yes, thank you! I totally remembered their labor issues (not covered in these articles) as well as these, all the more reason. basically I think nobody in NYC, LA, or any city with
other arthouse options should be patronizing Alamo. those of us in the El Pasos, Omahas, and Raleighs of the US unfortunately may have little choice, which I'll cover more below.
Roscoe wrote: Mon Aug 29, 2022 2:05 pm
A screening of INHERENT VICE at the Metrograph yesterday was almost ruined by the kind of jackass who thinks it's fun to get high before seeing a movie about some guy who's high a lot, and he sat there and laughed obnoxiously damn near continuously in the most annoying "HA-HA-HA-HA" way so that we all knew how funny he thought it was, and the generally tolerant NYC audience started to turn in their seats to see who the asshole was. Add to this a badly scratched 35mm print, and the day was a disappointment.
did you give his number to the Safdie Brothers? I'm sure they'd love this guy.
mystic_matahari wrote: Mon Aug 29, 2022 5:44 pm
tenia wrote: Mon Aug 29, 2022 5:30 am
"the constant servers walking by and people clinking wine glasses"
Wait, what ?
I like to think that the movie theatre experience can feel sacred but going to Alamo makes it feel more like a liminal wildlife experience--okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration. It's similar to Silverspot Cinema except it's branded itself as a cult/sub-genre cinephile cinema. It's interesting, really, the level of investment they've placed in the decor, and I sometimes think that the workers even have a uniform they have to follow because even they fit "the vibe" of the place.
I will say than an advantage of the place is their churro popcorn. Ha! And something they call "Video Vortex" where Ryan and I have been able to loan out DVDs that are difficult to find elsewhere along with pretty cool movie showings here and there. It's a shame, though, that it's corporate that decides what's going to be shown in each theatre and (from what I understand) the workers don't really have a say.
I always say it feels far more like hanging out at a friend's house than an actual theatre experience. they really push the horror stuff and have gone as far as to say it easily sells the best (though
The Lodger and an upcoming screening of
Nosferatu totally sold out, as do basically all Anime films, to no one's surprise) and you can tell the clientele goes for that too. I guess that's synonymous with the "hang out" experience moreso? I wasn't a huge fan of
Memoria, but they are screening it and I really can't imagine your first viewing being at Alamo. since it would be our second time, I'm a little more open to it, but even then..the film's entire focus is on sound design, something totally thrown out the window at Alamo.
the Video Vortex feature is a godsend though, we live in a county who's library system has made the inanely silly decision to
not carry movies. rather than try and finangle my way into the nearby universities, Alamo's lobby check out area is a godsend of obscure picks. I was able to relive the non-anamorphic wonders of the Wellspring DVD of
What Time is it There and they even let me bring home the booklet for MOC's long OOP disc of
Abhijian!
tenia wrote: Mon Aug 29, 2022 8:49 pm
I'm just completely amazed because in France, movie theaters and restaurants are like, you know, in different rooms altogether.
It's tough enough to suffer people buying stinky industrial cheese nachos and loudly eating them during the movie, I can't even imagine having waiters coming round to serve you a complete meal and viewers being at the theater but also having their dinner as if it was a totally normal thing to be at a restaurant table yet also at a movie theater.
it's really insane and I hate that it's a thing at all. unfortunately the trend of these "dine in" movie theatres has really caught on here in the states. we have a new chain called Paragon who claimed they would be showing "international cinema with food catered to the film you're watching", already an insane idea, but naturally the "international cinema" just means Anime and Bollywood, so that's one less place we will support. there are many cities that have at least one really legitimate arthouse theatre, but here (Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina), we have a sort of piecemeal situation. not a single theatre provides a "one size fits all" deal like say,
The Belcourt in Nashville, a city comparable to our own. getting to see recent Janus or Kino re-releases is a stretch, and we've had to drive to Winston-Salem (who's nice
Aperture is, nice, but a bit small) to see titles like
A Hero and
Introduction, and I'd like to think Farhadi and Hong have decent followings in the US!
this brings me to my other issue with many mid-market cities in the US - I really firmly do believe there is a market for "arthouse" and "cinephile" pictures and revivals out there. Barnes and Noble stores in these cities can all tell you how much stock they sell during a given Criterion sale, and presumably now Arrow as well. a lot of theatres and distributors really seem to undersell a market like this. cities like Dallas (
Texas Theatre), Kansas City (
Screenland), Iowa City (
Filmscene, and Indianapolis (
Kan Kan) all have successful theatres that do seem to get a lot of play and do well. it really shouldn't be limited to the coastal cities and then known "art" cities like Portland, Oregon. obviously we probably couldn't sell out a Weerasethakul retrospective or something like they do in LA, but to not even see the
Three Colors retrospectives making the rounds that well is saddening. we too often get these food/theatre mixes or what's even worse..
look, I appreciate the attempts that some "theatres" make but all too often we get movies projected in auditoriums that clearly are not set up for movie play. in the Triangle, we have a town-run "arthouse theatre" that is basically a glorified high school auditorium that will project Bluray discs as patrons sit in uncomfortable seats. dustybooks has reported to me a similar venue in Wilmington does the same thing, and I trust that this happens elsewhere across the country. I'm curious if any others experience this elsewhere in the US and abroad, and maybe I sound spoiled but this is just as inauthentic to me as Alamo is. the screening we witnessed was of the Criterion Bluray of
Tanpopo and the projector wasn't even calibrated for it! I witnessed our legitimate picturehouse (
The Rialto, which is amazing but unfortunately only one screen, so the schedule is limited) do a similar practice for Kurosawa's
Dreams, but at least they both had the equipment and experience to make it a nice experience. I don't know, I just think this can all be better handled.
for those who live in cities like
Oklahoma City (and I know a few on this board do),
Louisville and
Houston with art museums that actually care about their cinema curation, I hope you count your blessings! I envy it! this is another way I would think the gap would be filled too, but so often the ball gets dropped. I can count on one finger the times our art museum played a movie/restoration I was excited to see, and that was at least a big one -
La Dolce Vita all the way back in 2011.
