Part of our CINEMA IN THE TIME OF CORONAVIRUS series. Friday, June 26, 2020 @ 9:20p, Netflix Streaming Service: THE LOBSTER (2015, A24, dir by Yorgos Lanthimos, streaming, 118 mns)
HOW TO: While we all work to be socially responsible during the age of coronavirus, Secret Movie Club is experimenting with news ways we can all come together as a community and watch great movies.
We want to keep this very reasonable since folks have to have Netflix to start with. So donate whatever works for you. $1 is fine with us.
Just make sure you download NETFLIX PARTY on a Chrome Browser. You'll see the initials NP in the upper right hand corner of browser after a succesful download.
Secret Movie Club will email the link for the Netflix Party at 30 minutes before showtime using the email you provide here. Click that link then click the NP in upper right hand corner. This will synch you to our screening. We will start the movie at exactly 5 minutes after the hour.
There will be a chat function that allows everyone to comment as we go.
The Secret Movie Club team will be offering trivia, history, insights, articles, deep dives throughout the movie(s). We're going to work to make this as rich a feast as possible utilizing the technology at hand.
Then we'll want your feedback immediately on how we can improve/make it better! This also will allow Secret Movie Clubbers from all over the world to join in on a virtual screening!
This final week of June 2020 we’re screening a mini fest of great recent speculative sci-fi movies. Whereas the first movie of our double feature tonight, Ex Machina, goes the Roman Polanski contained location suspense route. The second movie, Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster goes the absurdist route using its near future sci fi ridiculous plot to examine/question accepted current human behavior.
After his wife leaves him for another lover, David gets sent to a hotel where he’s told he has 45 days to find a new mate or he will be turned into an animal of his choosing. David chooses a lobster. At the hotel, he befriends other “singles” and learns that guests can buy extra days if they hunt the “loners” who have escaped the hotel and now hide in the surrounding woods.
But when a series of events transpire that cause David to flee to the woods, he joins up with the loners who have their own set of rules including a prohibition on romantic love. Of course David meets another loner and they promptly fall in love. . .
Yorgos Lanthimos has built a career on using a surreal and absurdist sensibility to ironically throw more light on pressing contemporary and human issues. His movie DogTooth unsettlingly examined how parents, in trying to shield their children from the horrors of the world, can slowly devolve into a system of even worse horrors. The Lobster uses speculative sci-fi to set up a universe that in some ways feels like a hellish (though hilarious) Alice in Wonderland but in the service of examining our societal notions of relationships, being single, marriage, etc.
Come join us to see how a director with a vision and singular voice can bend the genre to do amazing things.