Goodbye, Harvard Exit

I went out of my way, last weekend, to visit a little movie house that will close down next month. The theater is called the Harvard Exit. My wife and I drove through the rain, parked on the street that the theater was named for, and had a little lunch - OK, a lot of lunch - before we headed in to see the movie.

The theater is in a great old building. It used to be the Womans Century Club. Here’s a cool video from the Seattle historical museum, MOHAI:



We walked into the theater, through its green doors, the ones that exit onto Harvard Street. A disinterested clerk took our $16 (it was a matinee). I suppose the poor bastard is going to be looking for a new job in the new year, so it’s hard to get upset at him.

Off to one side is a lobby more like a sitting room, with a candy counter and soft chairs to sit in. There are paperback books, piled up, for you to read, and plastic cups for ice water. You could sit by the faux fireplace and while away an hour, waiting to meet your party or waiting for your show to begin.


I took pictures of the old projector and the fireplace and the carpet. Theater carpets get me all nostalgic. It’s a thing.

Fireplace

Old projector, hardly digital

Carpet - it's a thing

Theaters have been closing down in Seattle for years. I remember seeing “The Story of O” at a midnight showing at the Neptune theater, way, way back in the day. More recently, I think I saw “Paprika” there, around 2007. A few years back, the Neptune shut down as a movie theater. It’s a venue for live performance, now.

My wife and I went to see the Buffy Sing Along at a midnight showing at the Egyptian, years and years ago, and we’ve been to movies there, now and again, including “Beasts of the Southern Wild”. Earlier this year, they closed the Egyptian, soon to reopen as part of SIFF.

I’m not too tempted to get weepy about Landmark Theaters that are closing down. There are more scheduled to go, but SIFF reanimates some of them, like the Uptown Theater in Queen Anne. Between SIFF and Sundance, there are lots of venues for slightly off-beat movies.

But we’ve seen movies at the Harvard Exit every few months. Recently, we saw “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya” at the Harvard Exit, and, also recently, “Pride”.

The movie we saw this weekend was called “Zero Motivation”. Here’s a picture:

Are you motivated?

It was a slacker film in the Israeli army, and if you want to know more about it, well, this isn’t the movie for you.

So, goodbye to the Harvard Exit -

Remember that sitting room? With the projector and the carpet that I took pictures of? Remember how I waxed sentimental about how you could while away a few minutes, have a moment, a memory of the day, something more than images flickering on a screen for a couple of hours?

The Lobby

I’ve never seen anyone sitting out there.

My God, what is it?

It’s easy to laugh at some of these old movies, and The Creeping Terror is worse than most. The movie revolves around a bizarre looking monster that is attacking people in a rural county in California. Here’s clip of the monster and the way that people don’t really run away from it. 

 
If you watched more than a few seconds of that, you’ll see the way the creature feeds - it sucks people in through a hole in its front. If the meal is a girl, she screams and kicks her legs. It takes a long time for the creature to get beyond her ass. If it’s a guy, we just see a pair of shoes sticking out. 

I was surprised, though, at the first part of this scene, where the movie establishes the dance hall. 

Here it is. 

 

If you watched for a minute, you saw that we open on a woman in tight, gold, sparkly pants and a bare midriff. She is dancing and having a good time. 

If you convince an attractive woman to dress in tight anything and shake her ass in your movie - whether for love or money - you have a responsibility to show it to the audience, so the camera lingers on her a while. 

Then the camera slowly pulls back, while other couples dance through, doing what I assume is some variety of the Twist. 

As we continue to pull back, we pan to the left to see people at the tables, including little bits of a drama, like a guy who’s too drunk to stand and a couple where the woman won’t dance with a man, who goes off and dances with somebody else. 

The directing of this scene is flawless. Even though there’s no dialog and no character that we’ve met, the scene holds your eye. 

I wondered, as I watched, astonished at this gem in the compost pile, whether I’d misjudged the movie. Maybe there was competent camera work throughout. Maybe, as I watched the rest, I would see other scenes that were just as workmanlike and efficient. 

 No, the rest was indifferent. 

But credit where credit has been earned.

Salt for your tail, Daddy-O

Remember that gushing praise I heaped on cheesy rubber monsters in my post about last week’s movie? Well, I may need to un-gush, a little.



This week’s movie was The Giant Claw (duhn-duhn-DA). The flying monster - or Big Bad Bird - attacks anything that moves, including planes, trains, and automobiles. Just standing still doesn’t help, because when it gets bored, BBB attacks tall buildings.

Models and man-in-suit can work perfectly well for visual effects. Look at Clash of the Titans - no, not Liam releasing the kraken. The first version. Look at Gojira. Not Matthew Broderick. The first version.

Sometimes, though, even when we are laughing at something obviously bad, it can get too cringe-worthy to stand. Stir in a walking sexual harassment lawsuit as a hero and military officers who I would never trust with a government plane, and is it over yet?

Aside from the goofy BBB, one scene stuck in my mind. Our heroes were on their way back from destroying one of the BBB’s eggs when they encounter a foursome of rowdy teenagers racing along in their car, fast and with lights.



Not only did the kids shout disparaging things at Our Hero (Get that tin can off the road, Daddy-O!), but they flouted the danger of the BBB!

Hey, man, who’s afraid of the Big Bad Bird!

Don’t worry about us. We’ve got salt for its tail.

According to the VAST CLOUD MIND KNOWN AS THE INTERNET, there’s an old folk belief that if you put salt on a bird’s tail, it can’t get away.

Naturally, BBB is having none of this. It swoops down to grab the rowdy teens, killing two of them, injuring the others.

At the end of the scene, our heroine kneels down to check a pulse - and finds a salt shaker!

What’s your SFZ?

I was a little disappointed, last night, when Sandra didn’t win the Oscar for Gravity. Still, she didn’t do much acting in that movie. It was more of heavy breathing role.

I haven’t seen every Sandra movie. Sandra’s movies have been, let’s say, varied. The run the gamut, and run the gamut hard, from high minded to goofy to sweet, and from awesome to unwatchable. Sandra was awesome in The Blind Side, but that was a little high minded for me. I probably would never have seen it if my wife hadn’t been taking a film class.

(Speaking of my wife, let’s not mention this blog post to her. I mean, you paste a picture of Sandra’s head on your wife’s body in one little wedding photo, and suddenly you have an “unhealthy fixation.”)

Every Sandra Bullock fan can be placed between two of her movies. For most people, this is as easy as liking Speed, but not Speed 2. For those of us who are a little more fanatical, well, it’s complicated.

But, if we go down the list, we should be able to find my personal Sandra Fan Zone (SFZ).

So, The Proposal and The Heat, well, no help there. Those are marginally worse than Love Potion Number Nine. And stinging insects.

The Lake House, yes.

Miss Congeniality, yes, Miss Congeniality 2, are you kidding?

Two Weeks Notice, yes.

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, guilty pleasure.

28 Days, good, until you realize that it isn’t about zombies.

Yes, I think my SFZ is right between The Lake House and 28 Days.

What’s yours?

Rubber Suit

Last year’s Gravity was visually stunning, offering a credible portrayal of a disaster in orbit that makes you hold on the armrests in the theatre. I thoroughly enjoyed it. A lot of credit goes to the artists who made everything in orbit look so real, but -

Forty-five years ago, Stanley Kubrick stuck a pen to a plate of glass with scotch tape and got a similar effect.

When it comes to a movie monster or creature or grotesque, the modern filmmaker can create photo realistic depictions of - well, anything. With enough time and money, studios can make any visual come to life, if nothing else, pixel by pixel, and you can get good movies out of it.

But give me a woman in a rubber suit, any day of the week!

Wait - that could be misinterpreted. Let me try again.

This week’s matinee was The She Creature, which features a love triangle between our poor Andrea and the side show carny hypnotist, Doctor Lombardi and our clean cut, academic hypnotist, Doctor Erickson.

Doctor Lombardi can hypnotize Andrea, casting her into the past to be a seventeenth century English wench or a sea monster with boobs from the dawn of time. He says things like this: “As long as I’m alive, I’ll possess you.”

Delivered with some enthusiasm, that line could be sinister and creepy, on top of pompous. Delivered in a monotone, it’s just creepy and pompous.

There’s some other stuff about gullible rich people and Erickson being above money and above rich blonde girls, but let’s get to the suit.

The rubber suit is bulky and has fins jutting off it in weird directions. And it has blonde hair and boobs, two things characteristic of mammals, not fish monsters from the beginning of time.

The monster comes out of the ocean and must return to it at the same place, but also fades in and out of existence right before our eyes.

Lombardi can call the monster out of the depths of time to kill people by giving hypnotic suggestions to Andrea. Why he does this isn’t clear. I guess to burnish his credentials as a spiritualist or something -

But let’s not get distracted from giant rubber boobs.

The creature - She Creature - was on screen only for a few minutes throughout the movie. She comes in, kills somebody, goes back to the ocean - and this is the right amount of time to spend with the creature. Maybe the suit would look stupid if we sat down and talked to the creatures, discussed the vast abyss that is time or where she could buy a good underwire, the kind that doesn’t pinch.

The movie makers create the frame that they are painting their picture in and pick out the colors in their pallot. If you introduce it right and play it straight, a rubber monster with boobs will put the blue cat people in Avatar to shame.

Cross the streams

Remember how Ghostbusters ended?

The Ghostbusters arrived at the portal between dimensions to confront Gozer as the Lovecraftian ancient god prepares to enter our world and begin a reign of blood. They confront Gozer in the form of a young woman before the eldritch god takes the form of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. A lot of hilarious stuff happens - and then they pull a resolution out of their, let’s say, hats.

Just as a fact - the idea that crossing the streams would fix the problem is kind of stupid. I know that they introduced the notion earlier in the film, but it doesn’t make any sense.

But I’m not complaining about it - and I don’t remember anyone complaining about it back in the day. Everybody loved that movie. Of course, maybe the fact that it was a comedy makes a difference, but I think there’s something more going on.

At the point in the movie where they cross the streams, it’s the right time for some resolution. They climbed all the stairs, they met Gozer, they saw Stay Puft. We even got some words to live by: “If somebody asks you if you’re a God, you say ‘Yes’!”

I get as snotty and superior as anyone else when movies use arbitrary devices to get the plot to move along and end the way that people want, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and that was a tasty ending.

Let’s cross the streams and get out of here while everyone is still laughing.

What's your stories?

I’ve gotten tired of narrative - not the concept, just the use of the word. People talk about how facts fit into a narrative of this or that. Sometimes, I think they mean theory in its literal sense - a system of ideas that help us organize observations.

Sometimes, they just mean story.

In 2007, Susan Faludi wrote a book called The Terror Dream about the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in 2001. She argued that our reaction as a country followed from one of our stories, the kidnapping of a white woman from under the nose of her menfolk.

You know - The Searchers.

The story of Comanche Station, this week’s feature, is Mr. Cody - and his wife. We first meet him when he rides up to some Comanche with a mule-load of trade goods. He has to sweeten the deal for the chief, throwing in his rifle, but for that princely sum, he receives a woman that he didn’t want.

But he saves her, anyway.

And they meet up with some other cowboys at Comanche Station. The party has to make its way to safety, through Comanche country - because the stage isn’t coming and the cowboys are on their own.

This movie was made before political correctness and before we treated Indians as people, but the Comanche don’t play a big role in this movie. They’re a danger, out there, picking off a cowboy and forming into raiding parties.

The real villain of the movie is another cowboy. He’s after the woman for the reward that her husband put out for her return. Him and Cody pace around each other, metaphorically, building alliances or testing them between the others in the group, waiting for the blow.

It’s a lot about what a man does, in the old west. The bad guy tells the woman, yeah, a big reward shows that her husband loves her, in a way, but he should have come after her, himself, if he was man enough to be her man.

The movie ends up being about two stories, Mr. Cody’s and the woman’s husband. The husband made the reward of five thousand dollars unconditional - whether they brought back his wife dead or alive. One of the cowboys asks why he would do a dumb thing like that, making it just as easy for somebody to bring her back dead.

Mr. Cody understands, though, because he’s been looking for his wife for ten years, now, trading drygoods and rifles for any white woman he hears of in the hope that it was her - hence, his disappointment when he first saw her. Mr. Cody won’t ever know, for sure, but he would gladly pay just to find out whether she’s dead.

Of course, the woman’s husband will never see her again, no matter what. He’s blind, so going after her himself is out of the question. He doesn’t see Cody, either, while the stoic cowboy rides off, without his reward.