Cinemas continue to close. In Detroit two art house palaces shut their doors in recent years – the
Main Art in Royal Oak and the
Maple Theater in West Bloomfield. Windsor has expanded cinema offerings with the new
Landmark in the former
Silver City. Great but its offerings are a carbon copy of the other area multiplexes. And thankfully the
Windsor International Film Festival (WIFF) has created a kind of monthly repertory series which helps fill the art house void. For me, the experience of watching a movie online and in a theatre is intrinsically different. And I’m trying to figure out why. I would/will drive miles and take great swaths of time out of my day, to go to a real live bricks and mortar movie house to see a film that looks even somewhat interesting. I also subscribe to
Netflix and the
Criterion Channel. For all intents and purposes Criterion is an art house cinema in your computer. Its array of independent and foreign films, and classic greats, is absolutely terrific. Besides a mammoth inventory there are monthly curated series like current films starring Penelope Cruz, Donald Sirk’s post-war noir, gritty 70s-era NY cinema, horror maestro David Cronenberg (photo) and a Vietnam War series. Yet I have to slog my way to the computer to watch. If even a small fraction of these films were featured at the local Bijou my interest would no doubt be excitedly piqued, I’d circle the date and clear my calendar to attend, forking over $10-$20 per. When my CC yearly sub is just over $130 with hundreds of movies at my fingertips - an incredible deal by comparison. It just doesn’t make sense. What’s the difference? Is it the actual getting-up-and-going experience to a physical entertainment venue that breaks up the monotony of being housebound? It it the “shared experience” with other moviegoers? It is that attending a cinema seems more of an “event”? It’s a conundrum that I feel won’t be broken.
I just finished watching
Leave the World Behind (Sam Esmail 2023) on
Netflix, starring Ethan Hawke, Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali and Kevin Bacon. It’s a mildly interesting horror thriller, enough to keep me watching to the end. But, my goodness, the similarities between Hawke and Bacon are uncanny. It’s not just Six Degrees of Separation (the famed Bacon cliché) but in this case, one.
More on movie wokeism, something which continues to turn me off cinema. My thoughts mirror those of UK columnist Sarah Vine, satirizing products she’d put tariffs on: “WOKE movie remakes: the all-women Ghostbusters; last year’s Mean Girls; Sex And The City without the sex, and now, disastrously, Snow White starring Rachel Zegler plus CGI dwarfs. Has Hollywood never heard of the phrase ‘Go woke, go broke’”?
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