I was a little bummed to read that Cineplex Entertainment, the country’s largest cinema operator, has purchased Cinemark Tinseltown, the 10-theatre multiplex in the long-suffering International Village mall on the edge of Gastown.
Because of their moderately-edgy programming and light crowds (at least for matinees), they’ve been a favourite theatre of mine for years. Tom Charity (clearly a reviewer in need of his own web presence), quoted in the aforementioned Globe and Mail article, echoes my concerns:
“I think [Tinseltown’s] booking has been really quite courageous and very diverse. … They’ve shown a much wider range of films than you see at the Scotiabank, for example. They’ve been open to showing Canadian films and even subtitled films and they’ve been very open to the community to renting the theatre out to local festivals. And that may or may not change. The proof will be in the pudding. But if we look at what happens at the Scotiabank, that type of thing doesn’t happen very much.â€Â
Over the years, I’ve seen a number of Canadian and foreign films (as well as a lot of mainstream crud) at Tinseltown. It’s also been home to a number of film festivals, including the Vancouver Queer Film Festival.
The theatre has a special place in my heart because it’s the only one where, on two separate occasions, I was the only person in a cinema watching a movie (Boys Don’t Cry on Christmas eve, and a weekday matinee of the Irish film Intermission, in case you were wondering). I also stupidly almost got my man-purse stolen from one of their theatres, so there’s that.
Sadly, I expect that this acquisition will result in the mainstreaming of Tinseltown’s programming. That’d be too bad. I’ll drop Cineplex Entertainment a note asking them to keep the indie vibe in the movies they select.
Because I remember, way back in high school, that I could go to a movie on Tuesday night for the princely sum of $2.50. Now it’s $8.75 on Tuesday nights at Tinseltown. That’s quite a bit of inflation in twenty years.
Earlier this year, Alliance Films released “Polytechnique “, a French-Canadian movie based on the 1989 Montreal Massacre at the École Polytechnique. Here’s the trailer:
It’s been a busy year, and I’ve been living in indie-film-starved Victoria, but I totally missed this movie. Based on a few reviews and the trailer, I’m sorry to have not seen it in the cinema. Wikipedia indicates that, outside of Quebec, it was released in Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary. Did anybody see it?
Also, is this the first movie about the Montreal Massacre? It’s interesting that it took 20 years to produce–the incident seems like natural fodder for the docudrama treatment. Consider, by contrast, that we’ve already seen a few (several, even?) 9/11 movies.
One other note: Wikipedia says that “there were two versions of the film produced, one in English and one in French.” I wonder what that means. Did they shoot every scene twice?
Looking at the film’s financials, we see the classic problem of telling Canadian stories to Canadians. “Polytechnique” had a $6 million budget, and box office revenue of only $1.6 million. There’s more money to be made in DVD sales and broadcast rights (or whatever they’re called), but the producers are never going to recoup their costs.
I thought I’d observed this trend in recent movies. The best way I could figure to illustrate it was with a little video. I think it’s self-explanatory:
What do you think?
As an interesting side note, I first attempted to upload this video to YouTube. I didn’t use any movie or actor-specific terms in the title, description or tags, though I did identify the video category as ‘Movies’. The video was immediately blocked because my video “may include content that is owned or licensed by these content owners: Content owner: FOX Type: Audiovisual content.” Presumably they have some fancy image recognition software running to identify the video’s content.
I’m pretty sure my usage here falls under fair use in the US, but I’m not going to bother disputing YouTube’s automated system.
I was talking last night about how much of our home media consumption is time-shifted. We pretty much only watch shows that I’ve downloaded or recorded on the PVR. I only listen to radio via a few podcasts. I discover music on my own schedule, as opposed to MTV or the radio.
I started thinking, then, about how we could time-shift media we enjoy outside the home. I wondered if the digital distribution of movies to movie theatres meant that they could display the movies when I wanted, instead of according to their schedule?
Couldn’t they open up their schedule to voting? For example, what if I had twenty people from my office who wanted to attend a summer blockbuster at 4:00pm, but the movie is scheduled to run at 3:00pm and 5:30pm. Couldn’t we, hypothetically, visit the cinema’s website and vote to change the movie schedule for that day?
Once digital distribution is commonplace, a cinema should run entirely like any other shop at the mall. It has no requirement for a skilled and scheduled projectionist, so the movie schedule could change daily based on the whims of its patrons.
And seeing as we’re changing movie start times, why can’t we vote on which movies the cinema runs? The real answer is that the producers, distributors and cinemas have this farcically baroque system for scheduling movies and dividing up box office revenue. That could change, though. Just as MP3s, Napster and iTunes has tranformed the music distribution channel, technology shifts could change the way movie sales work.
A vote-for-upcoming-movies model would reduce the amount of guesswork that cinemas have to undertake when scheduling movies. Combined with the crowd’s ability to adjust the schedule, these changes might, in theory, increase the average attendance per showing.
Surely some independent cinemas have tried this model. Have you heard of any?
I have a small bladder, and often get a drink at the movies. So I’m often presented with the thorny problem of when to go to the bathroom during a film. I think I’m pretty good at picking the best moment, when I’m unlikely to miss any major plot points. Of course, the better the movie, the more difficult it is to choose the right time.
Yesterday James sent me a link to RunPee.com (via Gizmodo). The site is down at the moment–too much attention?–but it apparently promises a very special kind of movie review. RunPee will tell you, as you might have guessed, when you should run to the bathroom and pee. Yet another problem solved by the internet.
I was recently reading New Yorker magazine, and encountered a reference to a sub-genre of movies called “mumblecore”. From Wikipedia:
Mumblecore is an American independent film movement that arose in the early 2000s.It is primarily characterized by ultra-low budget production (often employing digital video cameras), focus on personal relationships between twenty-somethings, improvised scripts, and non-professional actors. Filmmakers in this genre include Lynn Shelton, Andrew Bujalski, Mark Duplass, Jay Duplass, Aaron Katz, Joe Swanberg, Todd Rohal and Ry Russo-Young.
Based on box office revenue and some crowd-sourced review sites I checked, mumblecore has yet to find its 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of the list in Wikipedia, I’d only heard of one of the films, Baghead, and I hadn’t even seen that one.
Truth be told, these films sound like dreadful, film school wankery. But, then, I’d better watch one or two before I actually pass judgment. Have you seen Baghead? Or maybe Dance Party USA?
On May 24, 1989 (I know the exact date thanks to this page), Rob Stover, Steve Lee and I cut out of Grade 10 afternoon classes. We drove (Steve had his license very early) all the way from our safe West Vancouver enclave over to the Stanley Theatre. We sat in the front row of the balcony and watched the first matinee show on the opening day of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
My friend Rob was a huge Indiana Jones fan, but it was a bit of a thrill for all of us. That was in the midst of my Premiere-reading period–I was a cinephile from early on.
The Stanley was a gorgeous cinema, and I miss seeing movies in that grand old space. It’s a lovely theatre, too, of course. It’s a pity the Arts Club doesn’t make consistently engaging shows to play inside it.
