SO CAL EXPLORERS - Field trips for adults

Buy Your Tickets Here $13.00

Parking
There are two parking structures adjacent to 4SM off of 4th & 5th Streets accessible via Spurgeon St, a metered parking lot off of 3rd and Bush, and metered parking throughout East End and Downtown Santa Ana. Parking structures offer first 2 hours free!

Watch Trailer here

Director: Mark Sandrich Run Time: 101 min. Release Year: 1935
Starring: Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, Erik Rhodes, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers

Our Classic Movie Nights series heads to the peak of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ legendary collaborations with Top Hat, an art deco dream of gravity-defying dance! Set against a backdrop of gleaming ballrooms and breezy Venice vistas, this musical comedy is pure cinematic joy!

Astaire is the dashing American dancer who falls for Rogers’ quick-witted society girl, but a case of confused identity threatens their budding romance. What follows is a confection of screwball comedy and iconic choreography—including the immortal “Cheek to Cheek,” where Rogers floats across the floor in that legendary feathered gown.
With music by Irving Berlin, direction by Mark Sandrich, and the kind of sparkling chemistry you can’t fake, Top Hat is a love letter to the golden age of movie musicals. Eighty-plus years later, it still sings, sways, and seduces.

Buy Your Tickets Here $13.00

Parking
There are two parking structures adjacent to 4SM off of 4th & 5th Streets accessible via Spurgeon St, a metered parking lot off of 3rd and Bush, and metered parking throughout East End and Downtown Santa Ana. Parking structures offer first 2 hours free!

Watch Trailer here

Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz Run Time: 139 min. Release Year: 1950
Starring: Anne Baxter, Bette Davis, Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill, George Sanders

"Our Technicolor Summer series goes from surreal to scrumptious with Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory—a candy-colored fantasy that has enchanted generations with just the right amount of weirdness and pitch-black humor! When poor but kind-hearted Charlie Bucket finds a golden ticket inside a Wonka Bar, he wins the chance of a lifetime: a tour of the mysterious, magical chocolate factory run by the reclusive and eccentric Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder, in one of the greatest screen performances of all time). Charlie joins a group of wildly different children—each one a cautionary tale—on a journey through a world of edible delights, fizzy-lifting drinks, and Oompa Loompa morals. Whether you grew up with it or are discovering it anew, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is a golden ticket to a world where imagination rules—and where the most dazzling sights often hide the strangest secrets. In the early 1930s, the 3-strip Technicolor process was introduced to audiences, inviting them to experience a world dripping with vibrant saturation for the very first time. The Technicolor Summer series ranges from familiar classics to rarely-screened gems all Summer long!"

Cross-posted with LA & OC Weirdo Music & Art Forum

Part of the series Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema

Date: Monday, July 21 , 7:45 pm

Venue: Frida Cinema
305 E 4th St #100, Santa Ana, CA 92701
Phone: (714) 285-9422

Dinner 6:15 TBD

Tickets: $9 https://thefridacinema.org/movies/woman-in-the-dunes/

Trailer here

Review here

Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 100% positive review

1964 Japanese New Wave avant-garde psychological thriller film directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara and starring Eiji Okada, Kyōko Kishida, and Kōji Mitsui. It received widespread critical acclaim and was nominated for two Academy Awards. The screenplay for the film was adapted by Kōbō Abe from his 1962 novel of the same name.[1] The film follows an amateur entomologist (Okada) who is led to settle in the house of a lonely widow (Kishida) at the bottom of a sand dune in a rural coastal village. He soon realizes that the villagers have trapped him there and expect him to work for them.

Woman in the Dunes was an independent, joint production of Teshigahara Productions and the Japanese Art Theater Guild, a group of young film- makers involved in an attempt to create political-aesthetical films in opposition to the dominant studio productions of the 1960s, which they viewed as commercial, unartistic, and uninteresting[2]
The film is considered to be Teshigahara's masterpiece, and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time.

Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara Run Time: 147 min. Release Year: 1964

Language: Japanese

Starring: Eiji Okada, Hiroko Itō, Kōji Mitsui, Kyôko Kishida

The third film in our Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema series is Woman in the Dunes, a film about an entomologist on a casual field trip that finds himself lured into a nightmarish existence—trapped in a sand dune with a mysterious woman and forced into a Sisyphean task of survival. What begins as a bizarre circumstance becomes a harrowing philosophical inquiry into time, identity, and the illusion of freedom.

Based on the novel by Kōbō Abe, and brought to life by Hiroshi Teshigahara’s stark, surreal direction and Torū Takemitsu’s haunting score, Woman in the Dunes is a landmark of Japan’s 1960s avant-garde cinema. Nominated for two Academy Awards and winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, it’s both a psychological thriller and a profound existential riddle.

Arthouse 101: Japanese Cinema is a curated 12-film trip through the evolution of Japan—from the quiet post-war resilience of the 1940s all the way to the radical reinventions of the 1990s. Each Monday this July-September, we will explore a new facet of this incredible nation’s cinematic journey throughout the 20th century! All films will be presented in their original Japanese language with English subtitles!