Virtual art house abounds

For people locked down in their homes during the Covid-19 pandemic one of the biggest silver linings is the fact most of us have almost endless sources of entertainment to amuse ourselves. Once’s tempted to say: there’s not a better time to have a mass shut-in! There are television and online options galore like Turner Classic Movies (TCM), Netflix, Criterion Channel, HBO, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Google Play, iTunes and other TV movie-oriented channels. But even art house theatres, by public order closed to the public, are making movies available online. Such is the case with the Detroit Film Theatre and Ann Arbor’s Michigan Theatre. (The Landmark’s Main and The Maple Theater are offering no virtual programming.) The DFT currently has available What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, Rob Garver’s doc about the famous – perhaps world’s most famous – film critic, once of The New Yorker (photo abive). It’s also screening D. M. Young’s The Booksellers, a doc on the wonderful and sometimes quirky world of antiquarian bookshops. The Michigan Theatre opens today with Andrew Ahn’s Driveways starring Brian Dennehy, and has other openings throughout the weekend. Most of the films run about $10 US and can be paid thru PayPal. For Canadians, other cinemas couldn’t be accessed. For example, Cinema Detroit’s online offerings are only available in the US. Currently it’s screening Abner Pastoll's A Good Woman is Hard to Find, Lara Gallagher’s Clementine and Bartosz Konopka’s Sword of God. Some famous US art house cinemas are also screening online such as New York’s Film Forum. However, there's no access for Canadian cinephiles. Puzzled over what films to watch? The Windsor International Film Festival's (WIFF) director Vincent Georgie sends out email updates. (WIFF obviously had to suspend its monthly screenings at the The Capitol Theatre.) Today’s email suggestions have been WIFF People’s Choice Award festival favorites over the years. There’s  2011’a In Darkness (Agnieszka Holland), 2012’s The Intouchables (Eric Toledano & Olivier Nakache) – a perennially screened WIFF film – and 2013’s (tied) Gabrielle (Louise Archambault) and Short Term 12 (Destin Daniel Cretton), available on streaming services.

What have I been watching over the past week? I caught Harold Pinter’s Betrayal on YouTube. Pinter wrote the screenplay in this 1983 flic directed by David Hugh Jones and staring a very young Jeremy Irons, Patricia Hodge and a Ben Kingsley with actual hair! On TCM’s weekend Noir Alley I caught Otto Preminger’s Fallen Angel (1945) with Dana Andrews, Alice Faye, John Carradine and Linda Darnell. And on Netflix I re-watched (I’d mostly forgotten it) Nicole Holofcener’s 2018 The Land of Steady Habits with Edie Falco and Ben Mendelsohn (photo).