Multiplexity
It’s less than a month into 2010 and already there’s a word I never want to hear again: Squeakquel. Although, I don’t imagine there’ll be many more opportunities to use it. Not unless Crispin Glover, having remade Willard, decides to have a crack at Ben.
I’m sure I wasn’t the only one surprised by the news that 2009 was Australia’s biggest-ever year at the movie box office, with takings of over a billion dollars. Most of this, of course, was due to the kind of films that make misuse of the word ‘squeak’, and James Cameron’s 500 million-dollar update of The Smurfs, but still, don’t we keep hearing that cinemas are supposed to be on the way out? Certainly, Australian films didn’t account for much of this record take; according to Inside Film, the Natalie Bassingthwaighte vehicle Prey grossed a mere (and this isn’t a misprint) $744. I guess there won’t be a Bassingthwequel.
But isn’t it great that people still love going to the movies, even though, given the increasing size of our tellies, this may soon be known as ‘seeing a film on the small screen’? There’s still so much ritual fun to be had, even going to an old-fashioned ‘2D’ movie, ‘at the pictures’. I actually like lining up for tickets; you never know who you’ll bump into in the queue. Last weekend at the Rivoli, I shuffled past my accountant on one of the outer coils of the human snake slithering toward the box office. ‘What’re you seeing?’ I pried. ‘It’s fucking Complicated,’ he replied, explaining that it was his wife’s turn to choose. ‘Still, rather that than fucking Avatar,’ he added, pronouncing the ‘Ava’ to rhyme with ‘raver’, momentarily creating, in my mind, an image of Sam Worthington spending an entire movie operating a virtual Ava Gardner.
I used to live near the Jam Factory in Prahran, and friends who didn’t would often ask me to pop in on their behalf and pick up tickets for films that might be in danger of selling out. This I was happy to do, as I enjoyed the system I’d devised that allowed them to collect their tickets just before the screening: I’d hide the tickets on page fifty-nine of a book in the Borders right next to the cinema. I’d spent some time selecting a title that I knew would be unlikely to sell, a single yellowing copy of the script for Lakeboat by David Mamet. For over a year, my friends knew to ‘pick up their tickets at Lakeboat’, but then, late last year, Borders shifted their Plays section a few shelves over and somehow Lakeboat went astray in the move. We’ve since tried it with other books – Julia Morris’s Don’t You Know Who I Used to Be? was popular for a while – but it’s just not the same.
Speaking of the Jam Factory, my favourite feature of this airy, becolumned delivery system for early-nineties nostalgia is the neon-flecked Perspex ‘wall of stars’ you glide past as you ascend the escalator to screens 1-8. Two storeys high, it features the names of around thirty ‘classic movie stars’ angled randomly and rendered in raised laser-cut plastic letters. Apart from the incongruity of seeing, perhaps for the first time ever, names like Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino executed in sans serif Helvetica, one wonders what kids on their way to the Squeakquel make of names like Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier. It’s odd now too, to see Jessica Lange nestled amidst the Marlon Brandos and Charlie Chaplins. And of the three names down at ground level, thieves seem to have made off with Nicole Kidman and Anthony Hopkins, but so far there have been no takers for Gerard Depardieu.
Some cinemas (not the Jam Factory) make it almost impossible to enter without being guided abattoir-style through the snack bar, which, as we know, is what keeps the whole joint afloat. But at least we aren’t yet employing the technology I uncovered during a screening of The Devil’s Advocate in New York in 1997. There were only four of us at the three pm session and yet, halfway through, the auditorium suddenly became home to thick rolling gusts of popcorn odour. Eventually, it became more overbearing than even Al Pacino’s performance, and when I staggered, gasping, to the top of the aisle, I discovered, whirring almost silently in the dark, an enormous portable device consisting of a biplane propeller-sized fan, positioned behind a hot, buttery vat of bubbling popcorn extract. Maybe in a full house the resulting aroma would have seemed ‘natural’ but, with only four punters in attendance, the effect was that of a saran gas attack.
Once you are seated in the optimum viewing position – according to Roger Ebert, ‘the width of the screen back in the centre’; according to me, ‘away from the fuckwits’ – and the film itself has commenced, good manners dictate that all talking should cease. I agree. No one likes a chatterbox. But I must confess a weakness for the genuinely well-thought-through, timed and delivered interjection. At the screening of Inglourious Basterds I attended [WARNING: MASSIVE SPOILER AHEAD], just after the moment where Hitler is machine-gunned in the face, someone said very loudly, ‘Oh, that never happened’. Topping this, a friend told me that, in his screening, this shot was met with an enthusiastic ‘Cop that, Blakey!’ Most pleasingly, I’m told that several screenings of Lars von Tryhard’s AntiChrist have been disrupted (improved, I say) by cries of ‘Ooh, me plums!’ at a key moment of testicular violence.
For me, pretty much the only thing that can ruin a night or afternoon or morning at the multiplex is when there’s a projection disaster and you spend several fruitless minutes trying to find someone in a position to do a damn thing about it. The lovable old projectionist with his flat cap, suspenders, rolled-up sleeves and faithful moggy has long since been replaced by a single computer and a cardboard standee of The Rock. A couple of years back, I was at an eleven am screening of The Savages that began with the curtains closing and remaining so, while only the soundtrack of the movie proceeded to unspool. As a volunteer traipsed off on a futile mission to find a human, the rest of us remained seated for what was now a radio play. Nobody had any idea what was going on in the story and when, about ten minutes in, a character uttered the line ‘You should feel how hard my cock is’, two old ladies decided they’d had enough. The problem was never rectified – apparently, starting the film again would have meant once more sitting through the twenty minutes’ worth of ads – and it wasn’t till several months later that I saw the film properly, on DVD. I immediately noticed that the lack of picture at the screening had at least spared the old ladies a visual-only moment that occurs five minutes before the cock line. Had there not been technical problems, I feel certain they would have vacated the theatre as soon as we saw Laura Linney’s senile dad writing the word ‘prick’ on the bathroom wall using a clumped handful of his own freshly obtained faeces.
Some things, perhaps, don’t look better on the big screen.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). Click here to see an extended version of his video shops report from ‘The 7PM Project’.
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