Cinematic Reflections

   Several things combined this morning to get me to thinking about movies. One of the articles in the morning paper was plugging a series of classic movies to be shown at the Ritz theater on Thursday nights for a few weeks this summer. In an email yesterday, my daughter over in Arkansas was telling me about a new job that her husband had signed on to that dealt with movies, but more in the current realm.

   My mind went back to some of my earlier experiences in the theater. On Saturday afternoons, when I was growing up, the big thing to do was to walk a few blocks to the neighborhood theater to sit and watch a newsreel, a cartoon, a serial, and a full movie, all for 9 cents, and those cliff-hanging endings to each edition of that serial would bring you back again next week to see what would happen, how the hero would escape from his predicament, and the bad guy be foiled again, and again, and again.

   Then there were the double features downtown, the "big" movies at the Tivoli, and, of course, the drive-in. A lot of memories are packed into those venues of my growing up years.

   When I was in college, the second time around in the 80s, I needed some easy credit hours one summer, so I took a course called "Understanding Movies". I sounded like a crip course, was in an air conditioned theater, and was not a difficult grade. The instructor led us through the ways movie directors gave meaning to their films, and it was an interesting course. Looking back on it, the only movie I remember from that course was "Easy Rider" which may mean something, but I don't know what.

   I confess that, for the most part, I am not a fan of current day movies. The indiscriminate use of what I would call "bad language" turns me off, and the violence and sexual themes are not very uplifting. There may be some good acting and good direction, but I can't seem to get past those negatives. I guess I could not prove a correlation between the trend in violence, sexual promiscuity and bad language resulting from the movies, but I think there is one somewhere. 

   Besides, they have raised the price of admission, and I still remember the 9 cents.

   My son in law has turned a love of this cinematic art form into a career. Over the years he has written reviews for various publications around the country and has developed quite a following. I confess that most of the films he reviews, I have not heard of, much less seen, but there are a lot of people out there that must read him faithfully. One time he mentioned a blog post I had written, and my readership blasted to 7 times the normal for that day.

   His new venture in this area seems like a good fit for those who like movies, The Dissolve, check it out if you fit this category.

   As for me, I guess I will have to stick with the classics, although I still don't know if "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" is a classic. It is in color.

   Black and white, in an old theater, maybe that is me after all.

   Not the Ritz in Brunswick, but the Ritz just the same.