Scurvy

A lot of popcorn hulls under the gum since my last post, since which . . .

Tilda wins

The most genuine moment and the best acceptance-speech joke both came early Sunday night when Tilda Swinton surprised everyone, not least herself, by winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. I (well, Dave Kerr--but in this case, I would have on my own) had picked Cate Blanchett and also actually thought hers the best performance (not necessarily the same thing, of course), but Swinton's look of absolute shock at the announcement (sincere? Hey, she's a great actor, but nobody's that good) made it impossible not to be happy for somebody who has had a long, outstanding, mostly under-the-radar career. And who knew she could be funny, too? Never mind that she was just recycling Clooney's own self-deprecating joke; when you're an accepting an Oscar, originality is a bonus, but no one should demand it.

Orange loses

I have made my last traffic-defying walk along Marsh Hill Road while talking on the cell to my son-in-law: Showcase Orange will close after Sunday's shows. This, not to put too fine a point on it, sucks, and it sucks less for me than for the area's Indian community, because for the past year or two, Orange has routinely devoted one of its eight screens to a film from the Subcontinent. Will the Post Mall DeLux 14 give 1/14 of its screens to 1/6 of the world's population. Yeah, right.

But as sad as the closing is for Indian-Connecticutan filmgoers, let's face it: it's really all about me. What does this mean to the most important film audience in my life? Just tabulated my visits to Orange in 2007: only 11 trips for a total of 14 films, and none since 3 November. Still, among those 14 films were Children of Men, Once, A Mighty Heart, Sicko, Into the Wild, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, and No End in Sight--I probably wouldn't have missed any of those, but that would mean 7 films I saw via Netflix would still be sitting in my queue.

So what happens now? I can think of a range of possibilities; let's start with the worst:

• The Criterion, which has since its opening as an arthouse gradually moved toward a more mainstream theater, decides that with the one competing venue within fifteen miles for quieter, more thoughtful films gone, there's no reason not to push even harder toward Hollywood schlock. (I should point out that a key to my low number of visits to Orange in recent years has been a significant programming overlap between Orange and the Crit.) This would, in technical terms, suck donkey dicks.

I don't really think that will happen, though. More likely:

• The Crit will stay the course, but so will the other National Amusements theaters in Greater New Haven, in Milford and North Haven. Those venues generally show the same slate of films, and all the blockbusters go there. If they don't pick up the Orange slack, then I guess I'll be Netflixing another 6-12 films a year that simply don't come to town, or seeing them in Manhattan, at the cost of other even more obscure stuff I might be seeing. This would suck slightly less than the suckiness outlined just above, and seems pretty likely.

But maybe I'm being too pessimistic. Maybe:

• The two remaining Nationals will break their programming lockstep and one or both will pick up the Orange slack; this would be a Good Thing. Or . . .
• Better yet, the Cine 1-2-3-4, which has in recent months shown I'm Not There simultaneously with Orange and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days exclusively in Greater N.H., will seize the opportunity to run more exclusives. Given the new bus route that takes me practically to the front door, this would be a Very Good Thing. Or . . .
• The Criterion could pick up the Orange slack and rebound toward its arthouse origin. I don't expect it, but that would be an Excellent Thing.

Until we find out, join me in raising a toast to Showcase Orange, 1994-2008 in its current location; not sure how long it spent on the other side of I-95.

Where I Go and How I Get There

Seems like I must have discussed my carlessness on an earlier post, but if I can't be bothered to track it down, then why should you? In brief, to the extent that that's possible, given my chronic logorrhea, for a couple of decades I drove a red 1985 Celica, which I loved. But after a few years as a city boy, particularly when I became a divorced city boy, I came to realize that my need for a full-time vehicle had passed. So I donated the car to Kars-4-Kids (which I thought was pretty hilarious until a friend told me she'd once given a car to the Society for the Blind), planning to rent maybe one weekend a month to visit Costco, Wine and Liquor Warehouse, Trader Joe's, etc., and to hit the suburban multiplexes. That would cost less than I'd been paying on insurance alone. (That brevity shit is already in big trouble, ain't it?)

In the event, the New Haven bus system and my walking-distance supermarket have left me needing to rent maybe every other month on average, and being carless has been beautifully liberating--except when it's a pain in the ass 'cause some movie is playing somewhere I need a car to get to. But far more often beautifully liberating (hey, neighbors: don't forget to swap sides this week for streetsweeping, hahahahahahahahahahaha! and good luck finding a place to avoid getting towed on the snow route!), plus it installs me on about the highest moral ground imaginable among my kneejerk liberal treehugging friends (oh, you got a new Prius? That's terrific--that's what I'd buy if I were ever to get a car again, though of course I won't).

Where the hell was I? Oh, right--this is the movie blog, isn't it? And carlessness is important why? Oh, right, because going to movies requires some adaptation from the days when I could just decide 20 minutes ahead of time, hop into the car, and drive to Orange. So the "how I get there" matters. Well, to me anyway.

Downtown New Haven

• Criterion (abbreviated as Crit in reviews), Temple and George Streets. Standard clean, slick, modern theater, with some pretensions to charm (red carpet, mediocre mural of actors à la Sgt. Pepper), but most of the genuine charm comes from its simply being a comfortable and convenient place to watch movies--and from the friendly-except-for-the-one-dude-I-think-must-have-Asperger's staff, and from the real butter on the popcorn (though currently I'm in a whalish, butter-eschewing phase). Opened late 2004 as a five-screen art house; has since added two screens and gone to a more hybrid booking philosophy, which is OK by me, as I'd rather get my Pirates of the Caribbean fix downtown than have to take a bus to the 'burbs. Currently charging $10.50 with a $7.50 bargain matinee (first show only), and if you have a Criterion Club Card (need you even ask whether I do?), you get a free admission after paying for 15. They also have Friday and Saturday late-night Insomnia Theater shows (typically cultish action fare--Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn is this weekend's pic, I believe; Donnie Darko and Raiders of the Lost Ark are among the relatively few I've gone to) and Sunday morning Movies and Mimosas (mostly classics, Manhattan and Annie Hall the past two weeks, and often farther-back classics, though unfortunately they are either unable or unwilling to leave the sides of the screen blank, so pre-widescreen films get projected off the top and bottom [see earlier rant], but anyway . . . ), both of which are $5, or $4 for us cardholders; and on Sunday a.m., you can buy a mimosa made w/ decent prosecco for $2. Oh, and the $4 admissions also count toward your next free ticket, which, unless you're an idiot, will be at a $10.50 regular-admission show.
• York Square Cinema (YSC), Broadway west of York, but RIP. Died a few months after the Criterion opened, but the owners blamed not the arrival of a new downtown arthouse so much as the long-whined-about refusal of the studios to book a blockbuster in a dingy, ill-managed house where a few hundred Yale students would see it rather than in a suburban multiplex on an interstate highway. When it finally closed, it was like the hypochondriac's epitaph: See, I told you! Still, they showed some fine arthouse fare--generally edgier stuff than the Criterion is showing now (wouldn't have shied away from 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, e.g., I'm confident), and regardless of what pains in the asses are running it, any movie theater's death diminishes me.
• Whitney Humanities Center (WHC), Wall Street between Temple and Church. This is a June 2008 update: my recollection of the place, from Film Fests New Haven long past and a few free campus screenings, was of a beautiful 35mm projection system in a godawful room: no rake, butt-killing seats, and impossible to simultaneously darken and ventilate, so hellishly hot in season. Well, now it's air-conditioned and the seats are new and reasonably comfortable, and while there's still no rake, I've discovered the small balcony than ensures no heads in the way. Projection is still excellent, though the sound is barely adequate.

Edge of New Haven

People sometimes ask me, "How big a geek are you, exactly?" Perhaps the question is intended rhetorically, but I'd like to take this opportunity to cast some light on it: the most exciting thing I learned today is that a new bus route, the D13, makes the Cine 1-2-3-4 routinely bussable for the first time.

• Cine 1-2-3-4 (Cine), some little side road off of Middletown Ave. north of Route 80, or in other words, the middle of nowhere. I call this The Little Movie Theater That Could: a mom-and-pop operation originally carved out of the corner of Mom & Pop's farmland. Used to be kinda mildew-smelly, with sticky floors, but last couple times I've been there, they seemed to have addressed those issues. But who cares? It's just such a good place. Mostly it gets the 'plexes' leftovers, so mostly I don't go there much (plus, as I suggest above, it was until just recently a bear to get to via bus), but sometimes--as with I'm Not There, which I saw there on a car weekend in December, it opens something simultaneous w/ the 'plexes, and then on rare occasions, like this weekend, it gets a Greater New Haven exclusive. Which is a beautiful thing. Currently $9, $6:50 for bargain matinee. Oh, and by the way, the sign on the building now says Ciné 4, but to me, it'll never have that pretentious aigu.

Suburban Multiplexes

• Cinema De Lux 14 (Post), Connecticut Post Mall, Milford. Upscale multiplex, player piano in the cavernous lobby, Ben & Jerry's and Nathan's stations in the food court, stadium seating in all auditoriums, and a couple of reserved-seating, higher-priced theaters, for no particular reason. I take the O bus from downtown, which creeps along the Post Road (U.S. 1, which here is itself basically a ten-mile strip mall) and drops me off at the opposite end of the mall from where the theater is, meaning that I have to walk through hell to get there. The cinematic fare is standard blockbuster, rarely anything with a hint of the arthouse about it. Tickets are $10.75, but $7.50 for all shows before 6, which is pretty much all shows I go to in the 'burbs. (Same prices for the Showcases, which are, like this, part of the National Amusements chain.) Bargain matinee used to be first show only, but before the policy changed, Costco sold me a bunch of 2-for-$13.99 passes for the later shows; I still have a bunch, since I refuse to use 'em to save just a half-buck when I can save $3.25 for the occasional nighttime show I see. This plex replaced two earlier ones, the Showcase Milford (Mil) and the Fourplex (Four).
• Showcase North Haven (NoHa), Universal Drive. Same movies, less glitz, C bus, and now also reachable via the D13 that will take me to the Cine.
• Showcase Orange (Orange), Marsh Hill Road. This generally shows slightly more cerebral fare, including some arthouse stuff. Pain in the ass to get to via bus, though: I have to get off the O and walk about 3/4 mi. along a pedestrian unfriendly (no sidewalks, little shoulder, and genuinely marshy grass and fields after rain or snow) connector road between U.S. 1 and I-95. So the threshold for a single film to get me there is high; I'll sometimes double-feature something I'm not enthusiastic about just to make the trip worthwhile.

Outer Limits

• Madison Art Cinema (Mad), Main Street, nearly 20 miles from home, so reachable only by car, but a two-screen jewel box of an arthouse managed by Arnold Gorlick, who managed the York Square until his prickly personality and the owners' prickly personalities caused a prickle overload. Arnold is a real movie lover, though, and one of my few regrets about carlessness is an inability to patronize his place more.
• Regal Branford Stadium 12 (Bran), car only, and basically only when I have a free pass, as I did once. Movie hell: huge, noisy lobby, the highest concession prices around, standard blockbuster fare. With luck, I've seen the last of it.

Champaign, Illinois

When I go visit my family, these are the places available, all by car:

• Boardman's Art Theatre, Church Street, downtown: true to its name, one screen. Recently renovated, so the seats are reasonably comfortable, and the concessions are inexpensive and quirky--Lemonheads, e.g. Was one of two downtown porn theaters when I first moved to Champaign in 1974, but it was reclaimed a few years later, as simply the Art. Boardman's owns one other area theater that I know of.
• GKC Beverly 18, North Prospect, in the most hellish of hellish commercial areas. Standard blockbuster fare. Shows exactly the same films as . . .
• Goodrich Savoy 16, South Neil, in a somewhat less concentrated commercial hell. This one strikes me as a little dingier inside than the Beverly.

And that's it. The two smaller edge-of-town multiplexes, plus two beautiful downtown single-screen houses, plus another in downtown Urbana, plus a chopped up triplex and a newer two-screen on the UI campus in Urbana--all gone. One other downtown Champaign survivor is the palatial Virginia, which is the venue for some theatrical perfomances and a few classic movies, plus local boy Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival.

Manhattan

See my post on M4s for the getting-to-Grand Central part. Then . . .

• Landmark Sunshine (Sun), on Houston between First and Second Avenues. Standard clean, modern art house multiplex with stadium seating. Bonus points for real butter on the popcorn. Current ticket price $11.50. From Grand Central, take the downtown 6 train to Broadway and Lafayette, transfer to the downtown/Brooklyn-bound V or F for one stop, to Lower East Side/Second Av (the V's terminus). Note that you can't return the same way if you end the day here, because you there's no transfer to the uptown 6; if you're set on the 6, you have to leave the station, walk a short couple of blocks northeast to Bleecker and Lafayette, and pay another fare. (This is the only place in the entire New York subway system where such a condition prevails, and they sometimes talk about fixing it, but I'm not holding my breath.) The one-fare alternative is taking the uptown F or V to 42nd Street/Bryant Park, then walking the half-mile or so east to GCT, using the illuminated Chrysler Building spire as your guide. You could instead transfer to the Queens-bound 7, but the underground walk for the transfer is half as far as the aboveground walk to Grand Central, so unless the weather is absolutely foul, there's no point.
• Angelika (Ang), Houston and Mercer, just west of Broadway. Standard slightly grungy art house multiplex with little to no rake. Points deducted for asinine policy of salt distribution: no shakers, just little carry-out restaurant packets. More points deducted for the periodic subway rumble. Not coincidentally, it's a block west of the Broadway/Lafayette 6 stop.
• Film Forum (FF), Houston west of Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas). Three-screen art/revival house with some charm (and, in my experience, the city's most cramped men's room). Times Square Shuttle or 7 train to Times Square, transfer to the downtown 1 train, and FF is a half-block east of the Houston stop. If you're returning late at night, though, note that the Shuttle sometimes stops running, so the 7 may be your only choice.
• IFC (IFC), Sixth Avenue at 3rd Street. Three-screen art/revival house with little charm but clean and spacious bathrooms and stadium seating in two rooms and a moderate rake in the third. Not sure how much a plus this is, but Old Bay seasoning is available for your popcorn; also cinnamon sugar. $11.50 tickets. Historical note: this is the site of the old Waverly, which my generation remembers from the song "Frank Mills" in Hair. Same subway caveats as for the Sunshine, but to get here you transfer from the 6 to the uptown B, D, F, or V one stop to West 4th Street, which exits right by the theater. (And going back uptown, you also have all four options to get to 42nd/Bryant.)
• Quad (Quad), 13th Street between Sixth and Fifth Avenues. Standard urban art house with the best popcorn in town. I'll usually just walk the half-mile between here and the Union Square stop for the 6 (or, better, the express 4 or 5: nonstop GCT to Union Sq.), but if you must get as close as possible underground, transfer to the L train and take it one stop west to Sixth Avenue, then walk a block south and an avenue half-block west. Or you could do the Times Square transfer to a downtown 1 (or express 2 or 3), getting off at 14th and Fifth and walking south, then east.
• Cinema Village (CV), 12th Street just west of University Place (an avenue that runs from 4th to 14th between Fifth and Broadway). Art house with three of the tiniest screens not in somebody's den. Just a couple blocks southwest of the Union Square stop.
• Regal Union Square (USq), Broadway and 13th. Big, noisy multiplex, but every now and then . . . First thing I saw here, e.g., back in the visiting-my-wife-in-Brooklyn days, was Titus.
• Village East (VE), 12th Street and Second Avenue. Hybrid multiplex showing blockbusters and just enough art house fare to keep its Village bona fides. All the theaters but one are standard chop boxes, but screen 1, facing the unused 12th Street entrance, is obviously the original: a movie palace with a big screen, Egyptian decor, and two balconies. A pleasant walk from Union Square, or you can take the L to either Third or First.
• Two Boots Pioneer (2 Boots), 3rd Street just east of Avenue A. One-screen quirky house, with an excellent pizza joint on the corner. No early shows, so I never start here; when I finish here, the closest subway is Bleecker, about a half-mile west.
• Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, Broadway between 62nd and 63rd. Upper West Side art house that I haven't been to in ages, 'cause I can always see whatever they're showing downtown. Everything's underground, way underground. If I were going there directly from New Haven, I guess I'd get off the Metro North at Harlem/125th Street, catch the westbound M60 bus to St. Nicholas Av. (Central Park West), then transfer to a downtown A, B, C, or D to 59th Street. Basically, there's no easy way to get there from the East Side, so it's best to just take a Lexington Avenue train and a nice stroll across Central Park.

Nothing exceeds like excess

The history, logistics, and philosophy of the M4 (or M5, or, on rare occasions, M6)

Years ago--jesus, almost a quarter of a century ago--when I was between wives and girlfriends and working the 4-to-midnight shift on the sports desk at the newspaper in Champaign, Ill., I decided one day off that there was nothing I'd rather do with my free day than go to movies. A couple of movies. Maybe three. Hell, why not four? I would call it a Movie Madness Marathon.

So I checked the listings and established a workable itinerary, and that day in 1984 I went to (this is strictly from memory; the short-term has started to go, but the long-term's still pretty sharp) Splash at the Co-Ed on campus (long since gutted); Against All Odds at Country Fair Shopping Center (long since gutted); Repo Man at the Market Place Mall (theater long since razed, though the mall has grown to eat the entire north end of town); and Heat and Dust at the downtown Orpheum (long since tragically gutted). The films were, respectively, enchanting, plodding (had not yet seen the wonderful original, Out of the Past), transporting (though the other guy in the audience didn't seem to enjoy it as much; who had the bright idea to book this at a suburban shopping mall multiplex?), and Merchant-Ivorian. I still watch Repo Man regularly; it's a sort of benchmark for oddball flicks.

Years passed. A regional relocation ensued. A marriage blossomed and died. Now it's 2003, and I'm postmarriage/girlfriend/whatever. And it occurs to me that one good thing about this state is that, aside from the 37½ hours a week at work and the occasional phone call to reassure family that I'm still eating sufficiently and drinking sublethally, I don't have to answer to anyone. I can pretty much do what I fucking please. And if it pleases me, say, to take a train to Manhattan and go to movies all damn day, not only will no one object, no one will even care, or even know unless I tell them. And it occurs to me, moreover, that that is precisely what will please me. Thus was born the Manhattan Movie Madness Marathon, or M4.

(Four was the number of films I'd routinely see in a day at first, so the 4 in M4 was particularly appropriate. When I first did five, I adjusted the number to fit the number of movies, but I never did come up with a satisfactory fifth M-word to describe the shift, and the couple of times I've seen six films in day . . . well, Mega- would need to be in there somewhere, I suppose. But I digress . . . )

The typical M# (as I now sometimes call the generic form, before I've established an itinerary and plugged in a number) takes place on the Sunday of a three-day weekend. As you might gather, six to ten hours of cinemating, sandwiched between a couple of not-quite-two-hour train rides, take a toll on a fifty-four-year-old body, and it also gets me home well past my school-night bedtime, so I would never do one immediately ahead of a workday. Sunday is a better fit than Saturday because Sunday is the one day of the week I don't work out (though I do sometimes make myself get up early enough on Sat. to allow for a workout and shower before leaving--and on rare occasion I'll even adjust my workout schedule, taking Sat. off and working out on Sun., but that goes against my anal grain [Anal Grain, 100% fiber--eat it for breakfast, discard it an hour later!]).

I walk the not-quite-a-mile to the train station, get in the front car of the Metro North train, and settle down w/ water bottle and Times or a book. At Grand Central, I zoom to the subway station and grab, typically, a downtown 6. Virtually every M# is a strictly downtown mission, that being where the art houses congregate.

That's usually my last subway ride of the day until I'm ready to come home--and if I get to GCT with plenty of time and it's a nice day, I'll skip even the first ride and stroll down Park or Fifth Avenue. (I like to point out to people I tell about these movie days that I do spend some time outside, and I do walk at least a couple of miles in the course of the day, sometimes quite a bit more; I think people envision me as Jabba the Hutt in a dark room for twelve hours straight.) Invariably, if I start out strolling, there comes a moment when I realize that if I don't start pushing it, I'm not going to have time to hit the head before my first movie--and frequent head-hitting is one of the many keys to a successful M#.

Guess I should say a word about costs: currently my Metro North trip between New Haven and Manhattan costs $11.13½ (I buy an off-peak 10-ride pass online, the cheapest per-ride fare available) and each subway or bus ride costs $1.67 2/3 (I give the MTA $20, they give me $24 worth of Metrocard, or 12 rides--though the 20% bonus is scheduled to drop to 15% in March, making the effective price $1.73 per ride). Movie tickets vary from theater to theater, but they're all over $10 now, and $11.50 is becoming standard, with no "bargain matinees." The large corn and large diet caffeinated brown drink that constitute my lunch (plenty of salt on the corn, of course, the better to avoid having the large caffeinated beverage force me to take a bathroom break before the movie is over) come to $10 more or less, pretty much the same as at home. So, not counting whatever I might grab for dinner, if there's time, a five-movie day comes in at a hair less than $100; given what people pay to see a Broadway musical, I consider that a bargain.

So now I'm ready to see movies. But what movies? The planning process is part of the fun. Naturally, I have to ask the usual question of any consumer contemplating any purchase: can I expect to like it? But on an M# I also have to ask: is it likely to come to one of my more-or-less local theaters? Manhattan trips are relatively rare and relatively expensive: I don't want to waste an M4 slot on something that, if I wait a couple of weeks, I'll be able to walk downtown and see at a bargain matinee for $7.50. There's no surefire way of predicting what the downtown theater and the suburban multiplexes (one of which shows some art house fare) will eventually screen--you can check out the lobby posters and the trailers and, in the case of the downtown house, the "Coming Soon" page on the Web site, but these are all merely suggestive, not definitive.

Experience has taught me that films showing at certain Manhattan art houses--the Angelika and the Sunshine, e.g.--are nearly certain to come within a bus ride, or at worst a bus ride + a death-defying roadside walk of home, while those showing at, say, the IFC Center almost never come to Greater New Haven. So these days I tend to see a lot of films at IFC, and I almost never go to Sunshine or the Angelika--though if I'm so hot for a film that I don't want to take the slightest chance of missing it, I'll take a bigger risk of "wasting" the M4 slot.

Once I have an idea of "what," the logistical questions of "how long" and "how much time between" come into play: if a film showing at 11 a.m. at IFC (which routinely shows at least 15 minutes of trailers and other preliminaries) has a running time of 110 minutes, e.g., can I get from there to Film Forum (which occasionally shows no prelims at all)-- for a 1:15 show? Yes, though it may be cutting it too close for a bathroom trip between films. On the other hand, if that 1:15 at FF runs 110 minutes, a 3:15 a mile away at Cinema Village is a no-go.

I go through the Movie Clock in the Friday Times, writing down the titles of all films I might be interested in seeing, their running times, and their screening times (stringing the latter across the page such times more or less line up vertically--i.e., a 7:15 on one line is slightly to the left of a 7:30 on the line below). I order the venues geographically, describing a rough clockwise parabola, starting on the Lower East Side and ending in the East Village. To wit: Landmark Sunshine, on Houston between First and Second Avenues; Angelika, Houston and Mercer, just west of Broadway, less than 10 minutes from the Sunshine; Film Forum, Houston west of Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas), less than 10 minutes from the Ang; IFC, Sixth Avenue at 3rd Street, maybe 5 minutes from FF; Quad, 13th Street between Sixth and Fifth Avenues, 10 min from IFC; Cinema Village, 12th Street just west of University Place, 5 minutes from the Quad; Village East, 12th Street and Second Avenue, 10 minutes from CV; Two Boots Pioneer, 3rd Street just east of Avenue A, less than 15 minutes from the VE; to close the parabola, the Sunshine is barely 5 minutes from Two Boots.

So I use different colored highlighter pens to sketch out possible itineraries, and then it's just a matter of weighing my alternatives and going to the flicks. Then to the nearest subway and back to Grand Central--trains to New Haven run late enough that I have once or twice gotten home at 4 a.m. or so, but usually I'm home not long after midnight. "Don't all those movies run together?" people ask? Well, no: it's essentially just a one-day film festival, with the crucial difference that I'm programmer as well as patron.

And that, my friends, is a beautiful thing: being able to see the gorgeous or thought-provoking or mild-blowing film that the vast majority of the country must wait to see on DVD--if it ever comes out on DVD, if the St. Louis film lover, say, ever even hears about it. And after all, isn't that what it's all about? Having something others don't have, even if it's only an informed critical opinion about, say, Sanxia haoren (Still life)?