Well, that was a bit longer of a layoff between posts than I intended or anticipated, but I’m still here, folks. Let’s do Day Two!***********************************I have decided that Friday, April 26, spent bumping around from auditori...
Well, that was a bit longer of a layoff between posts than I intended or anticipated, but I’m still here, folks. Let’s do Day Two!***********************************I have decided that Friday, April 26, spent bumping around from auditorium to auditorium and throughout the greater lobby area of the Chinese multiplex for the 2013 TCM Classic Film Festival, was probably the single greatest day dedicated to watching movies that I’ve ever spent in my not-so-illustrious 53 years on this planet. Seven movies in a span of approximately 17 hours, with no breaks other than the time it took to get in and out of lines leading into the theaters and the restrooms. (I packed lunch and dinner.) The Swimmer, Voyage to Italy, Ruggles of Red Gap, I Am Suzanne!, It Always Rains on Sunday, Hondo and Plan Nine From Outer Space,all great in their own special ways. So what to do for an encore?Well, one thing was for certain—there would be nowhere near the amount of cinema consumed on Saturday as there had been the previous day. After I said my bleary-eyed post-Ed Wood good-byes to Richard and Ariel, I trudged through the front door of my humble Glendale manse at around 3:00 a.m., but I didn’t actually get to sleep until about 3:30. As I tumbled gracelessly down the rabbit hole toward some desperately need shuteye, I calculated my simple plan—I would set the alarm for around 9:00 a.m., thus skipping the festival of Bugs Bunny cartoons scheduled to celebrate the iconic character’s 75thbirthday which began around 9:30 a.m., and instead make my way back to the Chinese complex in time for the Deliverance screening which started around 11:45 a.m. I figured I could get by on somewhere in the neighborhood of six hours of sleep and still have enough in the tank to get me through the four movies I had on the docket for the day.But my dazed and confused body had other ideas. Without any electronic prompting from my clock, my eyes popped open promptly at 6:30 a.m., after two whole 90-minute sleep cycles. I was wide awake, exhausted but unable to keep my head from stirring about the movies of the past day and the ones yet to come. When it became clear, after a few minutes of tossing and turning, that I wasn’t going to get any more sleep, I decided to get up and start writing up what I’d seen of the festival so far. After logging part one of my post on Friday’s adventure, I hightailed it to the train station and hopped the one stop into Hollywood. This day would be slower, more measured, but still filled with the promise of transcending whatever physical reservations I had in favor of another brilliant experience.Once I arrived, with some considerable excitement I settled into my spot toward the front of the Chinese #1, the big centerpiece auditorium (477 seats) within the Chinese multiplex, in anticipation of seeing Deliverance on the big screen for the first time since 1973, when I was a 13-year-old high school freshman. I was already fairly movie savvy at that age, and I’d heard talk about the movie circulating since its release—by the time it made it to our hometown theater the Academy Awards for 1972 had already passed, so word of the grueling nightmares that awaited its four weekend adventurers (and those who bought tickets to see it) had trickled down even to the most isolated corners of Southern Oregon. But even if I knew (more or less) what to expect, my dad, who barely paid attention to the movies, wouldn’t have known Deliverancefrom Up the Creek. So when I cleverly appealed to his taste for the outdoors and casually suggested that maybe we could go see that new canoeing movie (I needed that accompanied adult to circumvent the “R” rating), he glanced at the tiny ad on the local movie calendar, which conveniently showed only the name of the movie, pictures of the actors looming over a silhouette of three men paddling their boat, and an ominous tag line (“Where does the camping trip end… and the nightmare begin?”), and agreed to take me to see it. Success
