Ready to get out of the house (with or without your family) this Thanksgiving? Throw on your stretchy pants and come to Sidewalk Film Center +Cinema! We’re celebrating the holiday all weekend long with drink specials, free screenings, and more! Here is a little more information on the films we have playing.
Thanksgiving Day Screenings
Hopefully, your Thanksgiving will be free from familial disagreements, but if you find yourself in conflict with your loved ones, take solace that however badly your dinner may have gone, at least your family isn’t like the one in Blood Rage. We’re screening this controversial and super satisfying slasher late in the evening on Thanksgiving, so wake up from your turkey-induced nap to check out the wild, gory tale of a homicidal maniac and the twin brother framed for his crimes. So put that carving fork to proper use this holiday, and if you see something red and sticky, remember… it’s not cranberry sauce.
Notorious for being what Kevin Costner thought was going to be his big break (his scenes were cut and he ended up only as a faceless corpse), The Big Chill was nominated for 3 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The film has been included among the “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die” (Steven Jay Schneider) and is a member of the Criterion Collection. Shot in Beaufort, South Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia, the story of a group of former college friends gathering due to the tragic death of one of their classmates, The Big Chill makes for perfect, albeit non-traditional, Southern Thanksgiving cinematic fare. In addition to friendship gathering and an on-screen Thanksgiving-specific scene, off-screen the cast was made to cook big meals together in character during the rehearsal phase of production, such has been said to have greatly contributed to the dynamic connection between actors/characters, as well as the film’s overall tone. Click here for a fun article about The Big Chill.
Continuing our cinematic celebration of Thanksgiving and in the spirit of giving, we’ll be screening a secret, free, PG-13 retrospective Thanksgiving film on Thanksgiving Day. Join us and be surprised, if you don’t like it, we’ll give you a refund.
Do you love Thanksgiving TV episodes as much as we do? If so (or even if you don’t, but just want a fun break from or with family and friends), join us in the Sidewalk Cinema lobby on Thanksgiving Day. Starting at about 1:30 pm we’ll be showing classic television Thanksgiving episodes all day and evening long – sitcoms, dramas and more. The line-up is packed with surprises and will be screening throughout the lobby bar so that you can relax and grab a drink (we’ll have plenty of seasonal specials) and enjoy a diverse line-up of seasonal classics. Lobby programming is always free at the Sidewalk Cinema.
Black Friday Screening Series
For Black Friday we have a doorbuster of a series, featuring all films about shopping – Personal Shopper, Mallrats and for the blackest of all Black Fridays, Chopping Mall.
We’re proud to show the 2017 supernatural drama Personal Shopper which reteams Kristen Stewart with her Clouds of Sils Maria director Olivier Assayas. In it, Stewart stars as a personal shopper for a demanding actress who moonlights as a medium. Having recently experienced the loss of her twin brother, she exists in a kind of emotionally detached limbo, searching for proof of an afterlife — and when she begins receiving mysterious text messages that may or may not come from the beyond, she may have found it. During the 2010s, Stewart became one of the most reliable actresses in independent and international cinema, and she grounds the spooky, mysterious and at times Hitchcockian Personal Shopper in tangible heartbreak and her trademark introverted charisma. It’s a star-making performance in a deeply strange movie that flirts with the great questions and suggests the only answers we can find are those we provide for ourselves.
The year was 1995, and director Kevin Smith was still reeling from the massive Cannes and Sundance success of his no-budget film Clerks (he shot overnights in the convenience store where he worked to make the movie). Ben Affleck was virtually unknown. Jason Lee was a professional skateboarder who was only dabbling in acting. Shannen Doherty was can’t-go-to-a-store-without-being-mobbed famous and had recently left the cast of Beverly Hills, 90210, at the height of her “difficult to work with” reputation. This pre-WiFi perfect storm of weirdness created the zeitgeisty Mallrats. Supposedly taking place 24 hours before the events featured in Clerks, two best friends seek refuge in the local mall after being dumped by their girlfriends. Does the film stand the test of time? You be the judge. It does take place almost completely in a mall, plus there are tons of fun easter eggs throughout the film… and no other movie in the world features Shannen Doherty, Stan Lee and an orangutan. Click here for a fun article about the film.
Meanwhile, the Black Friday horror selection Chopping Mall has it all: killer robots, Barbara Crampton, and… um… well, that’s really all you need. It’s the story of a state-of-the-art shopping mall (in 1986) with a robotic security system that goes haywire after an electrical storm. Now malfunctioning and murderous, the robots target eight young people who snuck into the mall to party overnight. Gory mayhem ensues, with cameos from ‘80s schlock luminaries like Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov, Gerrit Graham and Dick Miller. Chopping Mall, from master B-movie purveyor Jim Wynorski, is exactly the movie you think it is: killbots on a rampage in a 1980s mall. And you can’t beat that.