Fusebox Facts, Sullivan’s Travels, and More Recommended Events

Sullivan’s Travels

Monday 27, Alamo Mueller

What you first need to know about Preston Sturges is that he claims to have invented "kiss-proof" lipstick. Is that information truly relevant? Probably not, but it's the sort of daffiness you'd expect from a Sturges picture. Generally acknowledged to be the first hyphenate writer-director, he was a screwball comedy virtuoso. In his 1941 Hollywood satire Sullivan’s Travels, Joel McCrea plays a comic director desperate to be taken seriously by making a dour social drama. (I won't spoil its title; just know Sturges was a big influence on the Coen Brothers.) To get material, the director goes undercover as a hobo, and comedy – as well as the comely Veronica Lake – ensues.   – Kimberley Jones

Green Snake

Monday 27, We Luv Video

Alienated Majesty teams with We Luv Video to celebrate Lunar New Year the cinephile way: screening a Hong Kong fantasy movie. The verdant-titled film harkens to this year’s Chinese zodiac creature, the snake, with a story about two snake-spirit sisters trying to survive through demon hunters and mortal romances. Director Tsui Hark’s 1993 feature earned 3.5 stars from the Chron upon release, courtesy of reviewer Marc Savlov, but We Luv pens even higher praise for the picture: “[There] is no better way to celebrate the year of the snake than with Tsui Hark’s revisionist wuxia.” Slither down North Loop to see what everyone’s hissing about.   – James Scott

Lola

Monday 27, Wednesday 29 & Thursday 30, AFS Cinema

What higher praise can a film have than visionary Wong Kar-wai citing it as a major influence on his masterpiece Chungking Express? When the Hong Kong director dropped this reference to Jacques Demy’s dramatic romance at TIFF, it was specifically to do with Chungking’s second half where two lost souls tangle together. Starring Anouk Aimée and Marc Michel, Demy’s film was also once thought lost, only for a roughened print to be found and restored by filmmaker – and Demy’s widow – Agnès Varda. (Need more Varda? Peep the Beaches of Agnès screening at Hyperreal Film Club on Wednesday, Jan. 29!) This cleaned-up copy allows the coming week’s AFS audiences to revel in the Demy-described “musical without music” made up of missed moments and chance encounters.   – James Scott

The Crafty Adult: Paint Your Friend

Monday 27, Menchaca Road Branch Library

One of my favorite genres of Instagram Reel is people painting each other then revealing the paintings to each other, often to the subject’s dismay or bewilderment. Join this crafty crowd at Austin Public Library, where at each session the Crafty Adult group will learn the basics of a certain craft, go over the ins and outs, and then “let loose.” For this one, you can either BYO friend or match up with one there, and then paint their portrait! And remember, it’s all in good fun, so just try your best. Who knows? Maybe your friend is the next Mona Lisa!   – Kat McNevins

Wide Open Spaces: A Tribute Night to the Chicks

Monday 27, Sagebrush

We all need room to make a big mistake, don’t we? The Chicks get their flowers at this celebration titled for their Nineties album and the ballad sharing its title, inspired by songwriter Susan Gibson’s scribblings after dropping out of forestry school. Apparently, as Gibson confessed in 2006 to her alma mater Amarillo College’s newspaper The Ranger, her forgetting the notebook containing the song’s first lyrics and her mother’s consequential sending them to Gibson inspired the striking-out-on-one’s-own theme. But don’t worry: You won’t be alone in saluting the Chicks’ discography. Bands Libby & the Loveless, Rockbottom String Band, and the Side Saddles feature on the event lineup alongside DJ Boi Orbison, all of them playing their own tributes to the entire WOS album. Need another reason to drop in? A percentage of door proceeds benefit Mutual Aid Los Angeles.   – James Scott

Mending Circle

Monday 27, Yarborough Branch Library

Everyone has that article of clothing they can’t part with, be it a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, sweater, or bandanna. If a beloved item is looking a little worse for wear and you want to keep it in your sartorial rotation a few years longer, this meeting of amateur and professional menders might be just the place. Bring your struggling textiles and get some advice on how to keep them on your body and out of the trash.   – James Renovitch

Bad Film Festival: Rubber

Tuesday 28, Carver Branch Library

What defines a bad film? For some, it is the mere suggestion of absurdity – that life onscreen doesn’t mirror the natural world exactly. This is the only reason why I can imagine a film bearing such a stellar synopsis as 2010’s Rubber warrants entry into the library’s Bad Film Festival event series. From Wikipedia, verbatim: “The film is about a tire that comes to life and kills people with psychokinetic powers.” Like, OKAY?!?!? That rips. French on its director/writer’s side, the Quentin Dupieux-helmed feature rolled through Cannes Film Festival as a horror comedy – poking fun at its own premise as well as slashers the world over. See if the movie’s lost any tread in the years since its premiere at this free screening, and report back whether it’s truly “bad” or just a little tiring.   – James Scott

Shhhinema for the People

Tuesday 28, Hyperreal Film Club

Not much to tell you, really, because these weekly secret screenings are all about surprises. What could you see if you hit the button and bought a $5 ticket? Perhaps a rom-com, a mystery, or even Wes Craven Presents Dracula 2000! The Toronto Star called it “hip & happening,” remember? Okay, okay: I’m joking about the Gerald Butler Dracula movie being an option, but truly there’s no way to know what’s playing until you step into the cinema. “Look at you, living life on the edge,” HFC writes to its audience, “breaking up with fate, embracing the whims of an unruly prankster named Chaos.”   – James Scott

The Beaches of Agnès

Wednesday 29, Hyperreal Film Club

In the wake of David Lynch’s death, an aging artist’s autobiographical film seems the most appropriate viewing choice. Made in her 80th year, Agnès Varda’s self-focused documentary revisits her past through places, photography, trinkets, and other colorful marginalia that she deems important. These are her shores – memories as mirrors in the sand. While Varda claimed the 2008 feature would be her last, she lived to make two more docs, Faces Places and career retrospective Varda by Agnès. She passed in 2019, but her legacy – as all great artists’ do – continues in our celebration of her cinematic works.   – James Scott

Jersey Boys

Through March 2, Zach Theatre

When making a jukebox musical out of the memorable back catalog of American pop sensations the Four Seasons, the easy choice – the lazy choice – for Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice would have been to just concentrate on Frankie Valli. After all, he was the most famous member and voice of the Garden State quartet, their success spurred by the falsetto vocals on “Big Girls Don’t Cry” through a decade of hits like “What a Night” and “Sherry.” But what makes the Tony-winning Jersey Boys really stand out from its paper-thin stage biography peers is how all four of the seasons – Tommy DeVito, Nick Massi, Nick DeVito, and Valli – get to tell their complicated and sometimes contradictory versions of the history of America’s riposte to the Beatles.   – Richard Whittaker

Ernest Cole: Lost & Found

Wednesday 29 & Sunday 2, AFS Cinema

The subtitle to House of Bondage puts it plainly: “A South African Black Man Exposes in His Own Pictures and Words the Bitter Life of His Homeland Today.” Ernest Cole’s groundbreaking 1967 book of documentary photography provided the world some of its first shocking glimpses of life under South African apartheid – and, uniquely, from the perspective of someone living under the boot of that brutal regime. Cole got out of the country in 1966, but he never got the recognition he was due. This documentary profile by Raoul Peck (who made the Oscar-nominated James Baldwin doc I Am Not Your Negro) aims to change that. Narrated by LaKeith Stanfield.   – Kimberley Jones

An Evening with Fran Lebowitz

Wednesday 29, Paramount Theatre

There aren’t many people left whose career it is to be professionally themselves, but Fran Lebowitz is on that shrinking list. Sure, she’s had many jobs (interviewer, taxi driver, essayist, cleaner, memoirist) but the cultural legend remains a connection to a certain kind of New York – of Warhol, Mapplethorpe, the New York Dolls – and has retained the acerbic observational edge that made her an icon. While readers may still be waiting seemingly in vain for any of her unfinished novels to be published, breaking her three-decade dry streak, her conversation with Andy Langer should more than suffice.   – Richard Whittaker

Experiments in Distance

Wednesday 29, We Luv Video

Artist Abinadi Meza has done previous artistic stints in the Anthology Film Archives of New York, Rio de Janeiro’s Festival ECRA, and Austin’s own Mexic-Arte Museum among other prestigious places, all of which signal his unique ability to curate and create experimental film. The Otomi filmmaker and current We Luv artist-in-residence builds an hourlong sampling session for the rental shop’s patrons. Pieces selected for this showcase from his own back catalog and the WLV archives deal in “temporal dislocations, strange futures, surveilled sites, ambivalent technologies, and uncanny narrators,” according to the event copy. All the more reason to close the distance between you and the Free RSVP button, hm?   – James Scott

Eastern Condors

Wednesday 29, Alamo South Lamar

Schrödinger’s cat is not in a box: It’s in a 35mm film canister. Every time someone talks about a film that’s seemingly disappeared without trace, the question is always, “Is it good or not?” Yet there’s a certain safety in being able to say, “I guess we’ll never know,” with neither the thrill of finding a lost treasure nor the disappointment of knowing it was trash all along. So while silent horror aficionados still muse over London After Midnight, and cineastes stay up late dreaming of a restored cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, U.S. lovers of Hong Kong action have long wondered whether Sammo Hung’s bleak 1987 beat-em-up Eastern Condors was as grimy and brutal as legend had it. The cat’s out of the can: It is that good, a sweaty riff on The Dirty Dozen transplanted to the Vietnam War to cash in on the 1980s Vietnam War wave. Previously only seen in hush-hush secret screenings and bootleg VHS, it’s finally officially released in America by Criterion but smashing into the Alamo on 35mm.   – Richard Whittaker

Hippo

Wednesday 29, Alamo South Lamar

In this coming-of-age film about two hormone-driven stepsiblings, the word “weird” might not quite suffice. Hippo, an angsty teenage boy obsessed with violence and video games, contrasts with Buttercup, a Hungarian-Catholic immigrant fascinated by classical music and Jesus. Through striking black-and-white cinematography, Buttercup’s unrequited infatuation with Hippo unfolds, resulting in a transfixing oddity. The grotesque nature of each scene teeters on the edge of being wildly uncomfortable, while delivering hopelessly entertaining dark humor.   – Angelina Liu

Fusebox January Salon: Suzanne Bocanegra and Geoff Sobelle

Thursday 30, dadaLab

I’m a sucker for anything that blends different mediums or plays with convention, so it’s no wonder that Texas Performing Arts’ upcoming collaboration with Fusebox, Honor, An Artist Lecture, sounds right up my alley. Prep for the genre-bending show with an intimate salon by the creators. Theatre superstars Suzanne Bocanegra and Geoff Sobelle are presenting a preview conversation at Fusebox, discussing how they’re breaking barriers between visual and performance art in the service of storytelling. With bonus performances from dancer Allysen Hooks and drag king Sir Beauregard Elliot, Esq., this January salon will invigorate the mind and spirit.   – Cat McCarrey

Les Blank Night

Thursday 30, Hyperreal Film Club

Food, music, and madness – the three topics that fascinated documentarian Les Blank. The documentarian’s extraordinary contribution to film history would often mix all of the above, like capturing old friend Werner Herzog eating a shoe after he lost a bet, or how it’s not really a polka party without a buffet. If you’ve never seen a Les Blank movie, take this opportunity to find out about your favorite documentarian’s favorite documentarian.   – Richard Whittaker

“Transcendence: A Century of Black Queer Ecstasy, 1924-2024”

Through May 9, Christian-Green Gallery & Idea Lab

Across politics and pop culture, depictions of queer Black life most often emphasize pain, if not patronization. “Transcendence: A Century of Black Queer Ecstasy,” a multimedia exhibition presented by UT-Austin’s Art Galleries at Black Studies, flips the script, offering a century’s worth of works that focus instead on Black joy. Organized around seven themes – Portraiture, Beyond Figuration, Dance and Movement, Spirituality, Sex and Sensuality, Black Queer Futures, and Altered States – the works of over four dozen artists remind us that even in the face of adversity, we can achieve transcendence.   – Carys Anderson

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Want to see all of our listings broken down by day? Go to austinchronicle.com/calendar and see what's happening now or in the coming week.