Some of the best writing in OC Weekly can be found in a place you have to hunt for: Greg Stacy's Special Screenings. We love Greg a lot around here, but every so often he gets his dates wrong and he'll have a movie playing a week late or early or whatever. Thank the God of Educational Loans for our amazing interns, because they catch these errors. But today's fix comes courtesy of an Eagle-Eyed Timekeeper who just so happened to drive past the Edwards South Coast Village marquee on the way to the bank. Had that marquee gone unnoticed, this Thursday's edition of the Weekly may very well have had as Greg's Movie of the Week David Lynch's gloriously twisted Blue Velvet. Greg had it playing at the Edwards Rancho Santa Margarita on Tuesday, May 23, and the Village on Wednesday, May 24. It's actually in RSM tonight and the Village tomorrow, Wednesday night.Here's Greg's pick since you won't see it in print on Thursday:
Movie of the Week: BLUE VELVET Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is a nice kid who befriends a nice girl (Laura Dern) living in Lumberton, a nice little town in the Pacific Northwest. But things get a lot less nice when Jeffrey finds a severed ear in a field. He takes it to the cops, but curiosity compels him to investigate the matter further himself. It's a decision that will turn his life inside out, leading him into the bedroom of Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), a sultry singer who has a twisted relationship going on with Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper), a sadistic, gas-huffing psycho with major mommy issues.
Blue Velvet was an unlikely mainstream success in 1986. It's the picture that turned Hopper's stalled career around; you'll never look at him again without hearing Booth holler, “I'll fuck anything that moves!” It was also director David Lynch's first comeback (it seems like he's had half a dozen since) following the costly debacle that was Dune, in a time when, as Lynch has put it, “I was down so far that anything was up.” Lynch made Blue Velvet on a low budget with complete creative freedom, resulting in a picture so nightmarishly odd that producer Dino De Laurentiis had to set up his own distribution company just to get the thing into theaters. Twenty years later(!), Blue Velvet, like Booth himself, is as fascinatingly “sick and dangerous” as ever. Edwards Rancho Santa Margarita, 30632 Santa Margarita Pkwy., Rancho Santa Margarita, (949) 888-3358. Tues. (TONIGHT), 8 p.m. $6; Edwards South Coast Village, 1561 W. Sunflower Ave., Santa Ana, (800) 326-3264. Wed., 8 p.m. $6.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.