Film Shorts: Valley Cinemas, Streaming, the Worx

Valley Cinemas is introducing two films this week, The Visit (see review), and Jem and the Holograms, an adaptation of an ‘80s cartoon series about a Hasbro doll who runs a record studio and fronts a pop band. Adventures ensue.

Meanwhile, if you snoop around long enough online for freebies, you are bound to find a lot of free movies available for streaming on the Internet … I won’t reveal them all right now, but they are there, awaiting the click of your itchy finger.

This week, I shall present one excellent source: Shout Factory. Currently this DVD distributor is graduating to an online streaming presence. This is good news for consumers. Shout Factory specializes in old TV shows, B movies, and rock and roll. One of its best offerings is Mystery Science Theater 3000, arguably the best television show that ever made fun of all the horror and sci-fi junk you absorbed as a kid on Saturday nights.

But currently, Shout Factory is offering a Kaiju Japanese monster film marathon featuring Gamera, the flying turtle who battled Godzilla and various aliens. These are “good-bad” movies that keep you gripped even as you spout MST3K style witticisms in the direction of the TV screen. Of course the offer is a “come on,” meant to lure you into subscribing to the Shout Factory! service, which may not be a bad thing, given the wealth of odd and endearing material the DVD distributor holds in its vault.

Among the films at The Worx plays host to two big movies: San Andreas, with Dwayne Johnson as a chopper pilot trying to rescue his family during an earthquake in what turns out to be one of the best disaster films of recent years despite the often-panned dialogue, and Tomorrowland, an unduly complicated and in the end disappointed kids film. On Oct. 26, Pixels appears, an unexpectedly funny Adam Sandler comedy about those old barroom video games such as Space Invaders invading the earth. Also on hand is Max, about a dog serving in the Iraq war. Yes. A dog.

And don’t forget your local library. On hand now (or at least until someone beats you to it!), Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece from 1958, Vertigo, a mystery in which a San Francisco private detective falls in love with the subject of his hired investigation. Ridiculed upon its release, the film is now heralded as a masterpiece, and last year attained the rank of No. 1 movie of all time in a poll by the British film journal Sight and Sound. The film pits James Stewart against Kim Novak in a dance of eros and death, in which the logic of love is confounded by the tyranny of detection. In short, if you don’t like Vertigo, you don’t really like movies.