The Overlook Hour Guest Profile: Nocturama & Wolf Lake

This past weekend, a certain Clark Little celebrated his birthday. And I'm not talking about the Hawaiian photographer...

Yes, your host Clark Little checked off another year and celebrated the way any film fan would; at the movies. We took a mini field trip to the Mission District of San Francisco t watch Nocturama (2017) at the Roxie Theatre, then had an impromptu discussion about it right afterwards.

"The new film by Bertrand Bonello (Saint Laurent, House of Pleasures) is a terrorism thriller like no other, recalling Robert Bresson's The Devil, Probably as much as it does George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead. We first follow a group of tense, shifty adolescents as they prowl the streets and subways of Paris, learning through carefully delineated sequences that they're already well underway with a bombing plot. And then it becomes something familiar, yet altogether different, as these subversives tuck away inside a shopping mall and lose themselves in consumer culture - clothes, televisions, toys, and a stirring soundtrack that includes Blondie, Chief Keef, Shirley Bassey, Bonello's menacing electronic score, and Willow Smith. Will they survive the unseen, encroaching authorities? Or, as the walls close in, will they even survive each other? Nocturama presents no easy answers; what it does offer is one of the 21st century's most stirring cinematic experiences."

-Rotten Tomatoes

We followed this up with a screening at the Overlook of a film chosen by the birthday boy. He was drawn to a VHS clamshell, in which sat Wolf Lake (1978).  

"War veterans visit a lakeside cabin for a week of shooting, drinking, etc. but find the cabin being looked after by a young caretaker named David. When David's status as a war deserter is revealed, all hell breaks loose."

-IMDB

The synopsis of another film is mentioned too, but since we didn't record anything about it, check it out here. Or better yet, maybe don't.

Next week, engineer Randy will be back in studio with the guys for an much better sounding and more organized episode. We might even have a special guest... Till next week!

-Huntress