Mike Myer's 1993 magnum opus So I Married An Axe Murderer may not have achieved the same critical acclaim as Wayne's World did a year before, but as a screwball comedy about the city's painfully awkward, but mercifully fleeting (ahem) hipness of the early nineties, it certainly deserves a place in the canon of San Francisco cult films. It also deserves a solid whiskey drink and a plate of charcuterie to go along with a screening tomorrow night at The Roxie. This is San Francisco after all.
Wayne's World won all the points for an insanely quotable take on selling out in the basement-living, grunge-era nineties (like Reality Bites, but without having to look at Ethan Hawke's chin hair). So I Married An Axe Murderer, on the other hand, should have been an Oscar contendor for a cast of nearly insufferable only-in-San Francisco characters: the conspiracy-obsessed old guy, a mom who only gets her information from The Weekly World News, the local cop who's pissed his job isn't more like a TV show (see also), the hot local butcher who might turn out to be a serial killer, and of course the guy who still thinks performing Beat poetry in North Beach is a cool way to cope with a recent breakup:
Plus there's a Napa honeymoon in there somewhere.
Tomorrow night's screening at the Roxie (an only-in-SF institution of its own) will kick off the Bold Italic's new S.F. Film Redux series of under-appreciated, locally-shot films. Your $21 ticket price gets you that aforementioned whiskey (or beer, or wine, or whatever you use to drown your nostalgia for the bygone 90s) next door at Dalva, plus pre-movie snacks from Fatted Calf. (Get it? Butchery jokes!) Not too shabby since we couldn't even seem to get into a Zero Dark Thirty screening with a small diet coke and a handful of popcorn for under $25 bucks.
And hey, remember when cappuccinos were the cool way to drink coffee?
The Roxie
3117 16th Street (between Valencia and Guerrero)
Wednesday, January 23rd.
Box office and drinks open at 6 p.m. Movie starts at 7 p.m.
Tickets and Event Details.