New Theater, Misc Commentary

In the last couple days, a couple items about the availability of films caught my eye. The first, a very happy piece of news, comes from the Boston Globe's movie blog - a new movie theater is coming to Boston! The Stuart Street Playhouse, currently, as the name states, a theater, will reopen on October 9 as a movie theater - a nice big room, featuring indie and foreign films. (Details.) It will be programmed by the people who run the West Newton cinema - I've never been there, but it seems comparable to the Kendall, or maybe the Somerville Theater - two excellent cinemas across the river. Ty Burr's comments on the Globe's blog are to the point - Boston, now, has no commercial art houses. There are two big multiplexes - pretty good ones, I admit, with some decent semi-indie stuff along with the mainstream fare... It was not always thus - there used to be lots and lots of cinemas in Boston. Even in my filmgoing memory (serious for 15 years, sporadic for 8-10 years before that) half a dozen cinemas have disappeared - the Cheri, Copley Square, Nickolodeon, I think I remember this Stuart street cinema, there were screens out in Allston, there were screens downtown, on Washington Street... They all closed - creating a strange condition, before the Fenway opened - there was an art house (the Nicklolodeon), a quasi art house (the Copley - one of the most appalling excuses for a multiplex I have ever come across - 9 screens, most of them small, ugly, badly designed - hideous!), and the Cheri - which generally stuck to action films, some big, some small (saw Tigerland there, not long before it gave up the ghost) - But nothing for straightforward mainstream films. That's long been the situation in Cambridge/Somerville (unless you go out to the hinterlands) - art houses, rep houses, semi-mainstream fare - it was more pronounced in the late 90s. There were times when it was harder for me, living in the city (or on the red line) to get to a mainstream Hollywood film than to the latest Rohmer. Easier to see Expect the Unexpected than Babe: Pig in the City...

That's not the case now. The two big multiplexes (Fenway and the Boston Common) take care of the mainstream stuff - everything else, is on the Cambridge side of the river. Though the fact is - given the geography of Boston/Cambridge, there's not a great deal of difference between them - from most of Boston and suburbs, Harvard Square is as accessible as either of the Boston multiplexes - straight up the red line, straight up Mass Ave. The Kendall is pretty close to the subway - getting there by car can be a bit of adventure. The Coolidge, Somerville Theater, even the MFA, are all right on both the subway and major streets. All these places - Harvard Square (with its three film outlets - an AMC Loews theater; the Brattle and the Harvard Film Archive), Kendall, the Common and the Fenway - are within 2-3 miles of one another. Even the Coolidge and MFA or Somerville Theater are only another mile or so off - none of them are more than an hours walk from each other. Boston ain't big - add Cambridge, Somerville and Brookline, and it's still not big. This new theater is just as conveniently located, a bit closer to the South End, not far from the T...

And it is good news. Boston may not be able to match NY for films, but it's still a good city for a film lover. Though a lot better 15 years ago. Another theater can't hurt - I imagine in practice it will just add another screen for one of the films showing at the Kendall or Harvard Square or the Coolidge - but even just that can't be bad. Indie films that draw decent crowds often end up taking up a couple screens in those places - if one of them moves to Boston, it can open a screen somewhere else. Maybe dilute the effect of bland crowd pleasers that run for 6 months in those places... Anything, to get more options in the theaters. I hope this works - I certainly intend to give it my trade. I may be somewhat resigned to the fact that film as Film might become a museum piece only, a curio, something for the connoisseur - but I don't want to see that happen any time soon. And hate the idea that more adventurous, or at least, less commercial material, might become almost exclusively the domain of festivals, museums, and DVDs. I'm glad, yes, that DVDs are available - it probably has made it possible to see a lot more than I could have seen 20 years ago, or at least, to be less at the mercy of programmers and luck... But - film is Film, and that experience is well worth holding on to. Including all the peripheral elements - getting to the theater on time, getting across town in time for another show... Speaking just for myself - that is part of my life, a part I find quite enjoyable - the walks, the spaces, the seats in the theaters, the experience of walking out of a film, from dark to light... If I am sitting around home watching movies, I might as well read a book.

Meanwhile: on the other side of things, the DVD side - saw another odd post at Dan Schneider's Cinemension blog a day or so back. He starts out fairly reasonably - lamenting the difficulty of finding foreign films, and complaining about their cost. I suppose he protests a bit too much - the fact is, an astonishing amount of old and foreign material is available, and more all the time... though I suppose most cinephiles are always wanting something that's not around. (Me? Where's Night and Day? For example...) As for the prices - it's certainly irritating, though I suppose the prices aren't that extravagant. And they are certainly explicable - economies of scale, and all - you can charge minimal prices for popular films because you are going to move them in large quantities - not so much with Satantango or that new Gaumont Treasures set. Though that's on Netflix, so, you know... there are ways to ease the pain...

All that fairly reasonable commentary is followed, though, by one of his stranger hobby horses - the need for dubbing instead of subtitles. He keeps repeating this - it's an opinion he mostly has to himself, at least among people who would, in theory, watch a foreign language film. (Most people who complain about subs aren't really candidates for anything beyond foreign pop films - Jacky Chan, anime and the occasional European melodrama are about as far as that goes.) The flaw in his argument is obvious enough - he says film is a visual medium - this is wrong: film is an audio-visual medium. Adding text to a film is certainly far less intrusive than changing the entire soundtrack. Anyway - I suppose he's being consistent - he seems generally to have little respect for the materiality of art - his view seems to be, Art=Representation - words in a film are what they mean, nothing else - he does not seem interesting in words as sound. Or take this bit - he says:

Furthermore, if one watches classic foreign films from the 1950s and 1960s, which were routinely dubbed for American audiences (often retained in DVD releases), one can see how superior dubbing is. As example, Ingmar Bergman's Spider Trilogy is dubbed, and the fact that different actors and voices are used for the characters played by Max Von Sydow actually enhances all the characterizations, for we really get that it is not Max Von Sydow in all three films, but characters who merely look like Von Sydow, but sound different, even down to the peculiarities of their emotional vocal choices.

That strikes me as a very odd way to think about acting. Though it is consistent - he sees acting as the portrayal of a character, as what is represented. Not as material, so to speak. It's a different approach to art to see the signifier, the material, as having artistic importance, as carrying as much function as the meaning of what is on screen. But - I think you are bound to run into trouble sooner or later if you dismiss the signifier... it might lead you to declare Ulysses overrated.... a result, again, of reducing a work of art to its story, ignoring the means by which it is told.

Boss of it All

If you're expecting a review of Boss of it All - well, okay. Though my main reason for posting is to complain. And complain about utterly local things... Specifically about the Coolidge Corner movie theater, who are showing this film - in their digital screening room. Which means - it's shown on a DVD. A nice DVD projector, sure - but still... This is the second time in a month that I have been annoyed to find a film I wanted to see was being shown there on video - the last time was Zoo. I was annoyed because I had been reading about the film somewhere and the director specifically mentioned that he'd shot it on film. So - I was displeased to find it on video. (And before that - Bamako.)

I feel guilty about complaining - the Coolidge has doubled its number of screens in the last couple years, and uses them to bring in marginal films. This means - that digital screening room is bringing in more films that might otherwise not be shown. But I am going to complain anyway. First - because it is a bloody shame to show Lars Von Trier films (or films as visually rich as Zoo or Bamako) on video, not film... And second, because the result seems a bit less that there are more films getting a theatrical run than that the Coolidge can keep films like The Lives of Others around for half a year. I don't mean that's a bad film - or the other films at the Coolidge are bad (right now, that would be Once, Away From Her and Day Night Day Night) - but those other four films have all played elsewhere - and three of them are still playing elsewhere. And now, between them, they are keeping a Lars Von Trier film off the real screens - and it is not playing anywhere else. And it worries me that this allows the Coolidge to bring in films instead of someone else - to get them instead of the Brattle or something like that - where, even if they only played for a day or so, at least they would get shown on a real movie screen.

Nothing to be done I guess. The irritating part is that these films aren't going to play anywhere else - it is precisely the films that won't show up somewhere else that get shown in the digital screening room - so I can't just choose to go where they'll look right. Very annoying. Anyway - as for the film itself - it's pretty good. A comedy - an IT company is run by one Ravn, who pretends there is a "boss of it all" in America. He wants to sell the company to Icelanders - he needs the boss on hand to seal the deal. He hires an actor - who has too many theories, including an infatuation with a crank ploaywright named Gambini - there are complications and the actor has to convince the employees as well... Things proceed. It's quite funny, a worthy Danish successor to Office Space or The Office - though it's Lars Von Trier and he's up to a good deal more. Brechtian jokes, jokes about Dogme (the crazy playwright sounds a bit like that), about filming in Danish instead of English - and a new trick called Automavision - a way of programming the camera, to randomly change position, angle and so on... Another way of giving up control, you could say - which of course is part of what Dogme was about as well... It's disorienting, but also rather funny, in itself. Von Trier's theories tend to be almost as funny as the films - serious or not, it's a bit of a put on.... And usually entertaining, in its utterly bizarre way.