This building, in the small town of Belhaven, North Carolina, used to
be a movie theater, a palace of dreams.  It was a tiny palace, as
you can see.  The set-back led to doors which opened directly into
the theater — there was no lobby.  Popcorn, the only snack sold,
was dispensed from a movable cart set up on the sidewalk just under
the marquee, which is now gone.  I made a pilgrimage to the
building this past summer, because it was such an important part of my
life, once upon a time.

In 1956 and 1957 this theater was a few minutes walk from my home, and
I made that walk every Saturday, when the feature film always
changed.  A kid’s ticket cost 25 cents, half my allowance, and
popcorn cost 15 cents.  A Five and Dime next door sold popcorn for
10 cents, but you had to sneak it into the theater, past the watchful
eyes of a teenage usher.  I was five and six years-old in those
years, and I don’t think I ever missed a show.

Here are the ones I remember most clearly:

MOBY DICK

The John Huston version with Gregory Peck.  When I looked at the
poster and the lobby cards outside the theater before going in I
wondered if the film could possibly deliver the spectacle it
promised.  It did — beyond my wildest anticipation.

THE YEARLING

This movie affected me as deeply as any work of art ever has.  It
was really the first work which showed me how powerfully art can move
the heart.

ON MOONLIGHT BAY

I don’t remember this movie very well, though I remember the poster clearly.  The song On Moonlight Bay always gets to me, though, and that must have something to do with having heard Doris Day sing it in this film.

THE TEAHOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON

I don’t remember this one very well, either, and I haven’t seen it
since, but I have the impression that some sort of miracle occurred at
the end of it which was delightful.

JAILHOUSE ROCK

This was the first film I was ever allowed to go see at night without
adult supervision.  Our babysitter, a girl in her early teens,
escorted my sister and me and a few neighborhood pals to the
show.  The crowd was different at night, older, better behaved,
even for this rock and roll classic.  The evening screening seemed
like a window onto another world.

BUFFALO BILL

I only saw the first half of this film because I was suddenly
gripped by a profound sense of homesickness — for a home that was
practically in sight of the theater I was in.  When I got back
there I was unaccountably relieved to find my mom in the kitchen — as
though she’d be anywhere else an hour or so before suppertime.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

This film did not screen on Saturday, but on a Wednesday afternoon,
when the theater was always dark.  I assume this was because it
wasn’t a big enough house to rate a print of the newly released epic,
which was something of a sensation at the time, on a weekend.
(Many of the films I saw in Belhaven were older releases — whatever
prints the theater could get hold of when the new releases were tied up
in bigger towns.)  This Wednesday was a school day and I had to get special permission from my second-grade teacher to skip afternoon classes to go see it.
Permission was granted, undoubtedly because of the uplifting nature of
the motion picture in question.  No one else in the class wanted
to go see it but me, and there was almost no one else in the theater when it played.
Consequently I felt even more overwhelmed by the spectacle than I might
have otherwise been.  It was almost as though the drama was being
played only for me.

The movies I saw at this little palace of dreams have a kind of glow about them, in my memory, which time has never dimmed.  Even watching the films again and discovering that they weren’t quite as magical as they seemed back then doesn’t really
alter my memory of them.  I saw the films I saw, they were what
they were, and they set the standard of enchantment against which I
measure all other films.

The best thing about the movie Saved is the wondrous Jena Malone, who’s
brilliant in just about everything she does but has never gotten a
break-out role. Saved is a gentle satire of young fundamentalist
Christian teens, with a sentimental but overly-familiar message at its
core — real goodness isn’t always found in the dogmatic pronouncements
of the self-appointed true believers. Since this was a big part of
Jesus’s message, you could argue that this is really a Christian film
at heart, for all its barbs at the fundamentalist types. It’s pretty
funny but gets a little too sloppy and preachy at the end.

Malone is probably best known for her role in Donnie Darko but check out her little cameo in Cold Mountain as well — scary . . .

Above
is a cool French poster for the film Cherry 2000. It's a vision from
the 1980s (cast in a sort of sci-fi version of Coppelia) of sexual
relations in the 21st Century — and it wasn't far off. It tested
horribly with audiences back when it was made and was never released
theatrically in America, but it's now available on DVD. I don't know if
it's a cult classic yet but it will be, sooner or later. The direction
is not up to the level of the story and script but it's definitely worth
checking out. You can buy it here:



Cherry 2000

Certain Hollywood comedies from the 60s seem to have been designed to work as sedatives.  Nothing much happens in them, the plot complications are so trivial that one never really worries about their resolution, and everyone involved in the production seems to be half-awake.

There’s something pleasant about the phenomenon, in a mindless sort of way — like watching golf on television while under the influence of a mild pain-killer.

The Glass Bottom Boat is such a film.  Doris Day and Rod Taylor have some minor misunderstandings on the road to romance.  A crowd of fine character actors involve themselves in the proceedings to one degree or another, with nothing much to do except display their amusing personae in the absence of any scripted wit.

The film was directed by Frank Tashlin, who had one of the wackiest imaginations in Hollywood at the time — but he confines his energy to a few tepid bits of slapstick.  Dom DeLuise puts his foot in a pie, then gets it stuck in a trashcan — then Doris gets her foot stuck in it, too, trying to help him out of the jam.  When they both jerk free, Dom falls into a fish pond.

Everyone seems to be going through the motions, waiting for lunch, or recovering from it.  Yet the tone of distance is so consistent, so assured, that you have to think it was deliberate — offering an anesthetic for anxiety duly indicated and professionally administered.  Arthur Godfey, the personification of the entertainer as somnambulist, makes his film debut here — his practiced nullity anchors the film in its odd nether world, its sleepiness.

I don’t know why it’s all so delightful, so soothing — but I don’t really know how codeine works, either.

Perhaps these films did for audiences of the 60s what Jared Hess’s films do for us today — tell us not to worry so much, tell us that everything, as improbable as it might sound, is going to be o. k.

Vote for Pedro.

There’s something exhilarating about Mel Gibson’s total repudiation of
the conventional wisdom of Hollywood these days — which is to say, the
conventional wisdom of large corporations slowly and inexorably losing
touch with their audiences.

To make a 40-50 million-dollar film with your own money, in the Mayan language, with an
all-unknown and mostly inexperienced cast, is downright heroic — and someday Gibson is going to be numbered among the rebels and mavericks who finally brought the tottering empire of Hollywood to its knees.

Apocalypto isn’t going to be a mega-hit, the way The Passion Of the Christ
was.  Though it opened well, its word-of-mouth was terrible and it
will be lucky to earn back its cost, but it’s a fine film — not just
admirable from a conceptual point of view, but very well made, moving
and entertaining.

Gibson gets remarkable performances from his neophyte cast who, like
silent film actors, need to communicate with us primarily with their
bodies, faces and eyes.  Gibson has cast extraordinarily striking,
charismatic people in the main roles, but he’s also given them the
creative space and the confidence to wholly inhabit their characters,
to convey their essence to us.

I really don’t see how anyone could call the film racist, though some have — Gibson is an
easy mark for that kind of criticism these days.  But to set a whole movie inside a lost and alien culture demonstrates a kind of respect Hollywood, for all its political correctness, would never have the guts to back up with cold hard cash.  Gibson’s film is violent, and the tale he chooses to tell might be fairly accused of over-emphasizing the violence of a very violent society — but at the same time we’re not asked to condemn it in a patronizing sort of way, and we’re encouraged to sympathize deeply with many of its characters, without moral qualifications.

There are many bold and powerful images in the film, but there’s also a lot of quick
cutting of blurred shots that create a kind of synthetic excitement, quickening the pulse but taking us out of the environment of the story and into an editing room.

Still, it seems churlish to complain that the film isn’t a masterpiece, since it re-animates and throws us into the middle of a world we could never imagine as clearly through any other medium.  What we should complain about is that movies don’t do this sort of thing more often —
that it takes an eccentric filmmaker, working outside of all conventions, to make a film as ambitious as Apocalypto.

“Some women possess an artificial nobility which is associated with a movement of the eye, a tilt of the head, a manner of deportment, and which goes no further.”

— La Bruyère

This surely is the nobility of Elsa Lanchester’s “bride” of
Frankenstein — a cinematic vision which lasts just a few minutes on
screen but instantly becomes iconic, unforgettable.  But is her
nobility truly artificial?  Is she truly artificial?  Pieced
together out of corpses she may be, but how can we be sure she doesn’t
have a new and authentic identity of her own?  How much further
might her nobility go — or have gone if Frankensten’s monster hadn’t
destroyed her moments after she was born?

There is a world of mystery hidden in these questions.

Vile, perverse, depraved, this film is nevertheless a 70s noir masterpiece.  In it, Sam Peckinpah indulges his nihilism and misogyny freely — and isn’t misogyny the ultimate form of nihilism? — and through the medium of his protagonist, brilliantly played by Warren Oates, feels sorry for himself in the bargain.  It’s like the later works of Hemingway — a study of alcoholic despair seen from the inside through the eyes of genius. It’s unsettling, fascinating, moving and infuriating all at the same time. The film is also partly a love song to the real Mexico, as it is in between the tourist destinations, and a riff on the romantic theme of Mexico as locus of the dark side of the American unconscious — a theme also found in the works of B. Traven and Malcom Lowry and Tennessee Williams, all of whom are referenced here.  It’s Peckinpah’s most personal film and maybe his best, too — a sick work of art but a work of art all the same, with an absolutely stunning performance by Isela Vega as the earthy whore-madonna and voice of reason the Oates character will not heed . . . until it’s too late to matter.

Back in the Sixties, during his most radical phase, Jean-Luc Godard said
that Jerry Lewis was the only director making progressive movies in
America. Lewis’s work was so strange and subversive that even now it’s
hard to assess it — though one can trace its influence clearly in the
work of Godard, Coppola, Scorsese, Wes Anderson and (perhaps
indirectly) Charlie Kauffman. The Ladies Man, the second film he
directed, from 1961, is vintage Lewis — a discombobulating blend of
brilliant sight gags, hilarious vaudeville routines, dumb mugging,
cartoonish action and deeply surreal deconstructions of the Hollywood
studio style. Lewis doesn’t make me laugh very often, but when he does,
I laugh really hard. What’s important about his work, though, is its
radical assault on cinematic convention — which still seems brazen
and/or lunatic, depending on your point of view. You might not like his
work — you might even hate it — but if you love movies you need to
come to grips with it.

From Masculin Feminin, by Jean-Luc Godard, 1966:



“It wasn't the film we dreamed; the film we carried in our hearts; the film we wanted to make and secretly wanted
to live.”