Denver Cinema Club

Join DCC for JEOPARDY! Bar League trivia at BarFly, the bar at the Sloans Lake Alamo Drafthouse. Rhonda will be our host this week. The contest starts at 5:00, but the group will meet at 4:30 to stake out seats, place food and drink orders, and get acquainted.

It's free to play, though--understandably--BarFly would like participants to order something. Teams can have up to six players; if more than six DCCers show up, the group will split into two teams.

Here is the web page for the game. You'll find lots of DCCers among the photos.

The group will aim for the couches on the south side of the bar, along the windows overlooking Colfax. Look for a small Denver Cinema Club sign. Arrive early if you can, and help save seats!

Apologies for distance and timing on this, Truly one of the bigger movies of the year with late and limited release. Good news, AMC does have comfy seats and excellent sound/screens at least.

This will be a divisive movie, I am in the fan camp, but "Fearlessly feral" is not a bad tag. Very much in the batshit crazy Brady Corbet/Mona Fastvold vein. You may love it or you may hate it, but I am pretty sure it is not a movie you have seen before, which is saying something with this crowd! Posting this fair assessment...
Speaking at the press conference following the Venice world premiere of Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, co-writer and second-unit director Brady Corbet, Fastvold’s husband, illuminated the couple’s fruitful creative partnership, which also yielded their co-screenwriting duties on 2024’s The Brutalist. “We firmly believe,” he said, pointing to Fastvold’s ownership of and final cut on the film, “that you can only serve one master at a time.” To say nothing of the film’s numerous aesthetic and thematic echoes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, not to mention those of their previous project, Corbet’s comment is an interesting critical pathway into an often impenetrably busy, ambitious work that, when one breaks it down, is about both a marriage in tension and a husband working in service–far more glumly than the gregarious Corbet–to his spouse’s singular vision of the world. Pricklier than the more awards-friendly The Brutalist, though vulnerable to the same structural imbalances and ambiguity, The Testament of Ann Lee is a pleasantly odd text: a rich, overstuffed period musical that makes a grand figure of its impossibly marginal fringe subject. (Angelo Muredda/Filmfreakcentral,net)

Tickets available online and at the box office.
Ample free parking in adjacent lot.
We will head somewhere after to debrief and dinner! Details to follow.

I live in NW Denver if anyone is interested in car-pooling

This is a watch at home, discuss in person event, Part I of a two-part series looking at Hollywood just before the Production Code was enforced.

In the early 1930s, films operated in a brief window without strict moral oversight, and what came through the screen was unusually frank: sex without apology, ambition without punishment, desire without disguise. These films weren’t trying to shock. They were responding to a world that already felt unstable, unequal, and unconvinced by moral certainty.

In this first chapter, Pre-Code Hollywood is physical and unsentimental. Red Dust lets desire sit in the open air—sweaty, casual, and transactional. Baby Face treats sex as leverage in a rigged system. Tarzan and His Mate strips things down even further, imagining intimacy outside social order altogether.

What links these films isn’t provocation for its own sake, but a refusal to tidy things up. Desire drives behavior. Power shapes outcomes. Consequences are uneven. Part I focuses on that moment of clarity—before Hollywood decided it was safer not to look so closely.

We will meet to discuss our thoughts on Monday, January 26, at Odell Brewing Sloan's Lake. Please try to watch all three before attending.

Here is the list of films with instructions on how to find them.

RED DUST (1932, Victor Fleming, USA)
Red Dust drops us into a sweltering rubber plantation where desire has nothing to hide. Clark Gable and Jean Harlow don’t circle each other so much as collide—flirting, arguing, sleeping together with an ease that feels almost documentary. Sex isn’t coded as romance or transgression here; it’s casual, physical, and deeply tied to power and class. What makes the film feel startling even now is how little it moralizes. People want what they want, act on it, and live with the mess. The heat isn’t just atmospheric—it’s the pressure that strips away pretense, leaving behavior exposed and uncorrected.

• Rent from YouTube
• Rent from Prime Video
• Watch for free on Internet Archive (lower quality)

BABY FACE (1933, Alfred E. Green, USA)
Baby Face follows Barbara Stanwyck as a woman who looks at the world she’s been handed and decides to use the only leverage available to her. Moving from a speakeasy to a Manhattan office tower, she sleeps her way up the corporate ladder without apology or self-deception. The film doesn’t dress this up as romance or tragedy—it treats sex as strategy, ambition as survival. What’s unsettling isn’t her behavior, but how efficiently the system rewards it. Baby Face doesn’t ask whether she’s moral. It asks why the world is built so that this works—and who it’s really meant to protect.

• Rent from YouTube
• Rent from Prime Video
• Watch for free on Internet Archive

TARZAN AND HIS MATE (1934, Cedric Gibbons, Jack Conway, USA)
Tarzan and His Mate imagines a world where sex and intimacy exist without shame or explanation. Tarzan and Jane live together openly, touch constantly, and move through the jungle as a couple without marriage, rules, or apology. The famous underwater swimming sequence—lyrical, nude, and unmistakably erotic—doesn’t feel designed to provoke so much as to state a fact: bodies exist, and desire isn’t a problem to be solved. What gives the film its charge is the contrast between that freedom and the intruding outsiders who bring contracts, ownership, and “civilization” with them. The jungle isn’t framed as savage—it’s the visitors who look uncomfortable, grasping, and out of place.

• Watch for free on Internet Archive

• Read the description below carefully
• Also read our Advance Screenings page

We have a small number of seats for a free advance screening of Shelter, an action movie starring Jason Statham. Active members of the club--those who attend our regular events--will get priority for the seats. When you RSVP, you will be added to the wait list, and I will move people from the wait list to the "going" list by hand. Please RSVP only if you are sure you can attend.

The studio reps have asked me to submit our guest list by Friday, January 23. If you are on the "going" list on Friday afternoon, we will expect you at the movie on Tuesday. Again, please RSVP only if you are sure you can attend.

Arrive by 6:30 for the 7:00 screening. Skip the line if there is one, and check in with the studio reps. They will check your name off their list and direct you to your seat. (They usually seat everyone in the club together, but not always.) Don't be late! If you arrive after 6:45, you could lose your reserved seat.

• Watch the trailer for the film.
• See its page at Rotten Tomatoes.

I will not be there, so I don't have anything planned for after the movie. If you would like to meet with other members, use the comments below to coordinate. Your best bet is probably Dave and Busters, next door.

-- Mike

-----------
SHELTER
On a remote coastal island, a reclusive man rescues a young girl from a deadly storm, drawing them both into danger. Forced out of isolation, he must confront his turbulent past while protecting her, sending them on a tense journey of survival and redemption.

Directed By: Ric Roman Waugh
Written By: Ward Parry
Produced By: Jason. Statham, John Friedberg, Brendon Boyea, Greg Silverman, Jon Berg
Executive Producer: Rick Roman Waugh, Rachael Cole, Teddy Schwartzman, Michael Heimler, Andrew Golov, Mike Shanks, Volodymyr Artemenko, Yevgen Stupka, Victor Hadida, Gideon Yu, Elizabeth A. Bell
Cast: Jason Statham, Bodhi Rae Breathnach, Naomi Ackie, Bill Nighy