It’s harder and harder for a movie to make it to the big screen these days, especially if it doesn’t have a superhero in it. More and more mid-range features and documentaries are going straight to disc and VOD – or just VOD, bypassing physical media entirely – because the industry wisdom is that people watch those movies at home, if they watch them at all.
But then there are the movie people – people who like to go out and see movies in theatres, because that’s where the movies were made to be seen. Those are the people who turn up for retrospectives at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, and catch every documentary they can at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema, and show up for the special one-off presentations of contemporary cinema orchestrated by Kazik Radwanski and Dan Montgomery’s Medium Density Fibreboard Films (MDFF) or Jeff Wright’s Refocus.
This week – on Tuesday (October 13), in fact – MDFF and Refocus are going in on a screening together: the Canadian premiere of Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth, which we were all pretty sure was going straight to iTunes in this country. Perry certainly believed that would be the case when I sat down with him for an episode of my podcast Someone Else’s Movie in August the film couldn’t even get a TIFF screening because it opened in the U.S. in late August.
What Dan, Kaz and Jeff are doing here is effectively rescuing a movie that would otherwise have slid unnoticed onto video. After The Color Wheel and Listen Up Philip, “the new Alex Ross Perry” is a phrase that carries some weight among cinephiles he’s a remarkable talent, and Queen Of Earth sees him shifting that talent in a new direction.
The film stars Elisabeth Moss (who had a key role in Philip) as Catherine, a young woman who’s hit a rough patch in her life. Arriving at a lake house to decompress with an old friend (Katherine Waterston, of Inherent Vice and next week’s Sleeping With Other People), Catherine slips into an increasingly unstable pattern of behaviour, and Perry slowly steers the film’s tone from the caustic comedy of his previous work into something murkier, uglier and more dangerous. Roman Polanski used to joke that he thought Repulsion was a comedy with Queen Of Earth, Perry and Moss show us exactly how that would have worked.
The screening starts at 7 pm, Tickets are $8 in advance (available here) or $10 at the door. And yes, this will likely be your only chance to see Queen Of Earth in a theatre. So make the time.
