Jackson in "Skull Island."
The Memorial Union Terrace becomes an outdoor cinema every Monday night at 9 throughout the summer with the Wisconsin Union Directorate’s Lakeside Cinema series. It is that rare venue where you can enjoy alcohol, hot dogs and a sunset with your movie.
This year the audience gets a bonus: a puzzle to solve. The theme is The 15 Degrees of Samuel L. Jackson. This is not to be confused with a series that is all Samuel L., all the time. Instead, the Lakeside Cinema series features a daisy chain of movies, with each one connected to the last through one actor or another à la the sociological theory of six degrees of separation (meaning we’re all less than six steps away from everyone else), or the movie-related game, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
The program started May 29 with Jurassic Park, featuring Jackson as a doomed computer technician. June 5 is The Grand Budapest Hotel, a movie that co-stars Jeff Goldblum, who also got chased by dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg’s thriller. We then follow Tony Revolori, the Grand Budapest’s heroic lobby boy, to the coming-of-age comedy Dope, where he plays the hero’s best friend. This chain continues from actor to actor until the series winds its way to the high school basketball drama Coach Carter starring Samuel L. Jackson.
Got it?
We’ll leave it to you to figure out the connections between the remaining titles. Even as someone who kills time in waiting rooms playing variations of this game in my head, I was flummoxed by some of the links. Yes, it’s obvious that Eddie Murphy was in Dreamgirls and Shrek 2, but the tie between Rogue One and The Lego Movie is completely beyond me.
By my count, Samuel L. Jackson appears in three other movies in the series (Kingsman, The Avengers and Kong: Skull Island). Oddly enough, there are no Kevin Bacon movies on tap; neither is the Will Smith movie Six Degrees of Separation.
Esoteric movie trivia games aside, Lakeside Cinema delivers a vibrant lineup of crowd pleasers from the last quarter century including 22 Jump Street, Everybody Wants Some, Spy Kids and The Book of Life. Check the Wisconsin Union Directory website, union.wisc.edu/get-involved/wud/film/ for dates.