Cinematic Holiday
Got a chance during the exceptionally long Holiday weekend to catch up on some movies. It’s been a while. Here’s they, with some pithy notes on their respective viewing environments.
Wednesday Night: The Mist. Fine, scary film. Marcia Gay Harden chews her some serious scenery as a religious fanatic. Did you know director Frank Darabont got his start as crew on Hell Night (1981), featuring Linda Blair and Vince Van Patten? The audience at the Cinemark 20 was remarkably well-behaved, especially after the first good scare came in.
Thursday Night: Stayed in. Slowly recovered from the whole family and turkey onslaught, and there were no decent football games on. However, I ended up watching a rarely viewed treat on TCM: The Crowd (1928). A true silent classic directed by King Vidor, it’s the story of an irrepressible young man (James Murray) out to hit it big in New York City. It eventually crushes him like a bug. Murray was a remarkable actor, whose tragic end in 1936 is worthy of a film in itself. The audience, consisting of my wife and myself, was fairly quiet.
Friday: Down in Santa Cruz. Caught Enchanted at the 41st Avenue Playhouse, one of those lodestone theatres when Dan and I were kids. Saw Star Wars there. I don’t think he ever worked there, but I did a season of weekdays there as a cashier. The UA employees at the time were snooty and looked down on everyone else. They’re much nicer now. The film was wonderful, funny, and irreverent. Songs were great. Could have used one more musical number near the two-thirds mark. Audience was generally quiet and appreciative, except for a few tweeners near the front who got self-conscious during a big kiss scene and started throwing out unhelpful suggestions.
(Just a random observation: Enchanted, the story of a delightful cartoon princess brought magically to our world, is exactly the opposite of The Mist, the story of normal people in our world who are visited by unspeakable, murderous horror from another dimension. Just thought I’d throw that out there.)
Saturday: Shopping and socializing most of the day, but got home in time to catch a film I’ve been waiting months to see– Battlestar Galactica: Razor. Oh YEAH, I’m a “BSG” fan! The 2-hour movie was a flashback piece depicting events that occurred several seasons ago on the main program. It’s a sort of Tom Stoppard-style deal, a story mostly seen through the eyes of Kendra Shaw, a junior officer on the Battlestar Pegasus. 
Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen, who plays Shaw, did a remarkable job, and seen in a certain light is a fun-sized Angelina Jolie. The audience was the same as for The Crowd, but half of them fell asleep (it’s okay: she was making rather merry that afternoon, and we watched it again Monday). Now for the long, long wait ’til March, the scheduled start of Season 4. If that happens.
Sunday: No Country For Old Men at the Cinemark 20. Great Coen brothers film, one of the best yet. Anton Chigurh, the affectless serial killer played by Spanish heartthob Javier Bardem, was so strange and frightening you couldn’t take your eyes off him. I can see how the character developed: He’s a lot like Gaear Grimsrud, the dull-eyed kidnapper played by Peter Stormare in Fargo (1996). But Chigurh is so much worse: robotic, remorseless, resourceful, an implacable Terminator with a bad haircut. See it, see it, see it.
The audience for No Country was very well-behaved– except for a trio seated right behind us. They kept up a steady stream of loud-whispered commentary as the film unfolded, all three trying in vain to keep up with the plot twists. 
But here’s the thing: It’s a Coen Brothers film, not a Hitchcock mystery. The plot was neither difficult nor convoluted, and there were maybe four main characters. But they still lagged about ten minutes behind consistently: “Who’s that?” “Where’s the bad bad guy?” “Why is he doing that?” Normally, I’d have been shushing up a storm, but the inescapable fact (that is, inescapable if you’re sitting in front of them) that the combined brainpower of all three couldn’t keep up with a standard studio-release movie sort of stopped me. For some reason I felt sort of sorry for them, and left them alone. Could have been worse: they could have seen it before and spoiled the ending. So my cinematic blessings are hereby counted.
–Skot C.