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This Week's Attitude
I enjoy movies. I have since I was a youngster. Some even qualify as benchmarks for certain events in my life. Of course, as I've matured (there are some who might argue that perception), my tastes have become more sophisticated. Yet every now and then I find myself watching an old favorite that lacks quality and substance, yet suffices as a temporary, entertaining distraction from reality. Nowadays, I still long for quality movies, but each passing year there seem to be fewer that suit my liking. I'm also getting more finicky about what I want to see and think I'll enjoy. This year's Best Picture Academy Award® nominees weren't my cup of tea - and didn't come near approaching any record-breaking box office grosses - though I managed to see two of them and was not extremely impressed enough by "The Departed," despite its Best Picture award, or "Little Miss Sunshine" to look forward to watching them over and over, which is a condition that makes a movie Neilworthy. I don't much care about seeing "The Queen," despite the Helen Mirren's Oscar-winning performance and I'll catch up with the acclaimed "Babel" and Clint Eastwood's highly praised "Letters From Iwo Jima" on DVD. A Neilworthy motion picture is one that after repeated viewing still gratifies and reveals minor nuances and inflections, like the way an actor phrases a line or reacts to other players, I may have previously overlooked, but caught my attention the second, third or succeeding time around. "The Maltese Falcon" is an excellent example. I've seen it more than a dozen times, yet each subsequent viewing reveals more of the skilled rapport between the stars - Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor - and the Warner Brothers' cast of supporting actors - Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre and Elisha Cook, Jr., among them - who John Huston brilliantly directs. Twenty years ago, I might have gone to the movies a couple of times a month. I rarely go anymore. Nevertheless, there's nothing quite like watching a motion picture on a floor-to-ceiling screen in a darkened movie house - despite the increasing sales of large high definition and plasma TVs. These days I prefer to rent a wide screen DVD and watch it from the comfort of my sofa on my modest 32-inch screen with the remote close at hand to pause the film in case of unwanted interruptions or a compulsory trip to the bathroom. I don't have a genre preference. Give me a well-written, well-acted movie that grabs my attention in the first ten minutes and I'm hooked for the next 90 or so minutes whether it's dramas, thrillers, science fiction, horror or comedies. I'd be hard-pressed to list three favorites, but I could easily expand the list to 10 I've seen again and again over and over. And, I don't mind black and white oldies, many of which are true classics, like "Casablanca," that many younger people shun. As a matter of fact, at least half movies on my list would be black & white features. A typical Saturday afternoon in my youth, when the weather wasn't ideal enough to be outdoors or there was something I was eager to see, consisted of getting together with a few friends - a group of anywhere from two to ten - and walking to the local "itch," which was the Graham Theater on Whitney Avenue in Gerritsen Beach, just a few short blocks from my childhood home. Every neighborhood had its own "itch." You know, an old, rundown theater with gooey substances on the floor that your shoes stuck to and wads of gum on the seats that you weren't aware of until you went to the candy stand for stale popcorn and a box of Jujubes, Goobers or Nonpareils. (When you got home later your mother would inevitably ask how you could sit in gum.) The "itch" always reeked from a combination of stale popcorn and other odors that weren't always identifiable, but were, nonetheless, mildly foul. Before the feature, the typical show included cartoons and sometimes the latest episode of a serialized adventure ("Flash Gordon" and "Tim Tyler" readily come to mind) where the hero always wound up in a contrived predicament that he'd overcome the following week before ending up in another jam. (They were the forerunners of the hit TV series "24" minus the politically-intricate plots.) The feature, at times, was the latest American International or Hammer Films horror flick ("House of Wax" and "The House on Haunted Hill") in which characters get slaughtered one by one until the protagonist confronts and overcomes the fiend threatening to off his girlfriend. Or it may have been a science-gone-awry movie (like "Them" or "Godzilla") in which some genetically altered monster - usually the result of post-World War II atomic bomb tests - wreaked chaos in New York, Los Angeles or Tokyo. Then there were a bunch of memorable sci-fi flicks ("Invaders From Mars" and "Destination Moon," to name two) about imagined space exploration or Earth-invading aliens. The special effects were primitive compared to modern computer-generated wizardry, but to my friends and I just looking to be thrilled, they were awesome. Though I still enjoy well-made contemporary movies ("Crash," "Munich" and "Good Night and Good Luck"), I can't stand the crop (and the crap) of today's productions that tend to lack clever scripts in favor of overwhelming computerized special effects. That's because those movies are geared towards young audiences seeking the excellence they're accustomed to in video games they grew up with and frequently indulge in, as well as the simple thrills my friends and I sought years ago. Lamenting the dearth of quality movies compared to "the good ol' days" is, I guess, a combination of nostalgia and an aversion to youth-oriented contemporary pictures. As a member of the first cluster of Baby Boomers, the autumn of life is upon us, but those Saturday afternoons at the movies remain a memorable part of our lives. At this point, I want to roar like the MGM lion that closed many classic movies before the screen faded to black.
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