Flashback: The Crest and the Clyde

 

    Two weeks before I saw "Barbie" at the Clyde last summer, I saw "Oppenheimer" at the Crest. So I guess you could say I did the "Barbenheimer" thing, only not on the same day, or even in the same week. 

    The Crest is a fourplex in Shoreline, just north of Seattle, and for a long time it's been everybody's favorite bargain house. Tickets used to be $3, and then they were $4, and now they're up to $9 or more, depending on when you go to the movies. "Oppenheimer" and "Barbie" were both playing there, and when Ms. Applebaum and I came out after "Oppenheimer" ended, the "Barbie" people were lined up out the door, most of them in pink, except for one guy wearing nothing but black. We figured he had to be Goth Ken. 

    So we could've seen both movies right then, assuming "Barbie" wasn't sold out, but after three hours of "Oppenheimer", we decided to get pizza instead. 

    The Clyde is a one-screen cinema in Langley (population 1,150) on the south end of Whidbey Island. It opened in 1937, owned and operated by the Clyde family, who also ran the local garage and gas station. More than 80 years on, the Clyde survives by mixing it up with a diverse selection of revivals, art-house features, documentaries and commercial hits. 

    The manager was standing by the door when we went up to buy our tickets, wearing a pink T-shirt and greeting folks as they came in. He said they no longer bother with a separate senior price because at least half of the people who go to the Clyde are seniors, anyway. Tickets are $10. 

    Before the movie started, he took a couple of minutes to plug the shows that were coming up: "Grease" and "Best In Show" on revival nights, and (or course) "Oppenheimer" and more screenings of "Barbie". He added a brief pitch for a local school bond measure scheduled for the fall ballot, and then the room turned dark and the world turned pink. 

    A couple of things I've noticed going to the movies in and around Seattle since the pandemic. Weekday matinees, there are usually no more than eight or ten people in the theater, and sometimes not that many. It's almost a private screening, though in the last few months, those numbers appear to be picking up again. And at the Crest and the Clyde both, a significant percentage of those watching are old. 

    I imagine the numbers would skew differently for the latest "Transformers" or "Fast and Furious" or Marvel Universe movie, but it suggests that for now, at least, there's still an audience out there of people in their 50s and 60s and 70s, who will pay to see (more or less) grownup movies on a big screen, as long as they don't have to take out a bank loan to do it. 

    Even if the movie's derived from a toy and its primary color is pink.

Gulpilil: One Red Blood (2002)

 

GULPILIL: ONE RED BLOOD  (2002)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Darlene Johnson

A documentary portrait of Australian actor David Gulpilil, whose charismatic presence in dozens of movies had a profound effect on how Aborigines are perceived and depicted in the country's culture, and in particular in its films. For all his fame and stature in the industry, Gulpilil probably lived the least affluent and least glamorous existence of any movie star ever, and the film is about anthropology as much as cinema, with its subject spending most of his time away from movie projects in the primitive outback settlement he called home. That makes this useful for the cultural background it provides - the idea apparently was Gulpilil's own - but a more comprehensive look at his movies would be nice, too. Starting with "Walkabout" in 1970, Gulpilil's career on the screen lasted almost 50 years. He retired in 2019 and died in 2021, age unknown.

The Great Man Votes (1939)

 

THE GREAT MAN VOTES  (1939)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Garson Kanin

    John Barrymore, Virginia Weidler, Peter Holden,

    Katharine Alexander, Donald MacBride, Benny Bartlett, 

    Granville Bates, Luis Alberini, William Demarest

John Barrymore plays an ex-college professor and single dad doing his best to raise a couple of kids while working as a night watchman and putting away significant quantities of bootleg hooch. When a corrupt ward heeler comes around hoping to secure his vote in an upcoming election, he sees a glimmer of hope, or at least a chance to make things better for the kids. Barrymore was having serious memory issues by this time, and apparently read most of his lines off cue cards, but he had the skill to pull that off and appears to be having a good time doing it. It's a funny and affecting late-career performance. The movie's take on how electoral politics works out in the precincts and down in the streets is not reassuring. 

Double Trouble (1915)

 

DOUBLE TROUBLE  (1915)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Christy Cabanne

    Douglas Fairbanks, Margery Wilson, Gladys Brockwell,

    Richard Cummings, Olga Grey, Lillian Langdon

Early Fairbanks, with Doug as an amnesiac who comes to after five years to find he's got a split personality. It's more Mack Sennett than Robin Hood, and while there's barely a trace of Fairbanks the swashbuckler, that would come soon enough.

Dark Crimes (2016)

DARK CRIMES  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Alexandros Avranas

    Jim Carrey, Marton Csokas, Charlotte Gainsbourg,

    Kati Outinen, Piotr Głowacki, Robert Wieckiewicz

The frequently manic Jim Carrey gives a tense, understated performance as a police detective obsessed with cracking a cold case that involves a sex club, a murder and a writer whose work suggests he knows more than he should. It's a dirty business all around, and nobody, including the detective, is completely innocent. The story's set in an unnamed Eastern European country (it was shot in Poland), and the transition from communism to what comes next is still going on and hangs over everything. A noirish whodunit with a good international cast playing characters trapped in a maze they can never quite escape, going through the motions because there's nothing else they can do. The plot keeps you guessing, the mood is fatalistic, the colors are muted, and even Charlotte Gainsbourg looks burned out. 

The Creation of the Humanoids

 

THE CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS 

    D: Wesley Barry                      (1962)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    Don Megowan, Erica Elliott, Frances McCann,

    Don Doolittle, Dudley Manlove, David Cross

In the aftermath of an atomic war, robots have taken over much of the work that humans used to do. What will happen when a new generation of robots (created by robots) achieve the ability to reproduce? Odd but interesting low-budget 

sci-fi, really just a series of philosophical discussions about the evolving relationship between androids and humans in a society where humans are about to become irrelevant. Its key themes would resurface years later in the "Blade Runner" films. The actors who play the robots look like they're about to crack up.

The Good Liar (2019)

THE GOOD LIAR  (2019)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: Bill Condon 

    Helen Mirren, Ian McKellen, Russell Tovey,

    Jim Carter, Phil Dunster, Laurie Davidson

An old guy amed Brian, who claims he doesn't smoke, and an old woman named Estelle, who claims she doesn't drink, meet on a computer date, and you learn fairly quickly that a) he smokes, b) she drinks, and c) their names aren't Brian and Estelle. That's just the beginning of this twisty mystery, and those little deceptions are minor compared to what follows. You may or may not see the switchbacks coming, but either way, you're in good hands. Mirren and McKellen are in control all the way.

Blindman (1971)

 

BLINDMAN  (1971)  ¢ ¢

    D: Ferdinando Baldi

    Tony Anthony, Ringo Starr, Lloyd Batista,

    Raf Baldasarre, Magda Konopka, Agneta Eckmyr, 

    Marisa Solinas, Franz von Treuberg, Shirley Corrigan

Tony Anthony tries to pretend he's Charles Bronson in a pointless (and pointlessly brutal) spaghetti western about a blind gunman who takes on a horde of murderous Mexicans while trying to get 50 mail-order brides to their prospective husbands in Texas. In fact, he spends most of the movie trying to spring the women from captivity at the hands of bandits or the Mexican army, and he's no closer to getting the job done at the end than he was when the story began. Shots and even whole scenes in this are lifted from other, better spaghetti westerns, and Stelvio Cipriani's musical score owes everything to Ennio Morricone. Some bits stand out for their sheer bizarreness. One is the scene where the women, running barefoot through the desert, are chased down by men on horseback, who hunt them like animals. Another is the funeral of a bandit named Candy (played by Ringo Starr), in which all the sets and costumes are black-and-white. Ringo doesn't do much and gets killed off too soon. Anthony had a hand in the screenplay, so he can't blame anybody else for his lame one-liners. One thing he does make clear: He's not Charles Bronson. 

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977)

 

DEATH BED: THE BED THAT EATS  (1977)  ¢ 1/2

    D: George Barry

    Demene Hall, Julie Ritter, Rosa Luxemburg,

    Dave Marsh, William Russ, Linda Bond

A silly, artsy horror comedy (and a minor cult item) about an omnivorous bed and the unlucky souls it traps between the sheets. This gets a few points for sheer craziness, but not much else. Sleep tight and bon appetit.

City of Fear (1959)

CITY OF FEAR  (1959)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: Irving Lerner

    Vince Edwards, Lyle Talbot, John Archer, 

    Steven Ritch, Patricia Blair, Kelly Thordsen,

    Joseph Mell, Sherwood Price, Cathy Browne

A low-budget variation on "Panic In the Streets", about a murderer who escapes from San Quentin with a canister he believes contains a pound of uncut heroin. What it really contains is enough radioactive cobalt-60 to wipe out Los Angeles. Shoot up a little of that sometime and see what happens. Jerry Goldsmith composed the music and Lucien Ballard did the cinematography.

Cheeseheads (2015)

CHEESEHEADS  (2015)  ¢ ¢ 1/2

    D: John Mitchell 

A cheesehead returns to Wisconsin after 20 years to find out whether the place he remembers has changed, or whether he has. There's a lot of potential in this - Wisconsin's a place where regional eccentricity has evolved into a statewide cottage industry - but the movie ultimately plays it safe. It's exactly the sort of inoffensive, self-congratulatory promotional piece the Chamber of Commerce would love - a good-parts-only tour of a pastoral paradise where friendly people work hard and drink beer and eat cheese curds and root for the Packers. Which is okay, I suppose, if that's all you want to look at, or all you want people to see. You won't find any dirt on the sidewalk in a movie like this. 

Bullet Train (2022)

 

BULLET TRAIN  (2022)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: David Leitch

    Brad Pitt, Joey King, Logan Lerman, Hiroyuki Sanada,

    Aaron Taylor Johnson,, Brian Tyree Henry, Bad Bunny,

    Michael Shannon, Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum

A funny, fast-paced blast-o-rama shoot-'em-up about a bunch of assassins trying to kill each other on an express train bound for Kyoto from Tokyo. What can you say about a hyperviolent live-action cartoon that borrows equally from Quentin Tarantino and Thomas the Tank Engine? Well, if you can handle the absurd level of mayhem involved, you could say it's a guilty pleasure. And a great popcorn movie.

The Big Premiere (1940)

 

THE BIG PREMIERE  (1940)  ¢ ¢ 

    D: Edward L. Cahn

    George "Spanky" McFarland, Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer,

    Billie "Buckwheat" Thomas, Robert Blake, Darla Hood,

    Darwood Kaye, Shirley Coates, Eddie Gribbon

The Our Gang kids watch the stars arrive for a Hollywood premiere and stage a backyard premiere of their own. Alfalfa sings in this one. It's painful.

Shooting Captured Insurgents (1898)

SHOOTING CAPTURED INSURGENTS  (1898)  ¢ ¢ ¢

    D: George S. Fleming,  Edwin S. Porter

A handful of soldiers march some prisoners to a spot by a stone wall, where they shoot them at point-blank range. The action was staged, but it looks real enough, an effect enhanced by the age and decaying condition of the film. It lasts about a minute.