Location: New Beverly Cinema
7165 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
I recently listened to a peer divide film viewers into two categories: the 1/2 full and the 1/2 empty and declare that he could easily discern which camp a person belonged to. I couldn't help but wonder what kind of person he thought I was. Though I am not simply happy to sit in comfy chairs and look at the screen, I consider myself passionate about movies and deeply committed to theatrical exhibition. I suspect that I am both loyalist and nay-sayer: demanding but not without the ability to abandon critical mediation. The New Beverly's double feature of Badlands and Sugarland Express neatly matched my cynic and idealist. Rarely do I feel as vulnerable as I do when watching the films of Terrence Malick. I am struck by his eye for the beautiful and his subsequent ability to penetrate the frameline, to make the viewer reconceive the world around him. He fuses the mundane and sublime and locates the profound in the generally ignored. To watch a Malick film is to abandon my cynicism. Watching a Spielberg film, on the other hand, is to embrace my deepest skepticism. My utter rejection of Goldie Hawn's loopy, shrieking heroine suggests that though I love going to the movies there are some things I simply cannot tolerate.
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