Nuart Theater Not Quite Hollywood Tuesday 8/4/09, 7:30 pm
Price: $10.50. Concessions: Gummi bears. Audience: 12 out of 660 seats, unsurprising for a sort of obscure doc on a weeknight. Trailers/advertising: Lots. Ads for the L.A. Times starring Michael Bay, HDNet and HDNet Movies, Stella Artois, the Palm Pre, and Tanqueray gin. Trailers for Still Walking, Five Minutes of Heaven, Beeswax, Taxidermia and Somers Town. Projection: 35mm platter.
It’s about this point in the week when I start to wonder why I did this, and think of all of the things I could be getting done at night other than driving to another movie theater. But the theater and film for tonight were especially inviting: the Nuart is a five-minute drive from our house, with easy metered parking, and the movie was an entertaining movie about entertaining movies, so it wasn’t a particularly demanding evening.
I’ve only been to the Nuart a few times before, but it’s a great theater that fills the revival niche: I saw El Topo and Pierrot le fou there, both of which were playing during at least a week-long run, which I can’t imagine them getting anywhere else in L.A. As the previews rolled, something happened that had never happened before: I saw a trailer that featured a blurb from someone I actually know, writing in praise of the film. That was interesting enough, but then I actually recognized someone in the movie whom I know, totally unrelated to the first person. Admittedly, it is the new Andrew Bujalski movie, not the latest Scorsese picture, so it’s a lot more likely I’d know someone in one of his films, but still, it was funny.
The feature, about Australian genre films of the 1970s and 1980s, was fun, an energetically made film that was essentially a combination of interviews and film clips. They interviewed a lot of people – according to the thanks at the end, nearly 100? – and the film clips were uniformly from films I’d never heard of. In fact, the only movies I’d heard of, besides Mad Max, were the ones they made fun of as the stodgy, mainstream films aimed at overseas audiences. Great. I shouldn’t be surprised, though, as my movie-watching life really started in high school, and I went right for the foreign, the arty, and the classic, with very little time for the bad movies normal kids usually watch. Quentin Tarantino was somehow our guide, as it were, through the films, which sounds like it might not be a good thing, but for whatever reason, I find his demeanor and infectious enthusiasm for film a lot more charming these days than I used to. Maybe it’s his behind-the-scenes support of the local movie-going world that has changed my mind.
I didn’t really need those gummi bears, but I’m tired of writing “Concessions: none,” and they were gone before the previews were over, so I guess they weren’t that bad.
