Storm the Arthouse

New Yorker Films

As next week’s issue of this paper will prove conclusively, ’tis the season for list-making, when not just Santa Claus but movie critics and other pundits set about distilling the past 12 months into tidy inventories of naughty and nice. Even as I write, an e-mail pops up on my computer from the American Film Institute listing six “moments of significance” from the past year in film, as selected by a 13-member jury that included a handful of academics; critics David Denby, Kenneth Turan and David Thomson; and filmmakers Norman Jewison and Martha Coolidge. Among their chosen “moments” from 2005 were the continuing corporate consolidation of Hollywood — by which both the oldest (MGM) and the youngest (DreamWorks) of film studios were absorbed into larger conglomerates — and the precipitous downturn in theatrical attendance, as moviegoers opted for the company of their DVD players, video-game systems and big-screen televisions over the company of their fellow men. Once upon a time, the AFI’s press release reminds, “strangers came together in the dark and were awed by images of light and a story well told” — an experience that may soon seem as distant a cultural memory as vinyl records and the world before cell phones.

So does it come as any real surprise that a number of the best movies of 2005 have yet to appear in Los Angeles? I’m not talking about undistributed films, mind you, but rather movies that do have U.S. distributors yet still manage to bypass the supposed movie capital of the world. Movies like Marco Bellocchio’s Good Morning, Night, a coolly considered account of the 1978 kidnapping and assassination of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, which played to great acclaim at the 2003 Venice and Toronto film festivals. Good Morning, Night was acquired shortly thereafter by Wellspring Media and proceeded to sit on a shelf for the better part of the next two years before being quietly released on a single Manhattan screen last month. A couple of friends who saw it there said that the print was in dreadful condition. Despite strong reviews, it grossed all of $6,000 °©— roughly the cost of a thumbnail ad in The New York Times — and closed after two weeks. On February 25, Good Morning, Night will finally have its local premiere in a one-off screening at the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

As David Ehrenstein reported in these pages earlier this year, even rave reviews from the major daily newspapers are no longer any guarantee that a foreign-language picture will perform in New York, and most distributors and exhibitors remain of the opinion that if you can’t make it there, you can’t make it anywhere. Not that the news is especially encouraging for those movies that speak English as a first language. Just two weekends ago, Michael Almereyda’s scintillating sci-fi/film noir/romance Happy Here and Now opened on both coasts after nearly four years in distribution limbo and took in $1,800 in its first three days of release. (Just goes to show how far being the Film Pick of the Week in the L.A. Weekly will get you.) By comparison, Debra Granik’s excellent Down to the Bone, which recently won Best Actress honors (for star Vera Farmiga) from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, has amassed a relative fortune — $25,000 — since opening a month ago, which is still less than half of what Brokeback Mountain has been making on an average weekend at The Grove. No wonder then that at Indianapolis’ Keystone Art Cinema and Indie Lounge, the newest multiplex in the Landmark Theaters family, the current lineup includes not only Brokeback, but Syriana and Memoirs of a Geisha, collectively consuming more than half of the theater’s seven screens. Will the same programming philosophy reign supreme when Landmark (which proudly touts itself as the nation’s leading exhibitor of foreign and independent films) opens its long-in-the-works 14-screen multiplex at the Westside Pavilion in early 2007?

Raising such questions always risks earning the ire of distributors and exhibitors — who like to blame each other for their woes — to say nothing of readers. “Why do so many reviewers feel compelled to reference these obscure films that most of us have never even seen?” asks one of my recent correspondents, calling herself an “advocate for frustrated moviegoers” and proceeding to invoke the pleasures of Dukes of Hazzard and Fantastic Four while deriding those audiences who crave “some sort of intellectual stimulation from the screen.” For some reason, reading that letter brought to mind the image of a deranged mob setting fire to an art-house cinema, then dancing joyously amid the flaming ruins. So it is with due caution that your intrepid critic dons his asbestos jumpsuit and heads into the breach to offer a user’s guide to the best movies you couldn’t see — at least not in L.A. — in 2005:

The Far Side of the Moon

The Far Side of the Moon

Canadian film and theater director Robert LePage’s tour de force premiered at Toronto in 2003, and snuck into New York in early December. It will play San Francisco in February, but as of press time distributor TLA Releasing had not confirmed a Los Angeles booking. In the meantime, interested parties can order a copy of the Canadian DVD from www.amazon.ca. Nearly as impossible to describe as it is wondrous to behold, this deliriously clever human-scaled epic stars LePage himself in a spectacular dual performance as two radically different brothers — one a vain TV weatherman, the other a neurotic graduate student — each coping in his own way with feelings of solitude in this vast universe of ours. One resigns himself; the other explores, hoping against hope that he might better understand his own place in the cosmos and, just maybe, break free of the literal and figurative gravity that binds him to his lonely existence.