Yet another example of a movie that ages well, The Big Sleep was highly entertaining. The plot was twisty and turny (unnecessarily sometimes), the writing was beyond sharp, and Bogie’s Philip Marlowe was surrounded by babes. I’m still grinning about the book store scene in which the previously bespectacled shop girl, having offered to share her bottle of rye with Marlowe, turns back to him; glasses off and luscious hair let down. He concedes that although he could very well stand outside in the rain waiting for the subject of his investigation to show up, he’d “a lot rather get wet in here.”. (Fade to the next scene… he’s leaving.) “Aren’t you forgetting something?”, she asks. His response is a puzzled expression. She answers her own question, “Me.”. What’s not to like?

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It could be argued that Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life may just have sprouted a few too many branches for the director to effectively cultivate, but our first ever Saturday MovieNight feature was without question a work of breathtaking beauty.

The Tree of Life traces the lives of an archetypal suburban family in 50’s America. Three boys are born to the family, whose gentle, earthy mother aspires to teach them the way of grace, while father believes in the force of nature, and works hard to instill order in the lads. The protagonist eldest son, portrayed both by the impish Cameron Bright (first seen on the MovieNight screen as Sean in Jonathan Glazer’s excellent* Birth) and then, in the present time by Sean Penn, struggles to find a balance between the two.  Not content to travel non-linearly between the fifties and present day, Malick takes us abruptly back to the dawn of time, replete with big bang and (some very cute) dinosaurs. This instance of colossal celestial imagery was our second this season (the other being Melancholia, also on a weekend night… hmmm). I could have done without the rapturous final scene, which left me thinking that I might have accidentally subjected the MovieNight audience to an attempted “evangalization”, but on the whole… The Tree of Life was stunning!

Speaking of stunning, I know that I raved about our projector a couple of posts back, but once more, I was very impressed with the job done rendering the blu-ray transfer of Emmanuel Lubezki’s crispy clear photography… how could one not enjoy those close-ups of Jessica Chastain’s face?

*Critics disagreed wildly about Birth. James Berardinelli, who’s reviews are oft quoted in these posts, refered to Birth as “a pretentious piece of crap”.

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Part 2 of our Noir, noir, noir! mini-season featured the elegant heist drama, Rififi. Subscribing to a common misconception, I assumed that director Jules Dassin was a French import who had made his way to these shores after becoming known in Europe for his flair in the genre. Au contraire!  Dassin was in fact born in Connecticut to Russian-Jewish parents, and after having been a member of the communist party in for several years during the thirties, was blacklisted in Hollywood during the McCarthy era witch-hunt. The successful director was forced to flee Tinsel Town. He moved to France, where he made Rififi – his only French language movie (thanks for the research, Chris).

Rififi remains a mesmerizing experience, and our projector delivered the goods: neutral tones and deep, dark blacks (good black is essential for a classic noir!). If you’ve been with us for a while, you may remember our short feature, Miracle at Movienight, which introduced a new projector to the MovieNight family almost exactly three years ago (time does fly!). The replacement marked a great improvement in quality over its predecessor. You could actually see the film grain in a quality transfer! Unfortunately, it seemed unable to produce black and white without green and pink in it. (My dissatisfaction with the projector was born during a viewing of another amazing noir, Out of the Past.) The folks at Panasonic tired hard to help me out, but I’m fairly certain they associated my quest for perfection with some sort of mental illnes. They did replace the lamp eventually, but that didn’t really have much effect on the problem. Three years and nineteen hundred lamp hours later, it seems to be working just fine… or has someone just become a bit less fussy?

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Our Wednesday night MovieNight experiment provided no scientific evidence that one night of the week is preferable to another, but I have come to my own conclusion: MovieNight belongs on a Thursday evening. So there you have it.

One thing was abundantly clear, however. Miranda July is a “polarizer” (spell check tells me that this isn’t a real word… why the heck not?). The Future is the highly anticipated (at least by us) sophomoric effort from July. Her debut film, Me and You and Everyone We Know was my introduction to July, and it charmed me silly. A week after first watching it, MandYandEWW screened at MovieNight to a packed house. It was one of those magical evenings when I could look out from my perch behind the bar and see total engagement. Nobody “texted” (also not a word, according to Spelly McCheckinheimer), nobody slept, nobody chatted… just big wide eyes and smiles everywhere. In the weeks that followed, other guests explained that they hadn’t attended it because they’d seen it and hated it! Miranda the Polarizer.  While I confess that we weren’t exactly blown away with The Future when we saw it at IFC this summer, I still thought it would make a good MovieNight. Surprisingly, the second viewing (perhaps due to my preparedness to be underwhelmed?) was highly entertaining, and I found myself weeping with laughter. Maybe it’s about what phase the moon is in. ?

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