Jason Schwartzman – Memphis Flyer

Wes Anderson’s highly anticipated new project Asteroid City lands this weekend. The film is a star-studded trip to Arizona desert in 1955, where the Junior Stargazers Convention is gathering for a wholesome weekend. But this cozy scene is shattered when an actual alien arrives in a for-real spaceship. Is the alien good or bad? Will the play based on the low-key alien invasion make it to opening night? Frequent Anderson collaborators Jason Schwartzman, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Bob Balaban, and Jeff Goldblum are joined by Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Maya Hawke, and Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker.

Jennifer Lawrence returns to the screen in No Hard Feelings as Maddie, an Uber driver whose luck has run out. To stave off bankruptcy, she takes a Craigslist job as a surrogate girlfriend for introverted rich kid Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman). This sex comedy for people who hate sex and also comedy co-stars Matthew Broderick and Natalie Morales.

Speaking of alien invasions, the Time Warp Drive-In for June has three of them. First up on Saturday night June 24 throws Tom Cruise into a time loop. Edge of Tomorrow was a minor hit on release in 2014, and gained cult status since then—despite a late-game name change to Live, Die, Repeat. Emily Blunt and Bill Paxton co-star as soldiers fighting alien Mimics, whose time bomb is literal.

The kind of robotic mech suits the soldiers use in Edge of Tomorrow are straight out of Starship Troopers, the Robert A. Heinlein novel from 1959 which pretty much invented the idea. In 1997, director Paul Verhoeven omitted the armored spacesuits when he adapted the novel, focusing instead on subtly lampooning the book’s rah-rah militarism. Most people didn’t get the joke, but Starship Troopers is now regarded as a classic. Would you like to know more?

The Blob is an all-time classic of 1950s sci-fi. The 1988 remake, which provides the third film of the Time Warp, is well known among horror fans as one of the best remakes ever. Check out Kevin Dillon’s magnificent mullet in this trailer.

Pixar’s latest animated feature Elemental explores love in a world of air, fire, water, and earth. Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis) is a fire elemental who strikes up an unlikely romance with Wade (Mamoudou Athie), a water elemental. Can the two opposites reconcile, or will they vanish in a puff of steam? Longtime Pixar animator Peter Sohn based Elemental on his experiences as a Korean immigrant growing up in New York City.

On Wednesday, June 28, Indie Memphis presents Lynch/Oz. Filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe’s remarkable video essay explores the ways images and ideas from The Wizard of Oz shaped the radical cinema of David Lynch.

On Thursday, June 29, Paris Is Burning brings the vogue to Crosstown Theater. Director Jeanne Livingston spent seven years filming the Harlem Drag Ball culture, where competing houses competed for drag supremacy. Paris is Burning is a landmark in LBGTQ film, and one of the greatest documentaries of the last 50 years.

The Overnight (2015; dir. Patrick Brice)—In the past 24 hours, I’ve seen Parks and Recreation alum Adam Scott’s fake penis twice. I was ready for it the first time because it appeared towards the end of the pilot episode of HBO’s sexually explicit, mostly forgotten 2007 series Tell Me You Love Me, in which Scott played a central role. But last night, midway through Patrick Brice’s unpredictable new chamber comedy about Alex and Emily (Scott and Taylor Schilling), a thirty-something couple who meet and eventually spend a long night partying at the huge home of fellow thirty-somethings Kurt and Charlotte (Jason Schwartzman and Judith Godrèche), a decidedly different prosthetic version of Scott’s joystick hove unexpectedly into view. In Tell Me You Love Me, Scott’s display of plastic nudity only added to the show’s clinical, curious, operating-table asexuality; in The Overnight, Scott’s decision to display his genitalia feels less exploitative and thrown-in: it’s simultaneously embarrassing, desperate and triumphant. The size of Scott’s merch on display is different, too, but that’s another story.

Scott’s poolside disrobing (and subsequent dance number) is one of many gangly, touching and quietly unsettling moments in Brice’s film, which continuously swerves and skirts the larger implications of the “swinger vibe” Emily notices once the kids are put to bed, the big glass bong comes out, and Kurt spirits Alex away to his art studio to show off his swirling paintings of buttholes—which Kurt calls “Portals” because of course he does. As Kurt plies Alex and Emily with whiskey and nice robes and breast-pump DVDs and says things like “Give me 20 minutes and I will give you parental bliss,” the visiting couple find themselves trying to both draw the line somewhere and accept their hosts’ eccentricities without judgment because hey, it’s hard for adults with kids to make new friends and meet new people. The film saves its biggest joke for the very end but is wise enough to return to earth briefly once the long night ends, making The Overnight shorter, truer and more fun than most of the blockbusters currently squatting in theaters.

Grade: B+