The Big Picture?

Here's a moviegoing story that I've been thinking about recently:

A couple of years ago, I went with some friends to see Blow Out at the Museum of the Moving Image here in Astoria. I think the Museum was showing it as part of a big De Palma retrospective.

We took out seats and I recognized the guy sitting in front of us as Museum of the Moving Image regular. I have to say, appearance-wise and behavior-wise, he completely fit the stereotype of the "Comics Geek" - a little overweight, near-sighted, awkward in conversations, etc. I had chatted with him a couple of times, although our conversations usually went along the lines of him complaining about the Museum's programming choices - like, why they refused to do a Peter Hyams retrospective - and me nodding in agreement, not wanting to get too deeply into that kind of debate.

Anyway, I said "hi" to him and the movie started up and my friends and I watched it (we were all fans and none of us were seeing it for the first time) and, as usual, were devastated by it. So, we're sitting there, still reeling from the emotional impact of the final scene, and this guy turns to me and says: "You know, when he [John Travolta] goes into the train station, he leaves the door to his Jeep open. But when he comes back, it's closed."

I was just like, "Um, thanks for pointing that out."

Movie Chat: Double Features

This post at The House Next Door got me thinking about the worst double feature I ever attended.

I had always wanted to see Irvin Kershner's Loving, which, though available now on DVD, used to be really hard to find. I was pretty excited when I saw that the Film Forum was showing it as part of their American New Wave, Late 60s, early 70s series (this was back in 1996). It was the second movie of a double bill with another George Segal movie from 1970, Where's Poppa? I'm a big George Segal fan, so I was happy to see both of them, both for the first time.

Now, I liked Where's Poppa? a lot: it was funny and raunchy and had no sense of good tatse to get in the way of the fun. The crowd liked it, too. The problem was, they liked it so much and had such a good time at it, that, when Loving came on after a 10 minute break, they were still in the mood for laughs. They seemed tone deaf to Loving's minor key melancholy and, instead, they treated it as camp.

The problem is that the costumes and sets of Loving did look funny to a 1990s audience - mainly because they're so late-60s/early-70s. But the movie itself is serious and weighty. An audience that hadn't been revved up by Where's Poppa?, but instead had been treated to an even bigger downer of a movie like Born to Win, might have gotten onto its wavelength after a few titters at the actors' haridos.

Although maybe not. In my experience, Film Forum revivals tend to have the worst audiences in New York City. I mean, audiences for horror movies on 86th St. will be rowdier and louder, but that's what you'd expect for horror movies, which attract a lot of teens out looking for a good time. But you might think that someone going to the Film Forum to see Loving or Rio Bravo or Sunrise would be enough of a film buff to know how to behave at a theater. But these revivals end up attracting:

• (a) Hipsters who think it is so funny that in, say, Rio Bravo, John Wayne talks so much like someone doing a John Wayne impression, that they laugh every time he opens his mouth.
• (b) People who watch old movies for primarily campy pleasures, so they end up treating any old movie as if it were a camp experience.

Because (1) I've seen enough old movies that it isn't a novel, alien experience, (2) I generally take these movies fairly seriously (or, at least, I try to meet them on their own terms), and (3) my approach towards movie appreciation is almost always non-ironic, I get annoyed pretty quickly when the folks around me respond as if everything on the screen is there for their detatched, knowing, amusement.

Oh, my dream double bill would be two by Floyd Mutrux: Dusty and Sweets McGee (because I've never seen it) and Aloha, Bobby and Rose, because I never get tired of seeing it and I missed it the last time it was playing at the Film Forum.

Duma

Michael Blowhard points out that Duma--Carroll Ballard's new film--is getting a very limited theatrical release.

I saw Duma at the Tribeca film festival, and I thought it was pretty great--not quite as good as The Black Stallion, but close. It's a beautiful, old-fashioned kid-with-an-animal movie--the animal, in this case, being a cheetah. The "performances" from the cheetahs are amazing in their own right: they're a lot more expressive--not to mention funnier--than most non-dog animal acting. And it's refreshing to see an animal movie that has almost zero CGI.

However, I understand why Warner Bros. may not have wanted to give the movie a big release: the children in the audience had absolutely no capacity to watch it--they were bored and were talking up a storm within minutes. I think kids today are too used to movies like Finding Nemo which are bright and flashy and have something new to look at every single second. Compared to Finding Nemo and other animated kids' features, Duma is paced like a Wener Herzog movie.

A related, although slightly off-topic issue: when did parents stop teaching their kids how to behave at the movies? My parents started bringing me to the movies regularly when I was around 4 (when I saw E.T.). But they let me know that if I wanted to stay and watch the movie, I had to keep quiet. If I didn't, well, that meant no more movies for a long time. But the kids at the "Duma" screening just kept talking and talking, and the parents didn't even try to shush them. I can understand that kids who are used to watching DVDs at home might have trouble adjusting to watching movies in public, but I have a hard time believing that their parents don't know the difference.