The long, dark, days of January are upon us, but don’t let that stop you from venturing out to join your fellow Nevada County residents for a night out at the movies at one of our local movie theatres.
The Onyx Downtown continues its regular Sunday night screenings at the Nevada Theatre in Nevada City. Last year, programmer Spencer Kellar started taking a thematic approach, starting with “Noirvember” in November, followed by a month of Christmas holiday classic movies, among them the evergreen It’s a Wonderful Life and The Apartment.
To celebrate the dark days of January, The Onyx Downtown will turn over Sunday nights to four films that capture the winter season or four films (all of them R-rated) of spine-chilling horror and bone-freezing suspense.
The chills start on Sunday, January 7th, with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). His adaptation of what many consider Stephen King’s best novel was controversial on its release, with King among the dissenters (along with this correspondent). Still, the film is as immaculate as anything by this great auteur, with its tremendous Colorado Rockies setting and plenty of eerie touches. It’s wintry to a fault, as it should be. As a portrait of isolation (a classic theme in the horror genre), it feels flat to me. All the characters are crazy from the start, leaving the actors—Jack Nicholson chief among them–with no room to rise except to the edge of camp.
Sunday, January 14th features the undisputed classic of the bunch, Fargo (1996), an authentic Coen Brothers’ classic. It spins a gruesome, disturbing, but blackly funny yarn about murder in the snowy flatlands of Minnesota. At its center is a superb performance from Frances McDormand as a smalltown Minnesota cop investigating a kidnapping and subsequent murders committed by a trio of goofballs and sadistic halfwits. It’s witty, shocking, hilarious, and teasing in that inimitable Coen fashion. Cold as their films can be sometimes, McDormand warms the heart with a loving portrayal of a woman whose lack of worldly sophistication is more than compensated for by her keen investigative eye and fundamental Midwestern decency. Like other Coen films, it’s an excellent portrait of rural innocence facing a world of baffling evil and chaos. Hard as it tries, the current FX Fargo series can’t touch this original.
I recommend wearing a muffler, extra layers, and your sturdiest snowshoes for The Revenant (2015), on January 21st. Director Alejandro Iñárritu’s strenuous, near-surreal, frontier Western tells the true-life saga of Hugh Glass, a mountain man left for dead by his companions after a bear attack in the Dakota Territories in 1823. The film follows his desperate struggle for survival at a relentless pace while keeping us in suspense about the fate of his so-called friends should he ever catch up with them. The action-packed film is full of authentic gritty detail and shivers with wintry ambiance. For those with doubts about Leonardo, there’s terrific acting by Tom Hardy as one of Glass’ betrayers to keep us in our seats. The Revenant is a must for fans of Westerns and outdoor films.
The series closes on January 28th with in-your-face horror–John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), about the shapeshifting alien horror visited on an Antarctic research station during the endless winter night. As a fan of the 1951 The Thing from Another World, I initially dismissed this remake (along with most critics at the time). Repeated viewings have improved my opinion. While the dialogue and characters remain flat (the scientists don’t act much like scientists), Dean Cundey’s cinematography is rich with cold Gothic atmosphere that creates a crushing claustrophobia. Rob Bottin’s “Thing”—created wholly with live effects—is an exuberantly gruesome creation that takes the meaning to the word “icky” into fantastically dark corners (This one is especially not for the squeamish!) Another virtue is the counterpoint music by the great composer Ennio Morricone, one of his best scores for an American film. It brilliantly slides and slithers like a serpent beneath the darkness, keeping the tension high and the sense of dread relentless.
Thomas Burchfield’s short story “McCain Takes a Bullet” was a runner-up in this year’s Gold Country Writers’ Short Story Contest; his short story, “McCain, the Stranger” is in the online version of Mystery Tribune. His article “Noir or Not?: Straw Dogs” is in the current issue of Noir City magazine. A freelance editor, he’s also the author of the short story “Lucky Day” in the anthology Berkeley Noir (Akashic Press 2020), He’s also the author of Butchertown (Ambler House 2017), a ripping, 1920s gangster thriller and the award-winning contemporary vampire novel Dragon’s Ark. He reviews movies regularly on YubaNet.