There’s not much good about being unemployed, but my current state of joblessness did reintroduce me to a singular sensation and a long-forgotten experience: the weekday matinee.
Last Friday, while an ever-shrinking percentage of the American workforce went about their jobs, grimly hanging on, I took in a one o’clock show of “Gomorrah” at the Coolidge, entering the theater on a chill, sunny day during the endless month of March. (You know the rhyme: 30 days has September, April, June, and November/ All the rest have 31 except for blah, blah, blah. Well, that may be true in other parts of the world, but in New England I’m pretty sure March has about 62 days at least.)
Like most working people, my movie-going has been long limited to nighttime, specifically weekend nights, and I had pretty much forgotten how startling and sweet the transition can be from the harsh light of day to the comforting dark of the movie house. It was quite pleasurable not to have to wait for my popcorn, to be the first served. It was also a kick to see all the young moms arriving with their strollers and infants for the Coolidge’s “Box Office Babies” program. (The movie this afternoon was “The Reader” which, I must say, I didn’t think appropriate for tots.)
Inside, it was lovely to spread out in the theater, coat and hat tossed on an adjoining chair, feet up on the rail in front of the first row in the Coolidge’s second floor viewing room which, by the way, is architected to focus one’s attention on the big screen in a manner reminiscent of a screening room, only much larger. And then, suddenly, I was in Naples watching drugs peddled on the streets by little kids, fat guys in shorts and soccer shirts shooting each other in the head, toxic wastes getting dumped, and every other manner of murder and mayhem being committed in a post-industrial concrete wasteland hollowed out by the crimes of the Comorrah, the Neapolitan version of the Sicilian Mafia. As a corrective to the romantic view of the Mafia propagated by “The Godfather” movies (which I love, but not, of course, ‘Godfather III’) and, to a lesser extent “The Sopranos,” this is great stuff. It adds a “dis” to organized crime in both senses of the prefix. No honor among these thieves.
Then it’s over and I’m out of the warm darkness and into—surprise, surprise—the still-cold, still-bright afternoon light. How odd. How disorienting. It’s a bit like being born: bewildering and, in my current frame of mind, a little sad. Movies frequently mark the end of a day. After a matinee, there’s some afternoon and a whole evening left. (I fight the sadness by dropping into Starbucks for a caffeine java jolt.)
Anyway, as long as I’m out of work, it’s probably something I’ll do again. Maybe I’ll see you there. Whattaya think?
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Art, Politics, and Howard Zinn
Warming up with ‘Burn’ at the Coolidge Corner Theater
T.S. Elliot famously wrote that April was the cruelest month but, for my money, April, in Boston at least, ain’t got nothing on March. For that matter, all the months since last September (when I lost my job in the general economic meltdown) have been pretty cruel, except maybe for November, when Obama was elected and Bush booted.
But last Monday, standing on the corner of Harvard and Beacon in Brookline, the sun setting and the sleet spitting, the afterglow of Obama’s election provided but cold comfort as the chill crept into my bones. What I needed was a warm, well-lighted place (or a warm, dark place), and that’s how I ended up with both, at the Coolidge Corner Theater, a box of good butter-drizzled popcorn on my lap, listening to Matt Damon’s favorite radical historian (see “Good Will Hunting”), BU professor emeritus and author of “A People’s History of the United States” Howard Zinn introducing Gillo Pontecorovo’s 1970 anti-colonial epic, “Burn,” starring Marlon Brando.
The Coolidge’s big, gorgeous art deco main theater was about two-thirds filled with a chronologically heterogeneous crowd wearing Boston’s March uniform of parkas, watch caps, boots and red cheeks as Zinn, remarkably hale and hearty at 87, told the story of how he had tried to screen “Burn” for a class during the Vietnam War only to discover that United Artists had pulled it out of distribution. When Zinn called UA to ask why, he was told (he said) “because it’s a dirty, rotten, obscene film.” “Rotten to supporters of imperialism,” Zinn commented to much applause from an audience ready to boo colonialists, imperialists, capitalists, and anyone else who wouldn’t be caught dead listening to Zinn or watching Brando trying to represent all the evils of white male Western civilization in the person of his foppish English secret agent. (Think Fletcher Christian in “Mutiny on the Bounty.”)
“Burn” turned out to be more agitprop than drama, more politics than art as it told its story of a slave rebellion on the fictional Caribbean island of Queimada at first spurred on by Brando and then, ten years later, suppressed by the now-alcoholic and jaded secret agent man. Brando, with wavy blonde hair, a rugged blonde beard, wearing an array of brightly-colored scarves, was still slim and handsome then, and declared “Burn” his favorite performance ever. That’s silly (what about “On the Waterfront,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” or “Reflections in a Golden Eye”?) but Brando always felt a little embarrassed that he made his living doing something as lightweight as acting rather than something important like—I don’t know—leading revolutions against The Man?
Me, I’d be glad to be making a living doing anything these days, but as New England’s endless winter drags on and on and on, I’m grateful that the Coolidge Corner (http://www.coolidgecorner.org/) is there to offer warmth, snacks, and movies and programs that are out of the mainstream, out of the ordinary, and out of the cold.
T.S. Elliot famously wrote that April was the cruelest month but, for my money, April, in Boston at least, ain’t got nothing on March. For that matter, all the months since last September (when I lost my job in the general economic meltdown) have been pretty cruel, except maybe for November, when Obama was elected and Bush booted.
But last Monday, standing on the corner of Harvard and Beacon in Brookline, the sun setting and the sleet spitting, the afterglow of Obama’s election provided but cold comfort as the chill crept into my bones. What I needed was a warm, well-lighted place (or a warm, dark place), and that’s how I ended up with both, at the Coolidge Corner Theater, a box of good butter-drizzled popcorn on my lap, listening to Matt Damon’s favorite radical historian (see “Good Will Hunting”), BU professor emeritus and author of “A People’s History of the United States” Howard Zinn introducing Gillo Pontecorovo’s 1970 anti-colonial epic, “Burn,” starring Marlon Brando.
The Coolidge’s big, gorgeous art deco main theater was about two-thirds filled with a chronologically heterogeneous crowd wearing Boston’s March uniform of parkas, watch caps, boots and red cheeks as Zinn, remarkably hale and hearty at 87, told the story of how he had tried to screen “Burn” for a class during the Vietnam War only to discover that United Artists had pulled it out of distribution. When Zinn called UA to ask why, he was told (he said) “because it’s a dirty, rotten, obscene film.” “Rotten to supporters of imperialism,” Zinn commented to much applause from an audience ready to boo colonialists, imperialists, capitalists, and anyone else who wouldn’t be caught dead listening to Zinn or watching Brando trying to represent all the evils of white male Western civilization in the person of his foppish English secret agent. (Think Fletcher Christian in “Mutiny on the Bounty.”)
“Burn” turned out to be more agitprop than drama, more politics than art as it told its story of a slave rebellion on the fictional Caribbean island of Queimada at first spurred on by Brando and then, ten years later, suppressed by the now-alcoholic and jaded secret agent man. Brando, with wavy blonde hair, a rugged blonde beard, wearing an array of brightly-colored scarves, was still slim and handsome then, and declared “Burn” his favorite performance ever. That’s silly (what about “On the Waterfront,” “A Streetcar Named Desire,” or “Reflections in a Golden Eye”?) but Brando always felt a little embarrassed that he made his living doing something as lightweight as acting rather than something important like—I don’t know—leading revolutions against The Man?
Me, I’d be glad to be making a living doing anything these days, but as New England’s endless winter drags on and on and on, I’m grateful that the Coolidge Corner (http://www.coolidgecorner.org/) is there to offer warmth, snacks, and movies and programs that are out of the mainstream, out of the ordinary, and out of the cold.
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