Grindhouse Press Screening at East Village

I know I’ve been remiss on my posting here, but the day job, freelance work, and settling in to unfamiliar territory have kept me busy, scattered, excited, confused, thrilled, frustrated, tired, and, well, pretty much all the other adjectives you’d expect from a first-time New Yorker. I hope to get back to more regular posting, though, as always no promises (when this site starts generating income, I’ll start sticking to deadlines for it).

In the past, I’ve used this as a sort of all-purpose culture blog with a little bit of politics, cultural comment and random day-to-day observation thrown in. Since a lot of that material is going to go elsewhere at this point, what I’m hoping to do is use this space to talk about filmgoing in New York, from the perspective of a longtime movie fan and current (if not full time) film critic. The idea is to write not just about movies in New York (though I’ll certainly do that), but what it’s like to be a movie-goer and movie critic in New York, the locus for movies and movie culture on the East Coast. For New Yorkers, a lot of this may end up being pretty familiar stuff: what I hope to do is to sort of chronicle the ins and outs of seeing movies in New York from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know the town—which is something I would’ve loved to have had available before I moved here (or even now).

Friday night I caught a preview of Grindhouse (which I’ll be reviewing at a later date) at City Cinemas Village East on 2^nd Ave. It was a smart pick for the film—an old, downtown theater with an elaborate dome and a sharply inclined balcony over the main seating. The seats and aisles were somewhat cramped, especially since a lot of people came from the office and still had bags, coats, and other assorted movie theater carry-ons. The theater has a big screen and a pretty solid sound system, which, to the movie’s benefit, was turned out nice and loud. Press got most of the balcony, and the rest of the theater was filled up with lucky preview-goers (who waited in line for quite a while outside). I always feel kind of sorry for those regular joes waiting hours to see a movie early, but at the same time, it can actually add to the experience. I’ve waited in multi-hour lines for movies on a couple of occasions, and it tends to make the movie better—the crowd is jittery, anxious, and when the movie finally starts, it’s a release, even a rush. I think it was a good move to bring in fans off the street for Grindhouse, as it’s a movie that benefits from crowd energy.

The screening setup here in New York is quite different from D.C. In D.C., there are only two companies that handle all the screenings, there’s only one private screening room (at the MPAA), and there are probably less than 50 semi-regular movie critics in the city (a number of whom have other jobs or also cover other stuff for their publications). Once you get on the regular screening list for each of the companies, you don’t have to RSVP to screenings or go out of your way to find out times and get reservations. Screening info is emailed to you on a pretty regular basis, and you can just show up and give them your name and affiliation: you’re on the list and that’s all that’s needed.

Here, screenings are handled by a variety of different companies, and with many of the bigger films, critics (at least for smaller publications) have to actively pursue screening invites. There are a lot of folks in the movie press here, so there are actually tiers of press at the public screenings, with decent seats for the general press and the best seats for the bigger press (I’m assuming New York Times, New York, New Yorker, New York Press—pretty much any pub with the word New York in its title, as well as the other obvious ones: Village Voice, Time, etc…). I also got a gigantic packet of press material: summaries of both movies, interviews with the directors and actors, write ups of all the characters and bios of all the major players. Probably close to 50 pages of stuff. I can’t recall ever getting more than a single page press release for any film I reviewed in D.C.

The show didn’t start till about 30 minutes after the scheduled start time, which was very weird to me—no D.C. screening I went to started more than 3 minutes off schedule—but from the conversation between the two gentlemen next to me, both of whom seemed to be press screening regulars, I gather that late starts are somewhat abnormal in New York as well.

The pre-movie conversation I overheard was dominated by fairly knowledgeable movie-talk. Now you might expect this in a theater full of movie press. But in D.C., at least at the evening screenings, that’s often not the case. A lot of non-movie press and friends of press get themselves invited to the evening previews, usually just to go and see the movie early and for free. I certainly don’t begrudge them this (who doesn’t love free, early movies?), but it often meant that there weren’t a lot of serious movie nerds in attendance. The day screenings were different, of course, though it was almost like a club, as there were only a relative handful of folks who did it regularly and they all spent a lot of time seeing movies together. As such, it wasn’t quite as intense.

Maybe it was brought out in part by the fact that the movie was Tarantino-made movie-junkie-candy, but the room seemed thick with the air of cinema geek, and it was nice to be in the presence of what at least felt like a whole bunch of hardened, devoted, life-long theater goers.

I saw Werner Herzog’s 1987 Cobra Verde this afternoon at IFC Center, and I’m hoping to go back tomorrow to see Killer of Sheep (I was too tired to hack a double-feature today). More on those later.