Joel Schumacher's THE LOST BOYS (Contemporary American Revival)

Music Box - Friday and Saturday, Midnight
In addition to being the first movie where Corey Feldman and Corey Haim (R.I.P.) appear together, THE LOST BOYS is also a darn good time. In a rarity for a horror film from the '80's, the comedic elements work to lighten the mood without bringing too much cheese. Much as with Schumacher's previous movie targeted towards teenagers, ST. ELMO'S FIRE, the production team doesn't cut corners. Recently pubescent vampires (Keifer Sutherland, Jason Patric, and Jami Gertz) and soon-to-be pubescent comic store geeks (Haim and Feldman) get the adult treatment as realistic characters, without a comic foil in the bunch. Though the film was shot in and around Santa Cruz, the fictional location of San Carla, CA, is adeptly rendered as a dark and downtrodden small town, and feels like it could exist on the edge of the Salton Sea. With it's run-down boardwalk, gang problems, and mysterious disappearances, this is not the "Sunny California" that was (and is?) a staple of the movies. Though the film lags a bit during the third act, the night-time scenes of the amusement park and the vampires' lair are dead on, and the soundtrack features an excellent cover of "People are Strange" performed by Echo and the Bunnymen. (1987, 97 min, 35mm) JH - Cine-File.info

Haskell Wexler's MEDIUM COOL (American Revival)

Film Studies Center (University of Chicago) - Thursday, 7pm
How many times have you gone somewhere expecting a massive riot? And if you did go, did you also expect to come away with cinematic gold? That's pretty much what Chicago native Haskell Wexler did in '68 when he decided to shoot footage of protesters outside the Democratic National Convention. Already an Oscar-winning cinematographer for his work on WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, he set a fictional film about the ethics of a TV news cameraman amongst the actual chaos in the city. In MEDIUM COOL he used what was essentially a documentary crew (operating the camera himself), and had the actors intermingle with real protesters and police as all hell broke loose in Chicago. Other documentary footage was repurposed and additional narrative scenes were shot to fill in the gaps of the superficial plot, and Wexler used these elements to walk the line between fact and fiction while addressing the political climate of the times. Perhaps more than any other filmmaker, Wexler is responsible for the shooting style used in films by directors like John Cassavetes, John Sayles, and Kelly Reichardt, who all seem to have taken his advice: "If your film can reflect areas of life where people feel passion, then it will have genuine drama." Wexler in person. (1969, 111 min, 35mm) JH - Cine-File.info