Matinee (film)

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Matinee is a 1993 period comedy film directed by Joe Dante. It is an ensemble piece about the home front in the Cuban Missile Crisis combined with a tribute to independent filmmaker William Castle. The film stars John Goodman, Cathy Moriarty, Simon Fenton, Omri Katz, Lisa Jakub, Kellie Martin, Jesse Lee, Lucinda Jenney, John Sayles, Dick Miller, David Clennon, Lucy Butler, Robert Picardo, and James Villemaire. The film was written by Jerico and Charlie Haas, the latter portraying Mr. Elroy, a schoolteacher.

[edit] Story

Gene Loomis (Fenton) and his brother Dennis (Lee) live on a military base in Key West, Florida; their father away on one of the nearby submarines. After arriving home from the announcement of an exclusive engagement of Lawrence Woolsey's (Goodman) Mant, including Woolsey's appearance in-person, they arrive home to John F. Kennedy's television interruption, stating the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba. Woolsey finds this atmosphere of fear to be the perfect environment in which to open his film, in Atomo-Vision and Rumble-Rama.

Woolsey brings along Herb Denning (Miller) and Bob (Sayles) to stir up the yokels, but Howard, the theatre manager (Picardo), assures him that "the people of Key West are not yokels". Indeed, the progressive Jack and Rhonda (Clennon and Butler) find a strong free speech argument in allowing the film to proceed.

New to the local high school, and not getting along with the similarly-aged Andy (Nick Bronson) on the base, Gene ends up associating with misfit Stan (Katz), and becomes infatuated with Jack and Rhonda's daughter, Sanda (Jakub), after she takes a detention for protesting the uselessness of an air raid drill and yelling the truth of the faux protection at the students in the hall. In attempting to get a date to the dance, Stan goes for Sherry (Martin), who was seeing a prison poet, Harvey Starkweather (Villemaire), who regularly bothers Stan about his interest in her (and hers in him).

The film is structured in halves: the first half leading up to the screening, and the second half depicting the screening and what goes on at and around it.