The venue is different, the passion the same.
Much time has passed since I last graced these pages and
with that passing has come a lot of changes: new town, new theaters, new
position and new additions to the collection. My son has grown up and moved on
from being a mere animation grazing animal to a more well rounded cineste, so
much so that last night he laughed when I wanted to screen Monster, something I
had just bought and brought home fresh from the pawn shop.
Living in a larger city has its benefits. The theaters here
in Boise are plentiful and lovely. We have Imax, many beautiful and technically
clean first run house and plenty of dollar theaters to keep up with all those
second run features. There is an art house up the street, the Flicks, that
presents many of the same kinds of features that we used to screen at The Historic
Orchard. The beauty of that venue is that they have a full kitchen, a wet bar and
a video store attached to the premises. And they have four screens. It’s truly
a lot of bang for the buck for an intermountain city.
Movie collecting here has been something else, too, with a
large number of second hands around the region to feed my habit. VHS tapes go
for as low as fifty cents a pop, which is fine for all those titles that never
crossed over to disc or are foreign or just too hard to resist. Pawn shops have
been feeding my DVD jones in a big way, with 1st National Pawn
leading the way at two dollars a feature. I tend to come home with bags of
movies these days without any real reason to load up on them other than the
sheer volume of cool and interesting titles out there to be had at very low
prices. With the dearth of video stores out there it leaves the big box stores
and places like Hastings to feed the need and the bins at the pawns. I can only
hope that the home movie craze goes on and on for many years. If not, well,
there are always second run movie houses and Redbox!
The Boy lives with me part time while he attends BSU. Of all
the degrees in the whole wide world he chooses to pursue it’s one in Media
Studies. That leaves him tending camera at the local community access station,
editing films for old student pals and coming home to pour through the film
cache, dreaming up double and triple bills for us to watch in our increasing
short and valuable off time.
Gone are the days when I would wake and go to sleep with
movies burning. I am happy to have enough time to watch a movie a day, and if I’m
lucky I’ll have enough time to screen two or three a day on the weekends. But
the onset of spring and the calling of summer in the distance I know that many
other things will be bartering for my time. I have signed up to volunteer at a
local Shakespeare fest and that’s a good thing. I know that the foothills and
local bike trails will take up my time as well. Summer means sleepovers and the
kid’s taste in movies is certainly much different than mine and that’s all well
and good. It’s about time to catch up on all the wonderful animation and family
films that I haven’t seen over the last two or three years.
Leaving Port Orchard meant leaving behind a possible career
in movie exhibiting but now, instead, I am working through the classics, the cult,
the highs and the lows of films with a young guy that needs my guidance, my patience,
my deep pockets, to help make that film history something other than a dry slog
through a text book. I feel that in giving up Futon Cinema for awhile I was
able to fall back and regroup, lay in a ton of film and at the same time reset
my passion. I banked the fire and it has kept me warm.
Come, sit on down, let’s screen a few more films together!
Action!
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