A WORD OF WELCOME FROM OUR STARLORD

★

SULLY

Clint Eastwood ‧ 2016 ‧ Drama/Biography ‧ 1h 36m ‧ PG-13

THE MOVIE

Our weekend begins with a couple of your favorite soft spots blended and blasted big budget at the super-sized screen: anxiety-grade disaster movie sequences of extreme distress and heroic biopic business with a chewy emotional center. It's is also the first ever Hollywood feature to be filmed entirely in IMAX ratio, so you know the panic is real. Tom Hanks stars. Clint Eastwood directs. Bit random. It's hard to imagine them even having a conversation.

THE VENUE

The AMC Metreon IMAX has been the site of many blockbusting Jenkins movie moments since your first trip together to see The Dark Knight in 2008, including 5 of the Top 10 highest grossing movies of all time. We suffer no Liemax cop-outs at the MJFF: this is the full-size realest of deal, and comes standard with all Metreon features including wildly unpredictable popcorn quality, baffling escalator configuration, and special crêperie check-out desk.

THE GUEST

Your host, husband, and silver screen soul mate Mr Edward Jenkins will be joining you for this inaugural adventure, to hold your hand and put stuff in your bag. We let Edward choose the seats for this screening, a responsibility he agonized over, eventually purchasing and refunding three separate sets of tickets before deciding he had found "the true sweet spot for this particular presentation". He has promised not to send you to the concessions stand alone while he watches the trailers.

AKIRA

Katsuhiro Otomo ‧ 1988 ‧ Science-Fiction/Animated ‧ 2h 5m ‧ R

THE MOVIE

One for the biker boys and telekenetic girls. A seminal sci-fi masterpiece of visionary scope and insanely far-reaching futurist themes, AKIRA is a landmark in cell animation, and a profoundly influential cinematic milestone - it's also your husband's favorite ever movie, and your husband is a badass. Tetsuuuooooooo!

THE VENUE

The Roxie Theater is a poky old place with the worst seats ever, buried deep in the belly of Mission's filthiest and most meth-riddled streets - but we love it, because they showed Southland Tales in 35mm presented by Richard Kelly, and any theater that does that is the absolute business and deserves our eternal patronage.

THE GUESTS

Fresh from his very own trip down the Neo Tokyo rabbit-hole, Craig "Nino" Kind, aka El Padrino, will be primed and ready enter the void with Tetsuo and friends. Saulo Saulo is his secret weapon, currently sporting an extra-addled post-Burn brain. Together, they are unstoppable. Except the show is sold out and they don't have tickets.

BLAIR WITCH

David Adam Wingard ‧ 2016 ‧ Horror ‧ 1h 29m ‧ R

THE MOVIE

Once upon a previous decade, you watched horror movies with gleeful abandon. So here's a Saturday morning crash-course in horror movie re-immersion, with a revival of the franchise that taught Jimmy how to Blair Witch one out in the corner - a story of a supernatural entity so powerful, that horror maven Auntie Dan tattooed its sigil on his back and will forever remain marked. You can star but you can't hide!

THE VENUE

The Alamo Drafthouse took their sweet time setting up shop in San Francisco and you made it your second home in no time at all. Average Jenkins movie trip expenditure doubled overnight. But that's the price of enjoying Shishito Motherfucking Peppers in your cradle of movie comfort. That's not to mention Chocolate Milkshake, Fungi Pizza, Popcorn With Just Salt and Glass Of Water. Welcome to the Alamo.

THE GUESTS

Well-versed in the lore of movie magic, and no stranger to the ins and outs of an Alamo outing, Mr and Mrs Smith will be joining you on this shakycam journey back into the woods. Some definite Bonnie & Clyde vibes going on in this photo, which worked better when they were penciled in to watch the film about bank robbers coming up next. I asked for a picture of them shitting themselves crying in the woods, but no dice.

HELL OR HIGH WATER

David Mackenzie ‧ 2016 ‧ Crime/Drama ‧ 1h 42m ‧ R

THE MOVIE

Little is known by the Jenkins family of this mysterious slice of scorched-earth cowboy crime. Men scowl. Suns burns. Bullets kill. All this is safe to assume. Also safe to assume: this will be your favorite film of the entire weekend, because you love hard-boiled antiheroes, abandoned Americana, and the hard-knock soul of a blood-in-the-sand tragedy.

THE VENUE

That's a photo of New People not Kabuki but check out how rad that looks. Silly we've never been there. Shame this weekend they just have a film festival about old people. The Sundance Kabuki is oft-overlooked by the Jenkins crew, and has the world's shittest parking lot. Today, however, it is reborn as your personal palace.

THE GUEST

The only girl cool enough to have the same favorite movie as the MJFF President, Alexis wanted to see either an animated or creepy film, because she's an adult like that. But she gets neither, and she doesn't get her favorite film on her laminate either. But, she gets you all to herself for the best reviewed film of the fest. It's a firm but fair deal. 

THE NICE GUYS

Shane Black ‧ 2016 ‧ Comedy/Mystery ‧ 1h 56m ‧ R

THE MOVIE

Shane Black was once the guy in Predator who tells the pussy cavern joke. Now he's the guy that makes the most whipsmart crime comedies in Hollywood. He was also that back then too. So nothing much has changed, except now he's not in Predator movies making pussy cavern jokes. Although they are making a new Predator movie. This isn't that. This is The Nice Guys. Ryan Gosling yo.

THE VENUE

The Bedroom At 80 Clairview is a sacred retreat, sadly sullied in recent years by the arrival of tiny screaming infants and a disastrous spate of missing Apple TV remotes. Still, it houses a large viewing screen mounted on an articulated bracket, a motorized bed with futuristic backlit control panels, and is near all the best local amenities including the pillows, the duvet, and the chocolate. 

THE GUEST

Ready and waiting to spoon your legs and pin you down into a tiny corner of your giant bed, it's our trusty steed and untrustworthy mutt all rolled into one: Jimmy Jenkins. He would prefer a Snoopy movie or some UFC, but anything that involves the closest possible proximity to your body and nonstop popcorn is just fine in his books. No sudden moves please.

LO AND BEHOLD, REVERIES OF A CONNECTED WORLD

Werner Herzog ‧ 2016 ‧ Documentary ‧ 2h 38m ‧ PG-13

THE MOVIE

Prepare for your love of futurism and your thirst for documentaries to be suffocated and then systematically negated into objective irrelevance by Werner Herzog's unforgiving camera and abyssal philosophies. At least this one isn't that last one he did. Not watching that.

THE VENUE

The Embarcadero Center Cinema is perhaps unfairly maligned by Jenkins theatergoers, largely for being situated in a cramped, lifeless complex in a boring part of town far from home. Now, however, they have special recliners. Let the comfort begin.

THE GUEST

Rolling through the festival with an inevitable hangover from her own birthday celebrations, Benedicte is terrified of films being scary even if they aren't because they might be. A factual documentary seemed a good fit until Bene revealed "this subject FREAKS me out so much, I will probably not sleep for days". 

THE PEANUTS MOVIE

Steve Martino ‧ 2015 ‧ Adventure/Comedy ‧ 1h 33m ‧ G

THE MOVIE

Young Team! Spend a cosy Sunday morning in the company of your childhood Peanuts pals, with the babies and the dog all cuddled up. Laugh and smile with Snoopy and friends, and try your hardest to ignore the incessant pleas for fishies, Caillou and Toe-Mas. PLEASE NOTE: this is a breast-accessible screening, and may contain boob-munching throughout.

THE VENUE

The Clairview Court Cinema Room is one of San Francisco's premiere Midtown Terrace private screening rooms. Doubling as a home for Nino Brown, it converts into a state-of-the-art movie-den in minutes, while retaining its this-is-kind-of-a-bedroom feel complete with sofa cracks that your bum falls into. Rumors of a long-lost popcorn machine haunt the garage.

THE GUESTS

Lo and behold, Dash and Nia, the Jenkins brood, as they groweth in numbers and influence. First, they robbed you of your freedom to watch movies any time you like. Now, they are coming for your Film Festival, and they will not stop until every screening involves anthropomorphic animals. Watch as they rob you of infinite movie-watching possibilities, even as they melt your heart with unstoppable cuteness.

DON'T BREATHE

Fede Alvareze ‧ 2016 ‧ Thriller ‧ 1h 28m ‧ R

THE MOVIE

What better way to introduce our tiny infant babies to the wonders of the drive-in than with a movie that casts mundane relatable household spaces in a palpably tense and terrifying light? Nia might not understand what's really going on but Dash will need an iPad with nonstop fishie videos strapped around his face. No problem. 

THE VENUE

For our final destination this weekend, we make a long-delayed, oft-discussed and inevitably triumphant return to the West Wind Capitol Drive In down San Jose way. The site of so many nights lost in movie magic, it doesn't get much better than films under the stars where a pup can poop and popcorn blows endlessly around the dusty plains.

THE GUESTS

And finally they return! Back from their star-crossed adventures on the galactic moon of Black Rock City, can the intrepid Natalie and Jacob navigate the labyrinthian challenges of the West Wind? Hopefully they will not be separated by a sea of cars as we make the daring double-bill switch between screens, as has happened in legendary times of old.

SNOWDEN

Oliver Stone ‧ 2016 ‧ Biography/Thriller ‧ 2h 14m ‧ R

THE MOVIE

What could be a more perfect finale to a Monica Jenkins Film Festival than an Edward Snowden biopic directed by Oliver Stone about spies, technology, and the future of modern civilization, starring none other than Jason Joseph Gordon Jordan Lewis? Nothing, that's what. This festival has been dialed right the fuck in.

THE VENUE

Round two in the magical tarmac expanses of the six-screen-strong West Wind Capitol Drive-In. With a nice gap in between movies, you can look forward to that comfortingly familiar slow-roll journey, as we navigate the arteries of this vital institution and move from one parking lot of possibility to the next.

THE GUEST

Veteran member of the Jenkins Film Watching Council, Tilly is a most discerning critic. Still holding out hope for a feature-length Ed Rush & Optical documentary, she will be joining us for this finale screening once we are back at home, maybe, if we are putting out some treats, and she happens to be passing by.