It seems the only prudent thing to do is go to the movies. Actually leave the house and go to the cinema. I cannot for the life of me think of anything else or anything better to do in this situation, as the circus wagons trundle toward Washington, the elephant in his cage, Stephen Miller smirking in striped tights, Elise Stefanik in juggler’s sequins, Lee Zeldin with a too-small top hat perched on his head, carrying the lion-tamer’s whip.
Can you hear the music from the calliope?
The ticket-sale action has picked up a bit in recent weeks down at the Regal Cinema on Main Street. I went to see “Conclave” a few days ago and the seats were actually half full, more crowded than I’ve seen an auditorium since before the pandemic.
I do like a good movie about moral ambiguity. Have you seen “The Two Popes,” with Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins as dueling pontiffs in miter and red shoes? It’s even better than “Conclave.” I also admired the way the Regal theater manager had decorated the lobby with rolls and rolls of Christmas gift wrap and colored holiday lights, as part of a lobby-decorating competition tied to the promotion of “Red One,” the “Christmas action-adventure fantasy comedy” starring Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson.
Holiday-movie season is upon us, and it couldn’t come at a better moment, as far as the mental soothing and panic-distraction of the coastal elites goes. Brain-numbing-wise, I mean.
I’ve decided November 2024 is finally the ripe moment to invest in the Regal Cinema’s Unlimited pass, which gives you a subscription to watch as many movies as you want “for less than the cost of two tickets a month.” It’s highly likely I will want to go see Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator II” twice, for starters. I saw the original “Gladiator,” starring the magnificent Russell Crowe in his post-”Romper Stomper” prime, six times in the theater when it came out in that unforgettable year, 2000. Yep, six times. Tying my personal cinema-watching record with Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas.” What we do in life echoes in eternity.
That’s a quote from “Gladiator,” for you non-”Gladiator” fans out there: What we do in life echoes in eternity.
The movies are my lexicon. I find occasions not infrequently to quote not just “Gladiator” but Ridley Scott’s other two masterpieces, “Thelma and Louise” and “Blade Runner.” I saw both of those more than once, each, at the then-United Artists on Main Street, too, when they opened in 1991 and 1982 respectively.
From “Blade Runner”: Everything is true. Everything anybody has ever thought.
Despite being a lifelong movie buff who could pick John Barrymore out of a lineup by the time I was 13, I made the decision not to go into filmmaking myself — as a vocation — when I was a junior in boarding school, because, I thought, it would have represented a trespass into hobby territory already occupied by my elder brother, David. Siblings need to keep their hobbies straight and stick to their lanes. I was offered the chance to take a moviemaking course at boarding school, but my brother created Super 8 home movies with friends and kept a film-developer’s darkroom with Mike Light at the back of Oddfellows Hall on Newtown Lane. I don’t remember much about those homemade movies but I believe they blew things up with fireworks and used ketchup as fake blood. I have been regretting this demurral to go into moviemaking ever since.
On Sunday morning I went to the Sag Harbor Cinema for the Festival of Preservation, to catch a panel discussion. Art lifts us, psychologically, from the tightening mental vice of the global-capitalist-slash-authoritarian hegemony, as Trumpism beats liberal democracy to a pulp. An executive from Universal showed a PowerPoint about the restoration of Woody Woodpecker cartoons, and the South Fork’s own Joe Lauro, who runs the Historic Films Archive of 16-millimeter footage, showed clips from a lost 1915 silent movie about Abraham Lincoln that he and an intern unearthed to their astonishment in a storage unit in August.
“Gladiator”: We, who are about to die, salute you!
Later, the festival-goers watched a selection of home movies from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. For me, the highlight of these home movies was Charlie Chaplin capering half-naked in a little girl’s lace frock — you saw London, you saw France, you saw Charlie Chaplin’s underpants — in home movies at Pickfair, and, also, some stunningly gorgeous footage from the early 1930s of Serge Lifar of the Paris Opera Ballet dancing improvisationally on a rooftop. You may remember Serge Lifar not so much as a ballet impresario but as a Nazi collaborator. As I say, I do love art that helps us think about moral ambiguity.
Everyone in the audience at the Preservation Festival seemed to know one another by first name. There was much backtalk to the presenters at the podium and vocal commentary about what was unfolding on the screen. My kind of movie people. I love it when the audience talks back to the screen. One of my all-time favorite cinema experiences — up there with witnessing the famous triptych screening of the 1927 silent “Napoleon” at Radio City with a live orchestra when I was 13, and the “world premiere engagement” opening night of “A Room With a View” at the Paris on Fifth Avenue on March 7, 1986 — was seeing “Christmas With the Kranks” at the Regal on Court Street in Brooklyn, a nonstop audience riot, with more hoots of comedy in the seats and aisles than on the screen. Movie back chat should be in the American Constitution. Frank O’Hara would agree: Don’t shush me.
I’m going to be lowering my head and ducking into the cinema this holiday season to see “Moana 2”; “The Return,” with Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus returning to Ithaca (!); “The Count of Monte Cristo”; “Elephant Steps”; “Nosferatu”; “The Damned,” which is an Italian-produced drama about the American Civil War to which I say heck, yes, and “A Complete Unknown,” the Bob Dylan biopic, though I can already anticipate that “A Complete Unknown” will involve a lot of audible backtalk from me that will annoy the London-France-pants off friends seated near me. I’m a Timothee Chalamet dissenter. And I can do without “Wicked.” I never liked that one-tune musical in the first place.
Meanwhile, if you linger out on the street, you can hear the calliope as it pipes out a sinister, reedy rendition of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.”
Can you hear it?
The Trump administration would like to replace the entire Department of Education with obedient Christian-nationalist ideologues, not just because Trump would prefer that the epic, 400-year sweep of American racism wasn’t discussed in American history class but because he resents anyone who knows what the words “miter” and “calliope” mean or remembers who Odysseus was. Education is a class crime. (Does this new anti-intellectualism ring any bells? I direct this question to those of you who weren’t napping in history class. Hint, hint: Watch “Farewell My Concubine.”)
Mind your step, you readers, you eggheads.
Take cover, you “Napoleon” watchers. The ringmaster cometh.