Brokeback Mountain

[anonymous1980]

From the IMDb:

Mass. Correctional Officer Disciplined for Showing 'Brokeback'

Massachusetts may have earned itself a reputation for political liberalism by, among other things, sanctioning gay marriages, but the state's Department of Corrections has drawn the line at showing a movie featuring gay sex and male nudity to inmates at the state prison in Norfolk. In an interview with Reuters, a spokeswoman for the department confirmed Saturday that a correctional officer had been disciplined for screening Brokeback Mountain at the institution. "It was not the subject matter," she maintained. "It was the graphic nature of sexually explicit scenes." She said that the officer in question showed the movie, two days after it was released on DVD, without reviewing it in advance, as prison guidelines required him to do.

[criddic3]

remember in the early days of DVDs, when one side of the disc would be wide, the other full?

Damien, they still do occassionally. Cinderella Man and a few others from 2005 had the widescreen on one side and full on the other. These are the discs that do not have a picture on them, but a small circle in the middle of the disc with the title and a message that says "side a Widescreen, side b full screen." It's not as common now, but they still do it. I've even seen dvds that have the option on the same side of the disc and a highlight on the menu screen for one or the other, but I only saw that once or twice.

[Sonic Youth]

How about a heartening success story?

You may remember in November of 2004, I posted about a brand new theater in downtown New Haven, CT called Criterion Cinemas. It's a five screen theater that shows mostly indies and foreign films, with the ocassional major studio film to bring in extra cash. The theaters are pristine, the auditoriums are lovely, the equipment is first-rate, they sell wine (a rarity in this part of the country), the popcorn is the tastiest I've ever eaten, jazz standards play on the speakers before the movie begins, and it is the theater's stated policy to never play advertising before a film other than previews. It is here that I saw my first Jean Luc-Godard film on the big screen, and probably in more favorable conditions had I seen it in New York City.

The theater has been running for almost a year and a half, and it's chugging along quite nicely. A very important key to its success has been several ongoing film series. Every Sunday at 11am, they present a "Movie and Mimosa", a five dollar ticket to see a classic film on the big screen, with a two dollar glass of mimosa. Week after week, these shows are packed. You must get there early enough in case it sells out. I've seen Casablanca, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, and each received a round of applause. (Click on the link above to see the schedule.) Also successful is "Insomnia Theater", a Thursday late night screening of cult favorites like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, This is Spinal Tap, Don't Look Now, Clerks, Office Space, A Clockwork Orange, even John Waters' Female Trouble.

This theater has been so successful, work is being done to expand it to seven screens. But it gets better. It has been so successful, it has revitalized the entire Temple Street neighborhood. Businesses are moving in, trying to capitalize on the movie theater's success. This area was once where a Macy's department store resided, a long time ago. After it closed, the entire block was left abandoned, and except for a medical clinic, there has been only empty storefronts for twenty years. In the past ten months, new restaurants have been opening including a high-end market cafe, a pan-asian restaurant and sushi bar, a Moroccan coffee shop, and an old fashioned diner. Next month, a Mexican Grill opens and later in the year sees a tapas restaurant. Meaning? The area has become utterly yuppified. But better a successful yuppie neighborhood than no neighborhood at all. And a movie theater has been the pioneer. As trite as it sounds, it really is a dream come true.

[rain Bard]

When my neighborhood theatre booked a double bill of San Francisco and Follow the Fleet last year I actually took the opportunity to try to recreate a 1936-style moviegoing experience, intentionally coming in during the middle of Follow the Fleet, watching San Francisco in full, and then leaving "where I came in" to the Astaire-Rogers picture. Actually, I cheated a bit and stayed for a second viewing of Ginger's solo tap dance.

I hadn't seen the film before, but wasn't surprised at how easy it was to catch onto the plot.

[Big Magilla]

When I went to movies with my family in the late 50s and 60s, we always knew what time the picture began and that's when we arrived.

I worked as an usher, candy attendant and occasional doorman during my last two years in high school and my first two years in college in the early 60s when most people had adapted the practice of showing up at the theatre at the start of the film, but there were still a number of people who sauntered in while a film was in progess. The practice didn't really end until theatres started having gaps between showings later in the sixties.

[Damien]

I bought the Brokeback DVD at Tower Records at Lincoln Center on Tuesday. When I got home, Irealized I had picked up the cropped full-screen version by mistake (I didn't even realize this still made full screen DVDs -- remember in the early days of DVDs, when one side of the disc would be wide, the other full?) The next day I went to exchange it, and the store was completely sold out (of both versions) and had ordered 600 more by overnight delivery. So in urban areas at least, Brokeback would seem to be selling phenomenally well.

On the the issue in this thread, when the AMC 25 opened on "the new" 42nd Street in 1999, one theatre was reserved for "classics," and such movies as Lawrence of Arabia and Bridge On The River Kwai played there for one week bookings. The policy lasted about 6 weeks.

I'm always fascinated by the fact that people used to walk into a movie at any time, not at the beginning of the film (Andrew Sarris has also mentioned seeing movies this way growing up). In fact Darryl Zanuck was considered positively draconian when he declared that no one be allowed into All About Eve once the film had begun.

When I went to movies with my family in the late 50s and 60s, we always knew what time the picture began and that's when we arrived.

[kaytodd]

My county, which is right next to New Orleans, reopened about three weeks after Katrina. The weekend after the county reopened, the first movie theatre in the metro area reopened as well, Hollywood Cinema 9 in Kenner. For the last few years, they have been showing Bollywood films on one of their screens every Friday and Saturday; a different film every week. That tradition has continued uninterrupted. I have told myself I would check out a Bollywood film. I regret I have never followed through. I'll bet I would enjoy it.

Perhaps a fan of Bollywood films can recommend particular films or artists.

[Big Magilla]

The area I live in has a sizeable Filipino population. When the latest cineplex opened here with 14 theatres, effectively closing down the two smaller ones (six and eight each and no stadium seating), they devoted one screen to showing Filipino films. It lasted about a month.

[Penelope]

Re: chain theaters and foreign/independent films. We had a similar experience to Mike Kelly's here in Tampa: about 5 years ago, a Regal cinema opened at a new shopping/nightclub center near downtown, and promised to balance one or two screens for non-mainstream films. This is where I was able to see The Deep End, Le Placard, Before Sunset and Vera Drake; unfortunately, sometime early last year they changed policy and now it's all Hollywood commercial fare. Very frustrating, as this leaves Tampa with only one multiplex committed to showing foreign/independent film, and there are rumors that they will soon be closing to be replaced by condos.

[Mike Kelly]

Yeah, Bogdanovich had his rose-colored glasses on when he wrote that article (and I must have had them on when I read it). Still when I think back to the days of exploring the sixth balcony of the Brooklyn Paramount Theater I recall how the sceen looked like a postage stamp and not the clientele that were up there.

A theater near me went through a major renovation a few years ago, and the manager was touting how they were going to dedicate one of the smaller rooms to foreign and independant films. Indeed, that first year I was able to see The Magdeline Sisters, Elephant, Russian Ark and Swimming Pool there. It didn't last long however and this year, I had to travel over 50 miles to see The Squid and the Whale, Capote, Transamerica and Mrs. Henderson Presents.

[Big Magilla]

Bogdanovich is only four years older than me, but this article seems written by someone at least ten years older. He was only one and two respectively when Citizen Kane and How Green Was My Valley were released, and since his parents didn't take him to the movies until he was five, references to those films seem a bit disingenuous. Also, he would have been 19 going on 20 when North by Northwest was released, a little bit too old for his parents to be taking him to the movies, don't you think? But I carp. The really false note struck me when he talked about the lack of ratings available to guide parents. True, there was no MPAA, but there was the Legion of Decency, which for Catholics was even more restrictive. While non-Catholics did not have the same Church sanctioned pressure, most parents wouldn't take their kids to or allow them to go on their own to seen anything they felt would be too mature for them. They didn't need a ratings system to tell them A Streetcar Named Desire and A Place in the Sun were not for their little tykes' eyes. Conversely, in today's world there is nothing restricting parents from taking children to see R rated films, which are far more sugestive than anything Bogdanovich's parents might have been able to gloss over in their day.

Bogdonaovich is nothing if not a name-dropper. Was it necessary to quote Cary Grant? But, again, I carp.

I do like his suggestion that the studios pool their resources to open large-scale revival theatres in every major city as a way of drumming up interest in forthcoming DVDs of classic films, but, alas, it will never happen. The multiplexes have the ability to set aside one or two screens for non-commercial fare such as foreign films, small, independent Hollywood films and the occasional highly touted revival but don't do it because they can make more money from 14 screens showing the latest blockbuster(s) instead of cordoning off one or two for films of quality for which those of us with taste must travel far and wide and/or wait with baited breath for the DVD to view on our "small" screens at home.

[Reza]

If a couple on screen were going to bed together, vintage movie shorthand took over and the camera panned to the fireplace or to the waterfall, or, during a passionate kiss, there'd be a discreet fade to black. I would turn to my mother and ask what was happening, and she'd say something ambiguous, such as "they like each other" or "they're talking now," which completely satisfied my curiosity.

Nowadays this explanation does not work with kids. Not that we don't still come up with an explanation very similar to that given by Bogdanovich's Mom. However, instead of a satisfied ''ok'' we get instead a smirk or a rolling of the eyes.

[Mike Kelly]

Don't know how many have read this recent article by Peter Bogdanovich. I did a search and couldn't find anything here, but if it was already referenced, I apologize.

While it pertains to the theater experience rather than pre-conceived expectations due to hype, some of his comments do apply to the topic of this discussion. I had to chuckle when he described the practice of walking in, on the middle of a picture. Although it is something I haven't done for years and would never do today, it was fairly common back when there were double features. As he says, the inevitable announcement "this is where we came in at" would be heard as people would leave at various times during a show. Sounds ridiculous, but that's what happened. The point being that most movie going experiences back then were completely fresh, and that was a good thing.

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT
Moving Away From the Movie Theater
Once, great movie houses drew us together. Now they're gone -- and the decline of the big screen diminishes us all.
By Peter Bogdanovich
March 26, 2006
GOING TO THE MOVIES with my parents is one of the great memories of my childhood. I remember getting strong anticipatory butterflies in my stomach long before we'd even leave the apartment. In the late 1940s, early '50s, we lived on Manhattan's West 67th Street, three blocks from two huge "neighborhood" picture palaces: the RKO Colonial and the Loew's Lincoln. Both were spacious, elaborately decorated, very comfortable stand-alone theaters with huge screens and giant, red velvet curtains that parted before the show. Each seated more than 1,000 (with smoking in the balcony).

A typical evening or afternoon at the "nabes" meant a double feature — two recent films, usually an A-budget movie paired with a B-picture. We never checked for starting times (no one did); we went when we could or when we felt like it.
Normally, therefore, we would enter in the middle of one of the two features. Part of the fun was trying to figure out what was going on. After it ended, there would be a newsreel, a travelogue, a live-action comedy short, a cartoon and coming attractions. Then the next feature, followed by the first half of the other film until that once-proverbial moment: "This is where we came in." (All this, by the way, for 25 or 50 cents a head, often less for kids.) On Saturdays, there was the children's matinee, complete with a white-uniformed matron who chaperoned us and made sure kids didn't put their feet on the seats in front of them.

Both of my old neighborhood theaters have long since been demolished. But recently I've been thinking about them again as I've read about the decline in theater attendance — down from 90 million tickets sold per week in the late 1940s to about a quarter of that number today — as people rent movies and watch them at home on increasingly elaborate home entertainment systems. Now, some of the big studios are talking about closing the months-long window that has traditionally separated a movie's theatrical debut from its availability on video or DVD — a change that some say could lead to the end of the movie-theater experience altogether.

When I was a growing up, there were no ratings — all pictures being suitable for the whole family. Parents could, if they chose, take the family to serious films such as "How Green Was My Valley," "Citizen Kane" or "From Here to Eternity" without worrying that it might not be "appropriate" for the children. If a couple on screen were going to bed together, vintage movie shorthand took over and the camera panned to the fireplace or to the waterfall, or, during a passionate kiss, there'd be a discreet fade to black. I would turn to my mother and ask what was happening, and she'd say something ambiguous, such as "they like each other" or "they're talking now," which completely satisfied my curiosity.

Movies, when you used to see them on the big screen, had a mystery that they no longer have. For one thing, they were irretrievable: Once the first and second runs were past, most films were not easy to see again. They were much, much larger than life and therefore instantly mythic (screens and theaters were a lot bigger before the multiplex arrived). And they were inexorable; once a film had started, there was no pausing it or in any way stopping its relentless forward motion.

Also, the communal experience of seeing a picture with a large crowd of strangers was a great and irreplaceable happening — all of us, young or old (if the picture worked) palpably sharing the same emotions of sorrow or happiness. The bigger the crowd around us, the greater the impact.

On special occasions, my parents took me to the greatest movie theater in the country, Radio City Music Hall, which, for $2, would show a first-rate new film exclusively (such as "An American in Paris" or "North by Northwest") plus a live, 40-minute stage show featuring the Rockettes. That's why it meant so much to me in 1972 when my first comedy, "What's Up, Doc?" was booked to open in New York at the Music Hall.

I was so excited I called to tell Cary Grant (a friend of 10 years). "That's nice," he said casually. "I've had 28 pictures play the Hall.

"I tell you what you must do," he went on. "When it's playing, you go down there and stand in the back — and you listen and you watch while 6,500 people laugh at something you did. It will do your heart good!"

I went, of course, and it remains the single most memorable showing of any of my pictures: The sheer size of the reaction in that enormous theater was like a mainliner of joy. The fact is, it takes at least 100 people to get a decent laugh in a movie — smaller audiences are just not given to letting go.

On the other hand, a Michigan university student told me recently that one of the few classic Hollywood movies he'd seen was John Ford's version of John Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath." He said he'd been looking at a "video of it" and couldn't get his "eyelids to stop drooping."

Well, of course. Not only was he alone in his living room, but he was seeing on a small screen a work that had not been created ever to be reduced so radically in size. The especially dark photography (by the legendary Gregg Toland, who the following year shot Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane") needs the large screen to convey its effect, not to mention that darkness and TV have never produced easy-to-watch results.

What's more, Ford was very much the master of the long shot. Twenty years before that famous fly-speck-on-the-desert entrance in "Lawrence of Arabia," Ford had introduced Henry Fonda in "Grapes" as a tiny figure on the horizon coming toward us. But tiny on a giant screen is not the same as tiny on a TV set. The first makes a poetic impression, the second leaves you wondering what you're looking at and causes yet more eye strain. No wonder the student's eyelids drooped.

One of my favorite movies is Howard Hawks' "Bringing Up Baby" with Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn — probably the fastest and at the same time most darkly photographed comedy of all time. When I watch it on TV, I find myself getting tired and running out of steam before the film ends.

Most young people have never even seen older films (before 1962, let's say — the end of the movies' golden age, when the original studio system finally collapsed) on the large screen for which they were solely created. So it's easy to understand why they're not interested in them. That they don't know what they're missing is a sad fact, increasingly more common, therefore sadder.

What is there to say about seeing movies of quality on an iPod? Chilling.

I was first taken at age 5 or 6 by my father to see silent movies on the big screen at the Museum of Modern Art, and it inculcated in me a lifelong interest and reverence for older films. Starting my daughters at a young age looking at classics from the '20s, '30s and '40s did the same thing for them. Wouldn't it be a great thing if all the studios pooled their resources and opened large-scale revival theaters in every major city as a way of promoting DVDs of older films, which remain difficult to move in the kind of bulk everyone would like?

It's hard for me to imagine that the movie-theater experience will ever completely disappear, no matter how reduced it may become. After all, the legitimate theater still exists in the age of TV and film, though of course there is nowhere near as much of it as there was even as late as the 1950s. (Remember summer stock?) In some places you can even still see opera, a very popular medium a couple of hundred years ago.

But Larry McMurtry's novel, "The Last Picture Show," and the movie version of it which I directed were both at least partly about the loss to a small Texas town of its single movie theater, a great diminishment in community and sharing. We all now live in a more insular, distanced society. And though our communication capability has never been faster or more inclusive, it does not have the ability to let us experience the silent interrelating that happens in a live theater, at church or at a movie house.

Over the years I've noticed that audiences, just before the show starts, radiate a kind of innocence. Considered person by person, that may not be the case, but as a group they share the ability to be taken wherever the film chooses to take them, either to the stars or the gutter, and their communal experience will alter them for better or worse. Let's not let all that possibility fade away further than it already has.

Better movies would help.

[Mister Tee]

BJ, back as far as the mid-80s, I detected what I started calling Critics' Syndrome -- the gap between the delighted surprise a critic experiences in discovering a film, and the inevitably smaller delight experienced by an audience which has been told (by these critics) to look foward to the film. The particular example was My Beautiful Laundrette, which I thought was a perfectly good little film, but which critics praised to the skies. Had I encountered it, as they did, cold, packed in with a bunch of other unknown titles, I might have shared their wild enthusiasm.

I thought some variant of this was also true of Unforgiven -- which, don't mistake me, I think is a fine piece of work. But the hats-in-the-air response it got at the end of summer '92 seemed to have something to do with critics who'd endured a dreadful summer release schedule, and thought -- based on experience to dtae -- that an Eastwood western would only add to their drudgery. Once they'd offered up their wild enthusiasm, however, it set me (and others) up to expect a masterpiece -- not a few people I know felt let down a bit.

And this whole thing has only got worse in the current era. Not only do we have a hype machine that can make you sick of almost anything before you've even seen it -- because of mass-audience distaste for even faintly serious movies, studios (indies, esp.) have been forced into extreme-long-range publicity strategies. The rare Munich aside, most of the good grown-up movies we see will have been screened/chatted about/festivaled/publicized for many months before release -- it's the only way studios can get enough attention in a world of 250 channels and endless other distractions. Those of us obsessive enough to follow the whole path find ourselves absorbing opinions about a movie like Brokeback 4 months before we have a chance to see it. How can it not seem stale by then to many?

[The Original BJ]

Criddic, it's something I like to call the Titanic Syndrome. People who see a film before hype builds will inevitably cherish it more than people who see it after the hype has climaxed or is even at its apex. It's a standard event with films that have intense buzz surrounding them.

I think this phenom is so prevalent, we might as well start calling it the Titanic/American Beauty/Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon/In the Bedroom/Lost in Translation/Sideways/Million Dollar Baby/Brokeback Mountain/Junebug Syndrome. (That last one was for y'all around here.)

While I very much liked Brokeback Mountain, I found myself expressing my affection for the film coolly to friends and family, aware that the film they had heard was unbelievable had been beyond overrated by the time it even premiered. This phenom really does a number on small, character driven films, and every time the collective critical community comes out with hosannas blaring for another Lost in Translation/American Splendor/Sideways/Squid and the Whale, I wonder if they might be doing more of a service to this quirky films by tempering their enthusiasm only slightly.

One of the reasons 2005 was the most disappointing movie year in memory (IMO, although my memory doesn't nearly have the years some of you do), was partly due to the lack of quality, but it was also due to the over-hyped nature of EVERYTHING. Other than The Best of Youth, which lived up to its extraordinary hype, and Junebug, which I almost felt I discovered on its opening weekend, nearly all of my favorite films this year were, in some slight way, disappointing.

While the proliferation of media forms has certainly distracted audiences from movie theaters, I also think the Internet/entertainment news behemoth has hurt our ability to appreciate movies, the films now unseparable from their hype. Perhaps this was always the case, but it seems to me a problem that has escalated in recent years, especially as the mainstream public's taste has taken a nosedive.

Sometimes I can't stand it when some people (not you guys) argue that films like Brokeback/Sideways/insert any of the above films aren't "great" films. True, they may not be films for the canon, nor even the very best in their years; for the auteurist crowd extolling the virtues of the latest Jia Zhangke or Apichatpong Weerasethakul, I can completely understand the disbelief with the critical acclaim. However, for people who like mainstream movies, how were those films NOT some of the very best in their years? Sideways is no Eternal Sunshine, but if I have to hear one more person snobbishly tell me that it's "not a great piece of filmmaking," and then go on to yak interminably about the brilliance of Shrek 2 or Pirates of the Caribbean, I will freak.