CINEMA JUNKIE: Celebrating Digital Gym Cinema(please note this transcript was auto-generated)
JADE HINDMON: Welcome back to Midday Edition. I'm Jade Hindmon. San Diego filmgoers are still mourning the loss of the Ken Cinema, and more recently, the landmark Hillcrest cinemas, which shut down. But our Midday Movies Critics are here to remind you that San Diego still has a vibrant venue for film lovers to gather, and it's called Digital Gym Cinema. It's in East Village, and today we're going to celebrate what the venue has to offer and discuss its June Japanese film series. So joining me once again, our KPBS cinema junkie, Beth Accomando, and Moviewallas podcaster, Yazdi Pithavala. Welcome to you both.
BETH ACCOMANDO: Thank you.
YAZDI PITHAVALA: Thank you, Jade.
JADE HINDMON: The cinema landscape, it has changed drastically. But, Beth, you wanted to remind people we do still have an independent art house cinema in San Diego.
BETH ACCOMANDO: Yes, we do. And I love it. This is Digital Gym Cinema, as you mentioned. It was first on El Cajon Boulevard. Now it's a state-of-the-art venue in East Village. It's at Park and Market. And And I've been working with the cinema since it started, which has been over a decade. And I volunteered through a group called Film Geek San Diego, and I help program films there. And it's so wonderful to have a venue that will let you do anything and bring whatever crazy programming ideas you have. So we've done a Godzilla film series, we've done a Videodrome new Flesh rave party, and they let us do what we call Bunkers Half-Ass Midnight night. So I love the fact that you can find such diverse programming there just through what we do, and then they have their own great programming.
JADE HINDMON: Well, Yazdi, you are also a fan of this venue. So what makes it special? I mean, what needs does it feel in the community?
YAZDI PITHAVALA: Like Beth, I adore the digital gym. It's a small theater. It's no fuss. I love the fact that, of course, shows foreign films. It shows indie movies. It shows even locally made films. It's the venue for film festivals. It has its own little parking lot. So even though you're in East Village, you don't need to worry about parking, they have a mean hot dog over there. I also like the fact that if you become a member of the digital gym, every ticket costs 10 bucks or less. My general feeling is if I have an evening where I have nothing to do and I don't want to be bothered with finding out what movie I want to watch, I just show up at the digital gym. They do such an exceptional job curating the films. You can just show up and watch whatever is going and you won't be disappointed. I want to, in particular, recommend Melancholia. Melancholia is being shown as part of the Burke Lectureship on Religion and Society. And this particular program probes religion and society-related themes embedded in significant films. And Melancholia is a great example. It's one of Lars von Trier's movie.
YAZDI PITHAVALA: It stars Kirsten Dunst as a woman who is deeply, deeply going through crippling depression. And her story is seen through the eyes of the rest of the world getting ready for a giant asteroid which is going to hit the planet. I'm not going to spoil anything, but it has one of the best ending scenes of any movie I have seen. I love that while the rest of the world is freaking out around her, she is okay with it because for her, every day is like the end of the world. And here's a clip from the movie.
CLIP: The Earth is evil. We don't need to grieve for it. One, Nobody will miss it.
YAZDI PITHAVALA: Another film which is going to be showing at the Digital Gym Cinema is the film Jane Austen, Wrecked My Life. This movie is very apt since 2025, happens to be the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birthday. It tells the story of a Paris bookseller who is lost, and her friends sign her up secretly to a book writing workshop at the Jane Austen Society in England. And there she meets a variety of different characters. And the good thing about this film is, even as it's going through its plot, the film itself is a modern day adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. It's the movie you want to give a hug. It's the movie which in these troubled times is just exactly the medicine you need. And here's a clip from Jane Austen, Wrecked My Life.
CLIP Welcome to the Jane Austen Residency. And we're delighted to count amongst us this year a new recruit. Welcome. Welcome. We hope you will be inspired and we look forward to reading your work. I believe that some books become part of our lives because they reveal to us our true nature.
JADE HINDMON: I mean, some really interesting films there. And Beth, you've got Film Geeks programming coming up. Tell me about that.
BETH ACCOMANDO: Yes, we do monthly films there. And this year we're in the midst of a series that is divided between international horror and neo-noir. And we love to provide introductions productions with our films. And I always do themed food, which I love doing because I like to feed people and show them movies. So coming up on June seventh, we have one of our what we call Bunkers Half-Ass Midnights. And these are starting at 10:00 and get you out by midnight because it's San Diego, and we're not sure people will actually come out at midnight. And these are hosted by author Matt Rotman, and he's the author of Bunkers Ass Cinema. And he picks films that are just crazy. Some Some of them are not well known. Some of them are cult favorites. And this particular time, it is a film called Mosquito. And I think this trailer will give you a sense of what to expect. It came from another galaxy. It transformed one of Earth's smallest insects into a bloodthirsty sworn of terror. And it will be bonkers. And Matt always has a introduction as well, sometimes quite humorous. And then on June 15th, we will have one of our international horror films, and this is Mexico's Grave Robbers. And we're going to have a virtual introduction by Trash Mex's Armando Hernández, and he focuses his podcast on genre films from Mexico. So we like to have diverse programming, and also we have a really lovely community of film lovers that come that you can hang out with and talk about movies after each film.
JADE HINDMON: Love it. And like Yazdi said, Digital Gym does a lot of film curation, in addition to just screening new releases. I mean, they do a series on Tuesdays called Digital Gym Cinema Video, which showcases classics, often ones considered cult classics or out of the mainstream. And for June, they'll be highlighting Japanese cinema. Beth, tell us about that.
BETH ACCOMANDO: Yes. So Digital Gym loves to take advantage of the fact that some films, classics and cult cinema, get restorations. And the American Genre Film Archive has new restorations of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s films, and they're going to celebrate it with something called 80s Obayashi, and this will celebrate four of his films. He made 15 films in the '80s. All four of these focus on school-age kids, and they're considered youth films, often starring pop idles from the time. And he is best known for an absolutely crazy film called Hausu or house. And that was a wild ride inspired by his daughter's dreams. And I will say that watching it, especially if you do so at a midnight screening, is like taking a crazy LSD trip. You really can't explain what you've experienced. There are floating heads, weird things with watermelons, pianos that I think bite you, a crazy cat. I don't know. It's insane. But many of his films have fantastical elements. And the new series starts with School in the Crosshairs. And this is about a high school girl who has telekinetic powers who must defend her school from an extraterrestrial attack. And he uses special effects that are on a certain level, charmingly low tech, but also wildly imaginative.
BETH ACCOMANDO: And here's a little song from the trailer, which is It's deceptive in terms of how it sets up the film.
CLIP: You don't have to worry, worry,
BETH ACCOMANDO: So it sounds like a sweet little film, right? About young school girls, maybe. But there's some weird alien guy in a Silver Cape from Venus, and he's turning kids into these zombie-like creatures. It's crazy. And many of the films have fantastical or folklore elements. And there's also one called His Motorbike, Her Island, which is a love triangle between a boy, a girl, and a motorcycle. That's all I'll say.
JADE HINDMON: Okay. Yazdi, what did you think of the films? I mean, I know you're new to this director, just like I am. Yes.
YAZDI PITHAVALA: And I've heard so much about Hausu, but my introduction to Obayashi was through this film Girl Who Leapt Through Time, which is also going to be shown at the digital gym. And I really enjoyed it because it's so sweet and goofy, but at the same time, it's ahead of its time in terms of playing with concepts of time dilation. I know Chris Nolan and many others have made a career out of it, but this was a movie made in the '80s, which deal with very similar themes of what would happen if time moved in such a way that you were one day ahead of everybody else. And And so I really enjoyed the creativity and cleverness which is on display, even though it's all packaged as a very cute little, almost love story. So I think folks should really check it out.
JADE HINDMON: Oh, wow. Well, these films highlight one Japanese director. But if our listeners are new to Japanese cinema, you have a few others you recommend they seek out as well. Yazdi, who are your picks?
YAZDI PITHAVALA: Yeah. So everybody knows about Hayao Miyazaki, the grand poobah of animated movies, and And so I'm not going to talk about him. But there are two Japanese filmmakers that I do want to talk about. The first one is Yasujirō Ozu. And Ozu started with the silent movies in the 1920s, and consistently through the '60s, made a lot of movies. And I think more than any other Japanese filmmaker, he came closer in depicting the resilience of the Japanese culture and the importance of strong, familiar bonds. His most celebrated movie is Tokyo Story from 1953. That holds up as well as anything in contemporary cinema 75 years later. That movie, I've seen it several times, and it always gets to me. It's a beautiful, unsentimental look at expectations of kids growing up versus their parents. And it's a classic for good reason. He's also known for many other films like Floating Weeds, Late Spring, Early Summer. And as much as he's known for his deeply heartfelt movies, he's also famous for a lot of his formal innovations in the craft of cinema, particularly in opposition to Hollywood styles in the '50s and '60s. So really, Ozu is somebody that everybody ought to check out.
YAZDI PITHAVALA: And then in a more contemporary setting, I would recommend Hirokazu Kore-eda. And I must say that I have a soft spot for him. I've loved this director for a long time. He's very prolific. He has usually a movie come out every year. And he has, in a way, taken the mantle from Ozu in making these films that are deeply human. His films do not ever take an easy out with characters who are inherently bad or evil. You will not find any villains in his movies. Instead, he has his stories populated by characters who just are the way they are. And all of these individuals, they mean well, but they cannot help having the conflicts that they do. Kore-eda loves to have the audience tackle very moral quandaries, and any of his movies should be worth checking out. I should also say that his movie, Still Walking, is probably my favorite film from the last 20 years. I've seen it multiple number of times. Or his most recent and most celebrated movie, Shoplifters, which came out a couple of years ago and was nominated for best foreign film. Most recently, his movie Monster, is an incredible film which works at several different levels. So above all, if I were to recommend one working filmmaker, it would be Hirokazu Kore-eda.
JADE HINDMON: All right. Well, and I have a question about that because you mentioned that in his films, the characters are not inherently bad or evil. Is that that whole perspective more of a Western thing, to always have a character who's either good, bad, evil, not evil? I mean...
YAZDI PITHAVALA: Yeah, we We tend to set up our characters in terms of this is the person who's creating the adversity, and these are the people who are triumphant against it. Whereas all of Kore-eda’s stories are about people who are just wired differently, and they are placed together through circumstance or otherwise, and who have to learn to coexist or move ahead together. Shoplifters is about this group of family that is formed from people who are actually not related to each other, who are on the fringes of society. So, yeah, I think he does... He's a deeply humanist filmmaker.
BETH ACCOMANDO: Yeah. And I think what's really great is that recently he did a film called Broker that was set in Korea. And he'll present you with characters that initially strike you as unsympathetic or unlikable. And by the end of the film, he has completely won you over. And he is such a humane and compassionate filmmaker. And I think what he does really well is he tricks you into understanding these people, even though he often presents them initially as characters you might not like.
JADE HINDMON: Be unsavory.
BETH ACCOMANDO: Yes. It's such a journey. Like, you're always by the end of the film, you're going like, Oh, my God, how did he make me? How did he make baby kidnappers likable?
JADE HINDMON: Right. That's so very interesting. Interesting. Well, Beth, which Japanese directors do you recommend?
BETH ACCOMANDO: Well, as Yazdi implied, there are some that are so high up there, like Miyazaki and then, of course, Kurosawa, that I don't think we need to mention. But I do like to always offer a contrast. Yazdi always seems to offer these much nicer, more easily embraceable films and filmmakers. So I'm going to go with some that are a little more on the fringes. One director I love is Takashi Miike, and he is wildly prolific and incredibly diverse. He's worked in TV, in film, in commercials. He's made films that are family friendly, but then he's had films like this anthology episode of Masters of Horror that was banned, even in contemporary times. I Showtime felt that it was such disturbing content, they wouldn't air it. So he is someone who deals a lot in what is known as extreme cinema from Japan, films like Audition, Ichi the Killer, Visitor Q. But he has such a wildly flamboyant, over-the-top style in a lot of these films that I just find his work riveting. And it's interesting to me. I've noticed that violent and extreme films take on very different personality traits based on their countries. Japan is such a repressed and polite society that I feel like when filmmakers want to express this violence chaos, it's very much in direct opposition to this veneer that their society presents. And he has a new film coming out called Sham. It's a crime thriller, and it will be at Tribeca. And he's made, I think, over 100 films. So he has a huge collection to choose from. And to go for a filmmaker who's now deceased, who no longer is creating films, but whose legacy is great, is Suzuki Seijin. And he also makes these wildly audacious movies. He did one called Tokyo Drifter, which I would have to describe as a surreal MGM musical take on the Yakuza film. People, when I screen this film once, half the audience walked out in anger and bafflement, and the other half said it was the best film they saw at the festival. So there's that. We are going to be showing one of my favorite of his, which is called Branded to Kill. This is a 1960s black and white neo-noir film, and it's about a hitman who has a distinct fetish for sniffing steamed rice. And here is a bit of the trailer where you can tell from the music that it has a bit It had this noir vibe to it. So if you want to see some wild 1960s Japanese cinema, I cannot recommend anything better than Branded to Kill.
JADE HINDMON: The music really sets it up.
BETH ACCOMANDO: I'm waiting till you see them. Joe Shishido's got these chipmunk cheeks that you just, you don't know why they're there like that.
JADE HINDMON: All right. Well, I've been speaking with our Midday movie critics, Beth Accomando and Yazdi Pithavala. Digital Gym Cinema is located at Park and Market in East Village on the second floor of the UCSD extension building. The Gims cinema video series kicks off on June third. Beth and Yazdi, as always, thank you so much for joining me.
BETH ACCOMANDO: Thank you. Thank you.
