Film notes: what city am I in again?

Attending at the opening night of Woody Allen’s To Rome With Love earlier this summer I realized Windsor wasn’t alone in having a miniscule audience for this kind of movie. I was staying in Providence, RI, a well-known “Ivy League” college town – home of Brown University and a significant art college, no less – and the screening I attended opening night had perhaps a dozen people at it. I had to scratch my head: was I at Silver City or Devonshire?

Another hilarious story about French actor Gérard Depardieu. Poor Gérard. This time he was in trouble with the law for a road rage incident en Paris. Last time we looked it was for him, a notorious drinker, urinating in the aisle of an airplane. Well, at least the actor is true to his garrulous and bull in a china shop roles....Speaking of M. Depardieu, a new film Small World, has the actor as a kind of can’t-get-rid-of-him old friend of the family, a bit mentally off, who brings up embarrassing memories at all the wrong times. The Montreal Gazette’s film critic calls the move a “predictable psycho-drama” but “worth seeing” just for Depardieu. I can bet.

The Maple Theater is finally closed for renovations after a new company took the Bloomfield Hills threeplex over from Landmark Theatres over the past year. Virtually everyone I speak to says the good ol’ Maple is in need of a facelift. I won’t argue. But my expectations are never that high. I’m just happy that there’s another art house/independent theatre showing largely non-mainstream films.

Canada’s Financial Post seems to have started an “At the Movies” column on its opinion page. Yesterday Philip Cross took aim at the political subtext of The Hunger Games, yet another Hollywood left wing stab at the hand that feeds it – the capitalist system. (And Hollywood has got to be one of greatest examples of "dog-eat-dog" capitalism around!) Cross describes the film as class warfare and having an underwhelming interpretation of economics – Third World exploitation and all that. “The film demonstrates an adolescent’s understanding of how life and markets work.” Sounds fitting.