Property of a Lady

Deborah Lipp goes on about Wicca, politics, movies, Paganism, and cats. Not necessarily in that order.

Since this was so successful when Tom did it, and since I am still recovering from my trip, I am doing a trivia roundtable this week. Answer the following question and you get to post the next question. It can go as long as people are having fun.

In The Graduate, there’s a scene near the end where Dustin Hoffman confronts Katharine Ross in her apartment. An uncredited bit player would rise to stardom and Oscar victory. Name him.

Acting (belatedly) on Tim Goodman’s recommendation (spoilers there), we finally Netflixed the first three episodes of Slings and Arrows, a Canadian comic drama about a Shakespearean troupe (the “New Burbage Shakespeare Festival”) in turmoil. In the course of staging a production of Hamlet, they contend with the death of an indispensible character; an artistic director who was once driven mad by the play; a chirpily sinister corporate sponsor; long-festering hatreds among the principals; a clueless Gringolandian movie star; and much more.

As befits theatrical folk, everything is exaggerated and outrageous, and nobody is ever without an audience (if only in their own minds). It’s a world of outsized egos, petty jealousy, backbiting, and pretentious poses. In the middle of a rapier duel at a party (yes, there is a duel with rapiers–buttons off), the stage manager snaps at the assembled actors that they’re all a lot of insufferable children–and of course she’s right; but they’re immensely entertaining children, and their childlike love of theatre is the thing that redeems them.

It is exaggerated and at the same time nuanced. Lurking amid the manic farce are serious questions (about the relationship between art and commerce; about the purpose of live theatre in a world glutted on entertainment) and a pervasive sadness (at aging; at lost love, and long-ago betrayals; at becoming less than they had hoped; at the sense of their own obsolescence). The drama is never forced or heavy-handed, but simply human, inseparable from the comedy as it is in real life.

The cast is excellent, mostly not-quite-recognizable actors who I suspect are much better known in Canada (Paul Gross, from Tales of the City, Mark McKinney, from Kids in the Hall, and Rachel McAdams, from Mean Girls are the three I knew). The screenplay is consistently witty, and by ‘witty’ I mean ‘laugh-out-loud hilarious’. As in, you often have to rewind to get the funny line you missed when you were laughing at the funny line before it.

Highly recommended. Put it in your queue now.

Thirty years ago, my friend Russell and I ventured across the Bay to San Francisco, where we rode a bus for miles–miles!–deep into the heart of the Terra they call Incognita, all so we could wait hours in line for a movie that in that innocent era was simply called “Star Wars”.

The theater was the Coronet, and it was the only theater in the Bay Area showing the 70mm version. That made it Ground Zero for the fanatics. If you were watching the news back then and saw stories about the Star Wars phenomenon where they talked to fans waiting in line, odds are pretty good you saw the Coronet.

Over the years, I saw a dozen or so other movies there–some memorable (Fellowship of the Ring), some not so much (um…I forget). It wasn’t spectacular like the Paramount or ornate like the Alhambra, but it had a nice deco interior and it was a big single-screen theater where you felt like you were Watching A Movie.

Now I live in the neighborhood that seemed so foreign to me. Lucas has driven the Star Wars franchise into the ground with a prequel trilogy so bad it tarnishes the originals. And as of last Sunday morning, this is what was left of the Coronet.

It closed two years ago, as had most of the other single-screen theaters in San Francisco. I was sad at the time, got over it, moved on. The building stood empty, in limbo. Then a couple of weeks ago I rode by on the bus and saw that the sign was down and they had knocked down one of the walls, and it hit me all over again.

You live any place too long and this is what happens: the geography of your memory is dismantled piece by piece. You know it’ll happen but that doesn’t make it any easier. For me, the Coronet was a big piece.

More pictures below the fold… (more…)