short this week, or save it for a later date, but we'll have something unusual to whet your appetites before the feature, to be sure.

And the feature? Popular demand and general geek-nation excitation over the impending Tron sequel - which you should be excited about whether or not you're excited about Tron, because it'll mean a new Daft Punk album, as they're doing the soundtrack - has dictated that we're going to open this season with the original 1982 Disney video-game-ready classic about computer programmers who get digitized and sucked into the mainframe. There, they are forced to carry out neon-colored gladitatorial battles that, let's admit, have little purpose aside from looking really cool. But let's not forget: they look REALLY COOL.

And they're bound to look even cooler glowing neon red and blue up under the DC summer sky, so bring friends, bring a snack, bring a drink or three, and if you've got a favorite lawn chair, feel free to bring that, too. Sunset is around 8:30, so we'll look to get things underway by 9. See you there!

Insert "That's What She Said" joke here.

Exciting news for the fourth summer of rooftop movies! No, we haven't scheduled the first screening yet, though we know what we're going to show. Ever since that early April heat wave, the nights have been pretty chilly, and I'm waiting for an evening with a forecast low that doesn't go below 60. No dice yet, and next week isn't looking so great, so fingers crossed for the first week of May.

In the meantime, though, we're always hard at work here at Cinéma sur le toit looking to improve your moviegoing experience! Last year, it was an upgrade to the projection system. That improvement got us a smaller, but more powerful piece of equipment; this year, however, bigger is better, and we're all set to deliver to you 46% more image for every movie you come to see.

Many thanks to Eric for the long term screen loan that he wasn't even aware he'd made to the cause for the past few years. That screen has served us well, but this afternoon we took delivery of a brand new screen; it still has that new screen smell and everything. This thing is bright, white, and as you can see from the photo, absolutely huge. Basically, I went for the biggest one that I knew we could fit in our closet. With 99 diagonal inches on it, compared to 68 on the old one, we'll now be absolutely certain that no one else on the roof will be able to ignore what we're watching.

Keep an eye on the weather, and as soon as the nighttime temperature creeps up a few more degrees, we'll get everyone over here to see how this looks up on the roof.