Summer Cinema and Art House Films
This morning on my coffee walk I was thinking I hadn’t seen either the new Spiderman block buster that is out, nor The Odessey. But, big summer block busters are something I do, but my deep enjoyment is the late summer art house films.
Thamara today posted about cinema (Cinema - Thamara Kandabada ) and frames the local cinema really well. Growing up I went to see films with my parents and saw many I was way too young to see. But, there was an art house theater in Portland that we went to a few times and the theater was small and not like the big chain theaters. When we moved to Pacific Palisades we were a few blocks from the Palisades movie theater with two screens and it was just under a dollar to go. The movies were second run or small films, but often going in I’d see a director or actors I knew who were catching an afternoon showing. If there was something of interest I may head their after school (once football season was over) to see one or two movies, and often meet a friend to join along.
Summer Cinema Kicks In
I always enjoyed going to the cinema. But, it wasn’t until I was in college that I really kicked in. I had a great course on Media Criticism and we watched a lot of movies and learned to critique them (many Hitchcock films, The Killing Fields, All the President’s Men, Three Days of Condor and so much more).
The college paper had a regular reviewer who focused on two-sentence reviews of the big movies that were out (which he got reviewed comped tickets to). I knew the editor of the paper and the local small cinema in Lafayette had called and asked if the paper wanted to send someone to review the Spike Lee film She’s Gotta Have It and I was offered the free ticket and some small cash payment. I loved the film and I was hooked not only on Spike Lee, but art house films from then on. I wrote a four to six paragraph review and the local theater liked it and my professors enjoyed it and how I approached the review.
That prior summer I was living in Berkeley and working a couple jobs (one at the college doing odd construction projects around campus (one was reinforcing one of the freshman men’s dorm hallway walls so they wouldn’t try to put their heads through it - ¾ inch plywood and ½ inch sheetrock made it quieter, stronger, and if you slammed a door the walls wouldn’t wobble for 40 to 60 feet) and running room service at the Oakland Airport Hilton). So, I had a little cash for movies and I saw a lot. Ferris Bueller, Top Gun, Aliens, Stand by Me, Ruthless People, Short Circuit, Running Scared, About Last Night, and in a art house retrospective theater A Room with a View (which I would see many times over the next couple years). A Room with a View had me hooked on the small art house theaters with good films that ran in them. This set me up for She’s Gotta Have it.
I regularly kept my eye on the small art house theaters for what was on in Lafayette, Berkeley, and San Francisco. When I moved to Oxford for a term (plus), the Penultimate Picture Palace (PPP) just over the Cowley bridge was a members cinema and would have a nights of double and triple features of films a couple years old or more with a theme for the night. I paid the member ship fee (which I believe included access or discounts at Not the Moulin Rouge up the hill in Headington). One of the first films I caught at the PPP was A Room with a View, but with the audience there it wasn’t a romantic period piece is was a comedy with a lot of hard laughter and many sprinkled in chuckles. A couple months later it played again elsewhere in Oxford and by this point I understood enough of the culture and found it really was a comedy and it made it even more of a wonderful movie for me.
Post College the Small Cinema Enchantment Continues
Post-college, San Francisco had an abundance of small cinemas and retrospective cinema houses with their own quirks. But, summer art house gems with the walking in from a warm sunny day for a treat of a film and walking out to chilly damp fog, which was perfect for conversation, coffee, and shared introspection.
Moving to the DC area, it too had an abundance of small art house cinemas. But, somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, they started to close and get converted to other businesses. Georgetown had three or four, Foggy Bottom had a couple, and DuPont Circle had a couple or more. The summers in grad school were a great time to catch a good film at a small cinema.
Today the Options are Sparce
There are a few places around, but the business models went chasing more money. There is a community cinema a few miles away and a little farther away is the American Film Institute theater, but I haven’t been to that much. Walking distance there is a small multi-screen theater that used to only run art house and independent films on its four screens, but now it is one or two movies of six or seven playing that get a showing here or there on the schedule.
I still try to track down the summer independent small movies, but now mostly watch at home. I do watch the same to movies every summer on disks I own, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Bring on the Night, which is the Michael Apted film about Sting putting together his first band after The Police. Both scream summer to me and the enjoyment of films that to me have a lot of things to consider within them.