One of the peerless experiences of an American summer is the drive-in movie on a beautiful evening. Here in the Valley, however, the window of opportunity for such evenings is significantly narrower than it is in more temperate climes.
So even though it’s still April, Friday, April 25, and Saturday, April 26, might be your best shot at an authentic, comfortable outdoor movie night, when Harkins Theatres holds two more in its “Moonlight Cinema” series at Camelview in Scottsdale. The series shows movies on the roof at Fashion Square, under the stars, with plentiful food and drink options. Friday’s selections have an especially summery feel, too: 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark at 7:30 p.m., followed at 10:20 p.m. by 1993’s The Sandlot.
Directed by Steven Spielberg from a script by Lawrence Kasdan (story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman), this first Indiana Jones flick is a longtime favorite of mine; crisp and funny and filled with one unforgettable action set piece after another, yet also somehow unassuming. It truly feels like a vintage cliffhanger serial of the 1940s, directed by William Witney or some other master of the form.
The story of a quest to keep Nazi archaeological looters from finding the Ark of the Covenant also carried a wonderful Jewish joke, with its arrogant fascists imagining they could hijack the Ark’s cosmic Jewish power without ruinous consequences. The elaborate sequels were reasonably entertaining – 2023’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny may have been the best of them – but none, as far as I’m concerned, rose to the level of the crackling, confident original.
Raiders is followed, at 10:20 p.m., by The Sandlot, the David Mickey Evans flick about a bunch of kids playing baseball in a vacant lot. It’s a charming picture, capturing the world from a kid perspective, especially the monstrous look of the dog that they glimpse over the fence in the backyard into which they inevitably lose a ball. This results in a series of Wile E. Coyote-like attempts to retrieve it, cartoonishly foiled. My favorite moment comes when, after one such defeat, a kid soberly remarks, “We’ve been going about this all wrong. I blame myself.”
Tickets for each movie are $15.50; go to harkins.com for reserved seating, strongly encouraged.
