April begins this weekend, and we’ve already got some bangers headed your way! The month kicks off with Alex Garland’s Annihilation, returning once again to our screen this Monday. Then the week continues with exciting new titles like Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, erotic thriller Femme, and horror comedy Late Night with the Devil. Down the line, we’ve also got 30th anniversary screenings of Chungking Express, a 4/20 Scooby-Doo double feature, and the first three entries in our Spider-Man Mondays series. But you don’t have to wait until then to get your share of action because Rumble in the Bronx is playing next week!
Keong (Chan) comes from Hong Kong to visit New York for his uncle’s wedding. His uncle runs a market in the Bronx and Keong offers to help out while Uncle is on his honeymoon. During his stay in the Bronx, Keong befriends a neighbor kid and beats up some neighborhood thugs who cause problems at the market. One of those petty thugs in the local gang stumbles into a criminal situation way over his head. The film that introduced Jackie Chan to American audiences on a wide scale, Rumble in the Bronx earned a whopping $76 million worldwide against a budget between $7 to $13 million. It also garnered praise from critics, with some celebrating it simply for the fact that it finally brought Chan – already a star in his native Hong Kong – mainstream attention in the West.
If you’ve never seen Rumble in the Bronx before, you can thank Frank Stauffer, one of our two April Volunteers of the Month, for programming it! One of our Saturday volunteers, I’ve talked to Frank a couple times before but it had been a while since we’d last seen each other when we met for our interview. Fortunately, that was no impediment to our conversation, with us discovering that we share both a background in college radio and appreciation for the strategy game Hearts of Iron. It was a fun talk for both of us, and Rumble in the Bronx is sure to be a lot of fun when it plays here next week!
How did you find out about The Frida Cinema?
I moved out to Orange County and I was looking for local arthouse movie theaters. At the time, I was enjoying going all the way up to LA to see movies at like The Egyptian Theater or The Aero way out in Santa Monica, so I wanted to find something local.
What made you want to volunteer here?
Well, I was kinda enjoying seeing movies and I wanted to help contribute to that. I volunteered at a college radio station because I listened to it all the time and I was like “I want to help out here”. I liked the stuff that they did and I wanted to help keep that going, so I wanted to do the same thing with The Frida.
Tell us a little bit about Rumble in the Bronx.
Rumble in the Bronx, it’s Jackie Chan, you can’t go wrong with Jackie Chan. It’s just like a fun movie, it’s very like… all Jackie Chan movies are very accessible but this one is just super over the top. The kung-fu action is very fun and also just the comedy stylings of Jackie Chan are there too. It’s still very informed by the Hong Kong movies that he used to make too, so that’s why I enjoy it.
What were your other choices for Volunteer Pick of the Month?
I think my other choices were Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation and also Fritz Lang’s M. I actually haven’t seen M but it’s always been on my list, so it’s like “Oh, this would be a cool way to see something that is on my personal list of movies I want to see: on the big screen.”
What is your favorite Frida memory?
If you could program any movie here, what would you pick?
Rumble in the Bronx screens starting Wednesday, April 3rd.
Wednesday, Apr 3 – 6pm, 8:15pm
Thursday, Apr 4 – 6pm, 8:15pm
Tickets