Bowling Green’s oldest (to our knowledge) theater is on the square, it’s free, and it’s about to have the best end of summer run it’s had in years.
Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase
Friday, August 21 | 5PM | TV-Y7 | 74 mins
The gang got sucked into a video game and honestly that tracks.
Scooby and the crew are trapped inside a computer game built by a genius friend of theirs and now they have to fight through levels, dodge villain after villain, and deal with a phantom virus that has no chill whatsoever. It is 74 minutes of animated chaos that holds up completely and hits different on a big screen with a room full of people who grew up on it.
Bring the kids. Bring the nostalgia. Show up at 5PM and let The Capitol remind everyone why Saturday morning cartoons deserved a theater all along.
The Matrix
Friday, August 21 | 7PM | R | 140 mins
Scooby-Doo ends at 6:15. The Matrix starts at 7. The Capitol just programmed the greatest Friday night double feature in Bowling Green history and did it for free.
If you have never seen The Matrix on a big screen, tonight is the correction. Keanu Reeves as Neo. Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus. Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity. The Wachowskis in 1999 making one of the most visually and philosophically ambitious action films ever committed to celluloid, asking questions about reality and control and human consciousness that the internet has been arguing about for 25 years and will argue about for 25 more.
The lobby scene. The bullet dodge. The red pill. All of it on the screen at 416 E Main Avenue for nothing.
What is the Matrix? Show up at 7PM and find out why that question still matters.
Twin Peaks Part III
Saturday, August 22 | 3PM
David Lynch made a television show in 1990 that broke every rule about what television was allowed to be and then got cancelled for it. The world has spent 35 years catching up to what he was doing.
The Capitol has been running Twin Peaks on the big screen all summer the way it was always meant to be experienced and Saturday August 22nd is Part III. Four episodes back to back starting at 3PM in a Pacific Northwest lumber town where the homecoming queen is dead and nothing and nobody is quite what they appear to be.
May the Giant Be With You at 3. Coma at 5. The Man Behind the Glass at 6. Laura’s Secret Diary at 7.
Sex. Violence. Dream sequences. A gallery of characters so bizarre and so human that the combination should not work and absolutely does. A damn fine cup of coffee and a room full of people experiencing one of the most singular creative visions in American television history on an actual screen.
This is not background viewing. This is an event.
Show up at 3PM and clear the rest of the day. Twin Peaks does not release people on its schedule.
Fight Club with Casting Director Laray Mayfield
Wednesday, August 26 | 6:30PM | R | 140 mins
The first rule of this Capitol screening is that you absolutely should talk about it.
David Fincher’s 1999 social satire is one of the most provocative and misunderstood films of its generation. Edward Norton as a white collar insomniac sleepwalking through a life that means nothing. Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden, the most charismatic bad idea anyone has ever had. A story about masculinity, consumerism, and the particular American desperation of a man who has everything the culture promised him and feels nothing.
On a big screen it hits completely differently than it does on a laptop at midnight.
But here is what makes Wednesday August 26th at The Capitol something genuinely special.
After the film, casting director Laray Mayfield is doing a Q&A. Mayfield cast Fight Club. She also cast Se7en, The Social Network, Gone Girl, and a filmography that reads like a syllabus for understanding modern American cinema. The people who ended up in those roles, in those seats, changing those films forever — she found them.
A free screening of Fight Club followed by a conversation with the person who put it together.
Twin Peaks Part IV
Saturday, August 29 | 4PM
The mysteries of Twin Peaks do not resolve. They deepen.
Part IV of the Capitol’s landmark big screen Twin Peaks run arrives Saturday August 29th and if the first three installments have done their job, nobody sitting in that theater is certain about anything anymore. That is exactly where David Lynch wants everyone.
Four more episodes starting at 4PM. The Orchid’s Curse. Demons. Lonely Souls. Drive with a Dead Girl.
Those titles are not accidental. Nothing in Twin Peaks is accidental. Every dream sequence, every backward-talking dwarf, every slice of cherry pie exists inside a logic that reveals itself slowly and on its own terms and not a moment before it is ready.
Lonely Souls is one of the most devastating hours of television ever produced. It arrives at 6PM on a Saturday in downtown Bowling Green and it will earn every second of silence that follows it.
One more installment after this one. The Capitol has been building toward something all summer and August 29th is the penultimate chapter.
Show up at 4PM. Bring someone who has been watching with you. The damn fine coffee is not provided but the experience absolutely is.
The Blues Brothers
Wednesday, September 02 | 6:30PM | R | 132 mins
September opens at The Capitol the only way it deserves to. With a mission from God.
John Landis. 1980. Jake and Elwood Blues on the most chaotic fundraising tour in the history of Chicago, trying to raise $5,000 to save an orphanage and leaving approximately half the city in ruins behind them in the process.
This is one of the great American comedies. It is also one of the great American music films. Aretha Franklin. James Brown. Ray Charles. Cab Calloway. John Lee Hooker. All of them on screen doing what they actually do while John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd hold the whole magnificent wreck together with sunglasses and a shared commitment to the bit.
The car chase alone justifies the trip downtown.
Twin Peaks Part V — The Final Chapter
Saturday, September 05 | 3PM
It ends here.
All summer long The Capitol has been doing something no theater in Kentucky has done before — running the complete Twin Peaks original series on a big screen the way David Lynch always deserved and never got. Five Saturdays. One of the most singular creative visions in American television history projected large in downtown Bowling Green for free.
Saturday September 5th is the final chapter. Three episodes. 3PM.
Path to the Black Lodge. Miss Twin Peaks. Beyond Life and Death.
Those of you who have been in those seats since Part I know what is at stake. Those who haven’t should know that Beyond Life and Death is the finale that broke viewers in 1991, aired without resolution, and left a wound in American pop culture that David Lynch would not return to address for another 26 years.
It is one of the most haunting hours of television ever made. And it is going to play at 416 E Main Avenue on a Saturday afternoon in Bowling Green for nothing.
The Red Room is waiting. The Giant has something to tell you. Laura Palmer has one more secret.
Show up at 3PM and see how it ends. Or rather, see how it doesn’t.
See you at the Black Lodge.
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
Saturday, September 05 | 7PM | R | 135 mins
The series ended at 5PM. The truth starts at 7.
David Lynch spent the entire original run of Twin Peaks asking who killed Laura Palmer. Fire Walk with Me is his answer to the question nobody actually wanted answered — because the answer is not a mystery solved. It is a descent witnessed.
This is the final piece of the Capitol’s Twin Peaks marathon and it is the one that changes everything that came before it. The 1992 prequel follows Laura Palmer through the last seven days of her life. Homecoming queen by day. The girl pulling herself apart by night. Sheryl Lee in a performance so raw and so committed that Cannes booed the film in 1992 and critics have been apologizing for that ever since.
Lynch was not making entertainment. He was making an act of compassion for a character the show had turned into a symbol. Fire Walk with Me gives Laura Palmer back her humanity and it does not look away from what that costs.
It is nightmarish. It is devastating. It is one of the great films of the 1990s that the 1990s refused to recognize as such.
The Capitol has spent all summer building to this moment. Five Saturdays of the series on the big screen and now the film that wraps around all of it and breaks your heart properly.
The marathon ends tonight. Laura Palmer deserves the audience.
Office Space
Wednesday, September 09 | 6:30PM | R | 90 mins
If you have ever had a boss who said “yeah if you could just go ahead and” anything, this film was made specifically for you.
Mike Judge in 1999 looked at the American office and saw something so precisely absurd and so universally true that Office Space has never stopped being relevant for a single day of the 26 years since it came out. Ron Livingston as a software programmer who simply stops caring one Monday morning and discovers that not caring turns out to be the best career move he ever made. The TPS reports. The flair. The printer that has it coming. Milton and his stapler.
This is one of the most quotable films ever made and it plays completely differently in a room full of people who have lived it.
Somebody is going to bring a red stapler. It might as well be you.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Monday, September 14 | 2PM and 6:30PM | PG | 103 mins | Subtitled (1988)
- Robert Zemeckis. A Los Angeles where cartoon characters and humans share the same city, the same bars, and apparently the same murder charges.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is one of the great technical achievements in the history of cinema. Live action and animation sharing the same frame so seamlessly that 37 years later nobody has fully explained how they did it. Bob Hoskins as detective Eddie Valiant navigating Toontown. Christopher Lloyd as Judge Doom in one of the great villain performances of the decade. And Roger Rabbit himself, framed for a murder he did not commit and depending on a man who hates toons to save him.
It is a noir. It is a comedy. It is a film that works for a six year old and a film scholar simultaneously and never condescends to either one.
The Capitol is running it twice on Monday September 14th. 2PM for the afternoon crowd and 6:30PM for everyone else. Both screenings subtitled. Both screenings free.
Pick the one that works. Bring whoever needs to finally see this on a screen the size it deserves.
Coco
Tuesday, September 15 | 6:30PM | PG | 109 mins | Spanish with English Subtitles
Pixar made a lot of good films. Coco is one of the great ones.
Miguel wants to play guitar more than he wants anything else in the world. His family has banned music for generations and the reasons for that ban run deeper than anyone living fully understands. When a desperate decision lands Miguel in the Land of the Dead on Dia de los Muertos, he has one night to find his way back to the living and the clock is running.
It is a film about family. About memory. About what we carry forward from the people who came before us and what we owe them and what we are allowed to want for ourselves. It will make a room full of people cry and nobody will be embarrassed about it because everyone will be doing it together.
This screening is in Spanish with English subtitles and will be introduced by Community Engagement Division Manager Leyda Becker in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month.
That introduction matters. Coco is a film rooted in Mexican culture and tradition and hearing from someone in this community before the lights go down is exactly the right way to open it.
Bring someone you love. Bring a tissue. Both are necessary.
Stalker
Wednesday, September 16 | 6:30PM | Not Rated | 163 mins | Russian with English Subtitles
The Capitol is programming Andrei Tarkovsky on a Wednesday night in downtown Bowling Green and doing it for free and if that sentence does not make someone clear their calendar nothing will.
Stalker is one of the most celebrated films ever made. A hired guide leads a writer and a scientist into the Zone, a forbidden post-apocalyptic landscape surrounding the site of a long-ago disaster, moving toward a room rumored to grant the deepest wish of anyone who enters it. What happens on that journey is not action. It is not plot in the conventional sense. It is immersion. It is patience rewarded. It is cinema operating at the absolute outer edge of what the medium is capable of doing to a human being sitting in a dark room.
Tarkovsky spent his career asking questions about faith, longing, time, and what it means to want something so badly that the wanting itself becomes the point. Stalker is where all of those questions converge.
163 minutes. In Russian with English subtitles. Not rated because no rating system had the vocabulary for it.
This is not a casual Wednesday night out. This is the kind of film that people travel to see at special screenings in major cities and pay real money for the privilege. The Capitol is showing it for nothing on a weeknight in Bowling Green.
Some films ask something of you. This one asks everything. Give it.
Freaky Friday
Friday, September 18 | 5PM | PG | 97 mins
The Capitol is doing something genius on September 18th and it starts at 5PM.
Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis in the 2003 Disney remake that holds up completely and everyone who dismisses it has not watched it recently. A stressed mother and her teenage daughter swap bodies and spend the rest of the film learning what the other one’s life actually costs. It is charming. It is funny. It earns every moment it asks for.
Bring the kids. Bring the mom. Bring whoever in your life needs a reminder that the person driving them crazy is probably doing their best.
Friday
Friday, September 18 | 7PM | R | 89 mins
Then at 7PM the Capitol pivots hard and does not apologize.
F. Gary Gray. 1995. Ice Cube and Chris Tucker on a Friday in South Central Los Angeles where nothing particularly dramatic needs to happen for everything to be completely riveting. Friday is one of the great hangout films in American cinema. Funny in the way that only comes from people who are genuinely funny rather than people who were told to be funny.
The double feature pairing of Freaky Friday into Friday is one of the great September 18th decisions any theater has ever made.
Persona
Wednesday, September 30 | 6:30PM | Not Rated | 83 mins | Swedish with English Subtitles
September closes the way it opened. With intention.
Ingmar Bergman. 1966. Liv Ullmann as a stage actor who has gone inexplicably mute. Bibi Andersson as the nurse caring for her in a remote island cottage. Two women. An isolation that becomes something stranger and deeper than either of them anticipated. A transfer of identity so gradual and so complete that by the end the film itself seems uncertain where one woman ends and the other begins.
Persona is 83 minutes and it will occupy more space in the mind than films three times its length. Shot by Sven Nykvist in stark contrast and soft light. Acted with a nuance that makes most modern performances look like shouting.
Bergman made this film in 1966 and it has not aged because it was never about a specific time. It was about what happens when two people are alone together long enough for the masks to stop working.
September ends at The Capitol with one of the most quietly devastating films ever made. That is a September worth having. A Great way to start fall and say “goodbye” to Summer.