SAINTS PRESERVE US

Saturday Night at the Movies?

Saturday’s Globe and Mail included the newspaper’s monthly Report on Business magazine. Inside was one of those olio articles: heavy on graphics and light on my attention span; charts and little boxes of quotes; lots of buzzwords surrounding teams and pivoting. Needless to say, these past 12 infected months have tasked Canada’s corporate leaders.

I did reread the remarks of Cineplex movie theatre chain CEO Ellis Jacob. I’ve retyped them in full: “Everybody is concerned about streaming versus theatrical. The studios want theatrical releases; the directors do; the stars do. And maybe after X number of days, movies go to video-on-demand, where you pay 30 bucks to watch it at home. That doesn’t get me concerned, because it’s not free, and people still want to get out of the house. The challenge is having a movie in theatres and streaming at the same time. We’ve been in the business for 100 years. We took our hits with VCRs and DVDs. But as long as the content is there, our guests will come back.”

Oh, those halcyon days of wine and roses, of black and white televisions with tinfoiled rabbit ears in homes and Cinemascope Technicolor majesty unreeling in theatres for weeks or even months on end! Things have changed. There is a compelling argument to be made that long-form television series have superseded the novel as the world’s most popular storytelling device. Film isn’t even in the conversation.

Cineplex has previously tried to distance itself from Hollywood glamour. Its Rec Rooms, separate from its cinemas, are geared toward gamers, gourmands and guzzlers. There’s not a frame of celluloid in sight in their flashy spaces because Hollywood is tired. Hollywood has no imagination. Hollywood has no imagination II. And Mr. Jacob’s broken business model is predicated on content.

Streams at the Crooked 9 have featured productions from Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Sweden, Spain, England, France and Canada. There’s no going back to Hollywood. The supply chain has been ruptured. My world has opened up, some kind of personal boffo, free box office, blockbuster explosion without the special effects.

Content. I would be very content to see just two films as a guest in a Cineplex venue in 2021. Neither of them are products of a California factory. The first is a remake, or re-cutting of a documentary. The second reaffirms my escapist life as I’ve always known it and could never imagine otherwise.

Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s Let It Be is now out of circulation. There was a time when it was a midnight repertory cinema staple. Like Gimme Shelter (the song on the Stones record sleeve is spelled “Gimmie”) which was filmed around the same time, Let It Be is a compelling and hypnotic downer. And yet, those sessions, booked during the Beatles’ snippy nadir, yielded three of my favourite Beatles songs: “Two of Us,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” and “Get Back.” New Zealand director Peter Jackson is now editing The Beatles: Get Back, a Let It Be revisit utilizing more than 50 hours of previously unseen footage captured by Lindsay-Hogg. Jackson’s film will probably be released in September. I sense some well meaning revisionism en route, an attempt to alleviate some of the mythic heaviness weighing over the group’s dissolution. I’m reminded somewhat of British director Julien Temple’s twin films about the Sex Pistols: The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle and The Filth and the Fury; the same story told from two points of view.

Well, hello, Mister Bond. Celluloid 007 is the same as the Rolling Stones to me: that is I have no memories of my life without him in it. Ian Fleming’s novels were something of a salve for Great Britain. The kingdom by the sea was reeling from its pyrrhic Second World War victory, the ceding of the Raj and the Suez Crisis. The Cold War was a kettle best left off the cooker. Literary Bond suggested Great Britain was still a force in global affairs. The movies were something else again. Prior to the democratization of air travel, Bond lived every well respected middle class man’s fantasy. Who wouldn’t want to circumnavigate the globe while dressed to kill, pausing only to drink, smoke, gamble, and have sex? And so, Mister Jacob, I would be delighted to be your guest should you be able to screen No Time to Die sometime this year.

I’ve been writing about a retake on a rock documentary originally released in 1970 and film franchise begun in 1962. I am a retiree; I’ve got some time and cash to spare, but I know Mister Jacob isn’t terribly interested in my demographic even though he and I likely spring from the same boomer cohort. These days, I’d be content to watch both those films at home. A year without Cineplex has certainly broken the habits of some people, perhaps many younger than me. I suspect too that the reboot content Mister Jacob is relying on - beyond the Beatles and Bond - is already as tired as his quaint facilities. The Cineplex CEO dreams in Technicolor.      

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of film buffery since 2013. My novella Of Course You Did is coming in 2021. Sign up for e-mail alerts from the Crooked 9, use that thingy on the right.