Whenever I read Film Comment magazine, as I’m doing now, I feel particularly stupid. First it is unlikely that I will see the new retrospective of whatever at Lincoln Center, and second, I rarely know the celebrated Turkish, Georgian or Finnish directors who apparently have been turning out masterpiece after masterpiece during the last decade, while I struggle to catch up with the episodes of Futurama that I’ve missed. This experience leads to melancholy thoughts regarding “film culture” and “netflix:” what happened to seeing films “publically”–now it is only consistently possible in New York City and in some rare other locations (say San Francisco/Berkely where they have a major Film Archive or Minneapolis which has the Walker Art Center) to see a movie in a well-designed theater or even to see a movie in a theater at all. do people really wish to stay at home so goddamm much? on one hand, the bizarre corporate cineplex where I have to sit through a fucking half hour of TV commercials now (and then, like a bad freshman essay, they summarize what you’ve just seen–“we’ve taken a sneak peak at the big screen update of “Green Acres” and talked with its star Colin Farrell…) and on the other, the stupefaction of “home” where you can safely piss yourself while you slog through all 13 hours of Berlin Alexanderplatz. as peggy lee whispered to me during an amorous embrace, “baby, is that all there is?” To which I replied, “when the boundaries of public and private life are muddled, public life becomes the unsatisfactory adjunct of a private life that is nevertheless misshapen by “public” but inaccessible forces.” She slapped me and left with that cheap Sinatra-fake Jack Jones. I retaliated by copping a feel of Connie Francis, who had passed out over her most recent Gin Rickey.
Connie Francis is HOT.
I live in Minneapolis but so rarely get to the Walker that it may as well be in L.A. That said, ‘though I ought to think about our the latest and the hippest Finnish or other films at our local art house if not our local art museum, I am more interested in public viewing of lost classics, forgotten crap, recovered gems, or just things the program director liked. We have an indie theater called the Oak Street which is always doing the cool retrospective (from genre to director), or pulling a great old film out of obscurity (it’s where I first saw “California Split,” long before it got released on dvd). I am with you, Michael, on missing the public experience/life of film–but mostly for these kinds of films, in this kind of venue, where I get a sense that everyone else has cool stuff on their netflix queue, too, but may not really have a subscription to Film Comment….
By the by, I love the 20. I’m grateful for the wrap-up (the closing lines about what they’ve shown me), because I get so enrapt I forget all the best parts by the end. Thank you, the 20!