Hedwig and the Angry Inch
NEVADA THEATRE 6/29: The Onyx Downtown teams up with Nevada County Pride as we conclude our retrospective on movie musicals with HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH! With this trailblazing musical, writer-director-star John Cameron Mitchell and composer-lyricist Stephen Trask brought their signature creation from stage to screen for a movie as unclassifiable as its protagonist. Raised a boy in East Berlin, Hedwig (Mitchell) undergoes a traumatic personal transformation in order to emigrate to the U.S., where she reinvents herself as an “internationally ignored” but divinely talented rock diva, characterized by Mitchell as inhabiting a “beautiful gender of one.” The film tells Hedwig’s story through her music, an eclectic assortment of original punk anthems and power ballads by Trask, matching them with a freewheeling cinematic mosaic of music-video fantasies, animated interludes, and moments of bracing emotional realism. A hard-charging song cycle and a tender character study, HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH is a tribute to the transcendent power of rock and roll.
Cat On a Hot Tin Roof (1958)
SUNRISE CINEMA 6/28 - Sunrise Cinema ushers in summer with CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF. Academy Award winners Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman star in the classic screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer Prize-winning play. After Brick Pollitt (Newman) injures himself while drunkenly revisiting his high school sports-star days, he and his tempestuous wife, Maggie (Taylor), visit his family's Mississippi plantation for the 65th birthday of his hot-tempered father, Big Daddy (Burl Ives). Cantankerous even with declining health, Big Daddy demands to know why Brick and Maggie haven't yet given him a grandchild, unlike Brick's brother Gooper (Jack Carson) and his fecund wife, Mae (Madeleine Sherwood).
