Friday, July 25, 2025



Film Serious

Feeling a bit out of sorts in your new digs? Don’t cry in your porridge. Here we have something called the film series. The film series is a delightful amalgam of movies new and old, domestic and foreign, nostalgic and esoteric, nut busting and double nut busting.

The film selection is a democratic process: fueled by your suggestions, then debated and chosen by a skilled vanguard of your peers known as the Film Board to appeal to a wide range of interests. Most films sparkle in 35mm, some in 16mm, but all will be prints and will look like a little slice of heaven. The film series plays exclusively on a gigantor, state of the art-gasm screen in the glass building of the Center for Film Studies (CFS) that rises majestically above the rest of Stonehenge, also called the CFA. If you walk the CFA path, you’ll see it, the one-year old CFS. Oh will you ever. Additionally, posters outlining the dates and times of all the screenings are in your mailbox right now. They want you.

In days of yore, I wrote reviews of current releases under the column title Critical Ass. Now I have been promoted to film series columnist. “What!? How is trumpeting the film series a promotion from weighing in on the new stuff?” is what some of you might say. The film series defies a prose explanation. It is an experience, nay a vibration. A raw, non-chafing energy, sometimes pheromonal, pervades the CFS theater, humming like the omnipresent projector. Films from all over the spectrum like Y Tu Mama Tambien, Purple Rain, Night of the Hunter, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Super-Size Me, and City of God have lit this campus up like a pyrotechnics display. Why review hackneyed mainstream drivel when we have a cinematic powder keg of transcendent proportions ruling the roost right here on campus?

The film series starts off with a prodigious bang, thanks to two special events, and of course there will be no whimpers:

MONDAY (7/5): JOSS WHEDON-7:30 pm FREE
Joss Whedon, the maverick mind behind Buffy the Vampire Slayer, will speak and answer your questions. After he will screen a new film he has been working on. Why? Because he is a Wes alum and he loves us.

TUESDAY (7/6): NAPOLEON DYNAMITE- 8pm
Yes, you have likely peeped this flick before, but have you seen it on the big screen? You have? Well then have you watched it while thinking about how much I look like Napoleon? Some people seem to think this. Like those guys who hang outside 7/11 and chant “Napoleon” and aggressively jostle you when all you want is a Wild Cherry slurpee. I really think I am considerably more attractive. We both have sharp features, but his are more angular, gawky even. And I’ve been lifting. Check me out. Add your voice to this debate.

WEDNESDAY (7/7): THE WIZARD OF OZ- 8pm
You find yourself transported via the tornado of post-adolescence to an unfamiliar, sometimes scary, sometimes euphoric place. You are at Wesleyan University. You seek comfort in the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy acts as your agent of catharsis. But you do not click your heels, because you like it here so far. Wesleyan has a very low transfer rate.
*Pink Floyd will probably not be playing Dark Side of the Moon live at this screening. Stranger things have happened though. Like Nicolas Cage and Lisa Marie Presley getting hitched and the invention of Velcro*

THURSDAY (7/8) THE PHILADELPHIA STORY- 8pm FREE
Cary Grant. Katharine Hepburn. Jimmy Stewart. Also known as the mother lode. Mile a minute dialogue that’s as smart and sassy as your pacemaker can handle. A reminder of when movies were fun.

The poster in your mailbox has more information about the films showing. In next Friday’s issue, we will discuss the boundless pleasures of the chopsocky fantasy Kung Fu Hustle (Fri., 7/9) and the mega-classic On the Waterfront (Sat., 7/10).

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