Home Alone Double Feature

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JoinGreat Lakes Center for the Arts for its 2nd Annual holiday-themed double-feature on Saturday, December 23! This year's event will include The Grinch at 2:00PM and Home Alone at 7:00PM. Holiday attire encouraged! This includes but is certainly not limited to; ugly sweaters, holiday jammies, and Grinch fan merch.

The Grinch attempts to undermine the annual Christmas celebration at Whoville with the help of his loyal dog and reindeer. Disguised as Santa Claus he tries to steal all the presents, but his cover is threatened by an earnest young girl.

Home Alone is the story of 8-year-old Kevin (Macaulay Culkin), a mischievous kid who feels largely ignored by his large extended family. While everyone is preparing for a Christmas vacation in Paris, Kevin gets in trouble, is banished to the attic overnight, and wishes his family would just disappear.

Snack Boxes will be available for pick-up in the Main Lobby upon arrival for those who pre-purchase. Tickets to the Home for the Holidays Double Feature must be purchased separately. Snack Boxes will be available for purchase at the event while supplies last.

Great Lakes Center for the Arts' Theater has a total capacity of 525 seats, including box seating, and features state-of-the-art acoustics and equipment, including a 45- foot cinema screen and Dolby theatrical surround sound.

The Center's mission is to inspire, entertain, educate, and serve all in Northern Michigan year-round by presenting exceptional experiences across the full spectrum of the performing arts and offering impactful educational opportunities.

Join us for a special double feature presentation of Home Alone and Die Hard!

Just as Detective McClane lands in LA to spend Christmas with his wife, he learns about a hostage situation in an office building. Hans Gruber is the culprit and McClane's wife is one of the hostages.

Eight-year-old Kevin is accidentally left behind when his family leaves for France. At first, he's happy to be in charge; but when thieves try to break into his home, he puts up a fight like no other.

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I watched this a few years ago on Shudder (truly one of the great streaming services), and was shocked even learning about it. How is it that a movie with Jodie Foster and Martin Sheen just... disappeared? I would have expected to have seen it on the shelf at the video store at least.

Regardless, it's a really great, creepy, unpredictable movie, and I was really taken with how it let itself shift and change direction without a misstep. And through it all, they kept it intensely focused on this child who is also kind of an adult and how there are just so many people who won't mind their business. And through it all, I don't remember her backing down or flinching, so not only is this CHILD talking back to this adult who runs the town, but it's also a GIRL doing it. It just all felt so satisfying while simultaneously making me feel scared for her.

I mean no sleight against True Detective: Night Country, the recent HBO miniseries, when I say it peaks early. I enjoyed all six episodes, by and large, but no moment was quite as thrilling as when Jodie Foster, playing Alaskan police chief Liz Danvers, arrives at a crime scene. As Danvers begins asserting her authority while offering acerbic commentary, Foster quickly establishes who the character is and the status of her relationship with her subordinates, but there\u2019s a wariness to her expression that suggests, beneath the bluster, she suspects she might be in over her head. Foster conveys all this within moments of her first appearance, laying the groundwork for all that follows. It\u2019s assured, complicated work, and in a medium where Foster hasn\u2019t really worked since the days of The Partridge Family and Kung Fu.

Foster has been a too-rare presence in any medium over the past decade, appearing in just three movies since Elysium in 2013, and she\u2019s been missed. Some stars just know how to command the screen and Foster is one of them. She pretty much always has been, too. A look at her filmography reveals 1976 \u2014 the year of Taxi Driver, Bugsy Malone, and Freaky Friday \u2014 as her breakout year, though that\u2019s a little deceptive, as Freaky Friday didn\u2019t open widely until early the following year. It\u2019s also the credited release year of two other movies, the drama Echoes of a Summer (one of a couple of movies I couldn\u2019t track down for a semi-comprehensive survey of Foster\u2019s career I did for The Dissolve) and The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, a low-budget French and Canadian co-production that wouldn\u2019t play American theaters, and then not that many, until 1977.

Taxi Driver is undoubtedly the film that announced Foster as a major talent, but The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane gives the intelligence and complexity that\u2019s made her so compelling a more prolonged time in the spotlight. It\u2019s also, in its own way, just as disturbing. For all the moral murkiness of Taxi Driver, it\u2019s clear that Foster\u2019s character has grown up too fast and become part of an adult world in which she should not be living. However coincidentally, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane offers a dark counterpoint, casting Foster as a 13-year-old who\u2019s too smart to be bossed around by the callous, stupid, and abusive adults around her, even if that means burying a few of them in her backyard.

Directed by Nicolas Gessner, a Hungarian journeyman whose lack of flash ends up benefitting the film, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane adapts a 1973 novel by Laird Koenig, who also scripted. (By coincidence, both Gessner and Koenig died last year.) Foster plays Rynn Jacobs, who lives in a Victorian in some unnamed corner of what appears to be New England (though the film was shot on the east coast of Canada), having just moved there from England with her father, a poet of some renown. Or at least that\u2019s what she tells everyone. No one seems ever to have seen her father, despite her insistence that he\u2019s sleeping / in his study / away on business / too drunk whenever visitors ask.

Rynn gets a surprising number of visitors, too. The film opens on Halloween night as Rynn celebrates her thirteenth birthday, alone. She\u2019s unfamiliar with the tradition of trick or treating, or at least claims to be when Frank Hallet (Martin Sheen), the son of her landlady Cora, shows up ahead of his two sons. Without even huffing and puffing, he invites himself in, an obvious predator who immediately puts his prey on the defensive when he makes a joke about \u201Cdirty old men who try to give pretty little girls some candy.\u201D He stands a little too close and lets his eyes linger too long. And he has questions: Are those her father\u2019s French cigarettes he smells? And where is her father? And what about her mother? Does she have a boyfriend?

The thing about Frank, Rynn quickly discovers, is that everyone knows what he is but his position makes him untouchable. Played by Sheen, he\u2019s a kind of privileged, distant relation of his killer Kit in Badlands: not nearly as seductive, but just as predatory and with a support system to paper over his offenses. (For a truly creepy double feature, pair this film with another Reveal favorite, Smooth Talk.) Cora effectively runs the town, even if it\u2019s gone downhill by her standards. There are simply too many Italians now, and Rynn\u2019s study of Hebrew is just one more reason to look down on her. Arriving unexpectedly, Cora immediately begins moving the furniture back to its proper place. She even tries to have a look in the cellar, but this turns out to be a bad idea.

Though the film rarely strays from Rynn\u2019s house, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane fills in much of the history of her new town with a few telling details. Both the friendly policeman Officer Miglioriti (winningly played by Mort Shuman, co-writer, with Doc Pomus, of songs you\u2019ve heard a million times) and Mario (Scott Jacoby), a teenaged magician who becomes smitten with Rynn, come from the Italian population Cora disdains. Frank, it turns out, has been caught sexually menacing girls in the past, but a quickie marriage arranged by his mother helped cover it up. It\u2019s the sort of place where there are no secrets, even if people only pass them along in whispers.

That lack of privacy makes it hard to be Rynn. That she lives alone, her father having made arrangements for her independence before his death, is just the beginning of her secrets. But, as extraordinary as Rynn\u2019s circumstances might be, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane is just as much about how hard it is for any girl to be thirteen. Rynn\u2019s on guard at all times, but the film keeps offering examples of how she\u2019d have to be that way even if she weren\u2019t a parentless girl in a strange town. Officer Miglioriti aside, the adults she meets treat her as if she has no will of her own. Frank\u2019s the most dangerous creep she\u2019s ever met, but it\u2019s clear she\u2019s had to fend off the inappropriate attentions of men since they started looking at her differently.

Rynn\u2019s adolescence, like every adolescence, takes place in a gray area, even if its grayness is more intense than most others. When Rynn takes Mario to bed (Foster\u2019s older sister served as her body double for some shots of nudity that were sometimes cut from the film), it\u2019s presented with tenderness and matter-of-fact frankness but still doesn\u2019t feel right. These are kids playing at adulthood. They\u2019re doing a better job at it than the actual adults around them, but they\u2019re still just kids.

Similarly, the film doesn\u2019t shy away from depicting the awfulness of some of the actions she takes, but it also never lets viewers sympathies drift anywhere else. The ad campaign marketed The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane as a horror movie, which it sort of is. It arrived in theaters a year after The Omen and four years after The Exorcist, but the creepiest thing about it is how un-creepy Rynn is. Murderer or not, she\u2019s a bright, likable kid who just wants to be left alone and doesn\u2019t feel the need to go to school because she learns more on her own anyway.

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