The Joshcars for 2013

So having completed the live blogging for the Oscars, this is my Baker's Dozen best of 2013, in no particular order:

World War Z:
This is grading on a curve.  But basically, there are so many really shitty special effects spectaculars around these days that I feel an urge to give some recognition to a movie that's just a little bit different.  Also, since I keep asking authors to revise their manuscripts, it's nice to see something in the popular culture where revision works.  In particular, the ending of this major CGI-ridden summer spectacular release is quiet.  One setting, one main character, a place where small little things count, where the tension is real.  A place where the violence is earned, justified by the movie being what the movie is, and now entirely thrown in just because someone thinks it's fun to plow a starship into a building, or to destroy Manhattan for the 18th time and pretend like it isn't, like Superman didn't save Manhattan in Superman 2 over 30 years ago.  This was a pleasant surprise, an over-achiever in a genre that keeps under-achieving.  So I want to give it some credit.

The Spectacular Now:
Rumor has it that Miles Teller, the star of this spectacularly good adaptation of a YA novel, is going to be in a new Fantastic Four movie.  What a shame.  An actor as talented as Miles Teller shouldn't be wasting time in shitty SFX/CGI/superhero movies, please see my comments above on World War Z.  See my comments on my live Oscar blog, and this is an example of where Roger Ebert can do something I can't, which is explain why a movie is good.  This was one of the very last movies Ebert reviewed, and maybe I should just let his review speak for me. But I don't really want to.  So let me try.

I always feel like one of the best achievements in the arts is to get me to like the kind of thing I don't ordinarily like.  The New Yorker story that I can read must be a truly great story, or the generic slasher movie that I love can't be just a generic slasher movie, or the literary science fiction novel that grabs the Joshua Bilmes whose roots are in the Analog end of sf/f.  And The Spectacular Now is a movie about a character I despise, a high school student really big into alcohol who is supposed to be lovable.  And alcoholics aren't lovable.  Behavior fueled by alcohol isn't lovable.  There's nothing redeeming about a movie like Don's Party.  Nothing pleasant about Leaving Las Vegas.  Yet this movie walks the tightrope.

It has to be a team effort, here.  Novel by Tim Tharp.  Adapted by screenwriter Michael H. Weber, whose previous credits include the similarly successful (500) Days of Summer.  Directed by James Ponsoldt, whose prior movie was Smashed, the kind of movie about alcoholism that I really don't need in my life, thank you.

But most importantly, a pitch-perfect performance by Miles Teller.

He's a likable alcoholic but never a lovable one.  When he's given the chance to have more hours at work if only he would show up on time, he's self-aware enough to tell the boss that he knows it just won't work, he won't put the job before alcohol, and he won't be showing up on time.  Capable of being the perfect boyfriend, except for all the times he's drunk and he isn't capable of being anyone's boyfriend.

You can understand a bit of why he likes his booze.  He's from a broken home.  Older sister he isn't on great terms.  Struggling mother, who won't tell him where his father is.  And when we finally meet the father, you know the apple didn't fall far from the tree, and you also see this glimmer of awareness that our lead character knows his father's a screw-up, that he's a screw-up, that one doesn't justify the other and he doesn't admire his father for being what he too often is, even though he can't stop himself from being it.

It's awfully damned good.

Short Term 12:
Another quiet little film that has probably gone under the radar for most of you.  Brie Larson, who also has a supporting role in Spectacular Now, plays a counselor at a group home for troubled children.  Jonathan Gallagher is another "veteran" at the home, which isn't saying much.  It's a hard place to stay, the kind of place you burn out on real quick.  But the two of them have somehow managed to keep at it for at least a little bit, and the film starts with a quiet scene of Gallagher giving some background on the place to a new employee.  These characters have a lot more going on than we see at first, and the film peels back their layers slowly, carefully, way more so than any of us will ever be with an actual onion in our kitchen.  While it's doing that, the film also slowly peels back some of the closely held secrets for the characters in the home, many of whom might want to be someplace else, all of whom are free to be someplace else if they can escape past the doors and the guards and get on to the street outside.  It's a strange kind of thing, how the employees at the home can do just about anything to keep the kids from leaving but have no power to order them back should they leave.

So I'm not describing this like any film anyone is going to rush out to see.  But the writing is really good.  The acting is really good.  The surprises along the way are never total surprises, yet we never quite see them coming way far ahead of time.   Powerful stuff.

Rush:
Great performances.  Great soundtrack.  Great photography. Great racing sequences.

It's not like this film, one of Ron Howard's best, didn't get some good reviews.  It's not like it didn't get some recognition on the awards scene, with some acting awards especially.  But certainly, in the US, the film didn't do as well as hoped.  It's a shame, that.

12 Years a Slave:
It's a hard film to love, and I want to keep pushing it away, but it doesn't deserve that.

I first caught up with director Steve McQueen with Shame, an impressive feature about an IRA prisoner who went on hunger strike.  Searing visual images, excellent acting, powerful story.  Often hard to sit through.

I got to see McQueen in person when the Museum of the Moving Image screened his Shame.  Didn't impress me so much there.  The movie had the same stunning visuals, I can still see some scenes of the main character racing down deserted Manhattan streets that shimmer and gleam.  Like Shame, hard to sit through.  We don't really need visually stunning movies about sex addicts.  And to have to listen to the director talk about all of the wonderful artistic decisions in making a film that nobody should have bothered with.  It's the risk of these Q&A things.  This wasn't as bad as listening to Alan Parker spout on about his genius in making The Life of David Gale, but it was close.

Then we arrive at 12 Years a Slave.  And we're starting to see some patterns here.  There are stunning visuals, and the movie is hard to sit through.

But it's a worthy movie in better ways than a lot of other worthy movies.  It isn't a movie that uses white people to tell the story of the black struggle.  It isn't Richard Attenborough or Bernardo Bertolluci who choke on their own artifice half the time.  See Gandhi for worthy and dull, or The Last Emperor.  See Cry Freedom.  No, this is told with passion, with emotion, with an abundance of good acting.  

Captain Phillips:
Tom Hanks gives a great performance, and the film shows director Paul Greengrass at this best, with great photography and great editing in the service of some real-life drama.

Room 237:
A documentary about The Shining, kind of.

If you like The Shining -- and I like it very much -- it's hard to see it just once.  You want to keep seeing it, over and over and over again.  And when you see a movie over and over again, you notice things about it that you may not notice on the first viewing or the thirtieth.  And it's a movie directed by Stanley Kubrick, whom some consider to be technocratic and cold, so in control of every frame that he suffocates human emotion.  So when you see one of his movies over and over again, and you notice things, you know that everything has to be there for a reason.

So this movie introduces us to people, whom we hear in voiceover over clips from the film but don't actually see on-screen, who have very clear ideas of what The Shining is all about.  Notice how the carpet has things that look like little rockets, and this is a movie about the faking of the Apollo rocket launches.  Or notice the food in the pantry and realize it's a movie about the treatment of the American Indian.  Or realize that the window in the hotel GM's office couldn't really be there and go someplace else from there.  All of these theories can't be right, and likely none of them are.  According to Kubrick's right hand man on the film, even the control freak director sometimes has a particular thing appear on the screen because they happened to need something and that was at hand on the particular day they shot a particular scene where they needed this particular thing.

I have a confession to make.  I never realized the window in the office couldn't have been a window.  I have stared at the screen a gazillion times trying to figure out if the bathroom window that Danny has to climb out of can really be a window in that particular place. I've yearned to look at blueprints because I never quite believe the architecture of the hotel, and now I find out that I might be able to go on the internet and find the blueprints I'm looking for.  But do I want to?  I like my mysteries.  I like my The Shining.

It's funny, sometimes funny-scary, it's insightful about the creative process, about our interaction with creativity, about obsession. .

Philomena:
The funny version of the not so funny story of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland.  Excellently acted by Judi Dench and Steve Coogan.

Before Midnight:
I saw Before Sunrise when it came out 18 years ago, at the UA Lynbrook on a day when I rode out there to visit the accountants for the Scott Meredith Agency, whom I used for a couple years when I struck out on my own.  If memory serves, I've not seen the movie again, though the idea of it sticks around.  And then Before Sunset came around, 9 years after, and it sticks around.  You can't quite believe how much tension you can get out of wondering if a guy's going to leave to catch his flight or not, and this movie left me as rapt about that small little decision as if there were a red timer counting down for the bomb that might go off and destroy the world.  And now, Before Midnight.  Once again, Ethan Hawke, Juliet Delpy and director Richard Linklater collaborate on a little movie with a long aftertaste.  Ethan Hawke didn't make his flight.  Now, he's got a son from his prior marriage, the one that broke up in part because he didn't make that flight.  And he's spending some tense time in Greece with his girlfriend, Delpy.  And they ride around in a car after dropping their son off at the airport, and they talk while the beautiful Greek scenery glides by.  And they talk over lunch with friends, while chopping the vegetables and eating the result.  And they talk some more while they walk back to their hotel, an extended take tracking them through relics.  And it all comes to a head when they get to the hotel, 18 years of history and resentment and love and bitterness and shared experiences and things they should've done together but didn't.  Nominated for an Oscar in the screenplay categories.  The movies seem like they're being made up on the spot, but as I read in one interview, you can't go filming across the Greek countryside, closing roads, doing multiple takes, and make it all up as you go along.

Her:
One of the best sf films in a long time.  Winner of an Academy Award for Original Screenplay.

The Wolf of Wall Street:
Not quite up to the level of Goodfellas, but an amazingly good film by Martin Scorcese, with an exceptional lead performance by Leonardo DiCaprio and good supporting work by Jonah Hill, Kyle Chandler and others.  Leisurely, finding its own rhythms, and certain to be talked about for a very long time.

The Conjuring:
I realized as I was typing that I needed to add this to my list for reasons mentioned in what I say above about The Spectacular Now.  I'm nearing 50.  I don't do horror movies the way I used to.  I hardly do them at all.  But I went to see this one, I was on the edge of my seat the whole way, I was using my arms or my knees or my anything to keep myself from seeing what was happening on the screen because I was scared.  The movie's of a type, but it's among the very best of it's type that you'll find.

Gravity:
New-fangled technology and old-fashioned great acting from Sandra Bullock and George Clooney.  Visually stunning to look at, suspenseful to sit through, one of the few films I wish I'd paid more to see.

There are several hundred films released each year, and I see only a small percentage of them, somewhere between 90-110 in a typical year.  So ya know, my list isn't as valid as some critic who is paid to see movies and sees 400 of them, but it also isn't full of too many obscure films that only a critic would have or could have seen.  Room 237, Short Term 12, Spectacular Now are the more "obscure" of the movies on my list, but hey, I just round a Room 237 DVD lurking in Costco, so how obscure can it be!

Rushing Captain Phillips

In case you haven't noticed, I'm trying to catch up on a year of movie reviews in the week of/after the Golden Globes and before the announcement of Oscar nominations.

Lots of people have seen the excellent Captain Phillips.  As well they should!

Tom Hanks is fantastic in this movie.  Unlike in Saving Mr. Banks, you never forget that he is Tom Hanks.  But the much talked about last scene of the movie which is harrowing and amazing (and all the more so for being partially improvised, with Hanks playing against a non-actor) is all the more so for us knowing that if it's Tom Hanks in this situation, it really could be any of us.  It's directed by Paul Greengrass who is a quite perfect choice.  He started out as a documentarian, moved to doing documentaries like the quite excellent Bloody Sunday and United 93, jas done action-oriented feature films like Green Zone and two Bourne movies.  So here, he gets to take a real story which is full of ways to show off his action-shooting acumen.  Screenplay by Billy Ray, whose credits include hte fact-based Shattered Glass.

Alas, far fewer people have seen the excellent film Rush.  It was a pleasant surprise that Daniel Brühl picked up a Golden Globe nomination for Supporting Actor in the film, for a movie that came and went disappointingly at the US box office, and has also gotten nods from the Screen Actors Guild, the Broadcast Film Critics, and the BAFTAs (British film awards).

More to the point, Rush has a lot of people and things in it that I have long admired, doing very good work, in a well-crafted entertainment.  You need to see Rush!  You should stop reading this blog post and go find Rush to stream or rent or whatever!!

The director of Rush is Ron Howard.  As I mention here I think Ron Howard is underrated.  He has a career full of solid films, very few really bad ones, and deserves more of a reputation for doing consistent work for so very very long.

The screenwriter of Rush is Peter Morgan.  The Queen and Frost/Nixon are among his best-known credits, but his The Damned United is an excellent sports film about British football that understandably didn't take the US by storm but is really really good.  So this is another sports movie from him.

Daniel Brühl.  He first came to my eye in 2003 in a film called Good Bye Lenin! about a son trying to hide the fall of the East German regime from his mother.  A German actor, he hasn't done a lot of English-language film acting, but he's been in a Bourne movie and in Inglorious Basterds and I've never been sad to see him in something.

I really liked Thor, the first one, directed by Kenneth Branagh, which spent lots of time showing me Chris Hemsworth in a tight tee-shirt.  I did not like the new Thor movie, which had Chris Hemsworth covered up in a silly Thor uniform the whole time.  Hemsworth is under-rated by critics because he looks fantastic.  He really looks fantastic.  So it's easy to overlook that you don't just watch him on the screen because he looks fantastic but rather because he radiates charm and charisma, and the charm and charisma kind of hide the fact that he can act.  I think I'm saying that because he can act, and not just because I enjoy looking at him enough that I wish it was because he was acting, and not because he's posing.

So with all these things going for it, Rush can't be bad, and it isn't.  It's a darned fine movie.  Like The Damned United, it goes beyond beyond just a sports movie.  There are a lot of moral issues involved about the collision of safety and money in sports that pop their head up through the action.  There's enough going on with the characters and with universality of theme that I enjoyed this Formula One racing movie even though I don't have any interest to speak of in Formula One.

The making of the movie is smooth and unobtrusive.  The thing with Ron Howard is that he gets out of the way, and usually lets his story speak for itself.  So he gets some good actors, he finds a good DP in Anthony Dod Mantle (127 Hours, Slumdog Millionaire, Millions, 28 Days Later, all for Danny Boyle), and the film is attractive to look at.  Hans Zimmer does an amazing score, one of the best I've heard in a long long long long long time, and hopefully to become a masterwork in Zimmer's discography alongside Rain Man.  The overall sound editing and sound design of the film is excellent, so the music co-exists with the dialogue and the sounds of the race cars careening around the turns.

And of course the acting is really good.  You can't tell Chris Hemsworth is acting because he's just radiating charisma as a bad boy race car driver as famous for his sexual rondelays off the circuit as for how he drives the ovals on.  Brühl is one of those drivers who's full of respect for the game and his competitors and by-the-books, and he talks in a weird foreign accent while the driver Hemsworth plays talks nicely accented English.  The two are both very talented, fierce competitors.  And on a rainy day when Brühl is saying it's too dangerous to race, Hemsworth is using his charisma to say the show must go on.  The two pair off one another nicely.

What not to see?  The film is great to listen to, great to look at in every way, an interesting story that gripped me in spite of being set in a milieu I don't default to being interested in.

It would make me very happy to see nominations for sound, score, and in an acting category.  It will make me very sad if the film is overlooked entirely.

Green Zone

When I re-committed to the blog three months ago after a post-less fall 2009, one of the things I said I'd try and do was limit the length of my posts, and on balance I think I've done that. There goes that goal. There's too much going on in Green Zone (see Wednesday evening March 10, 2010 at the Universal Screening Room) to keep it short.

The movie can be reviewed as a Bourne-like action movie. Green Zone star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass teamed on Bourne #2 and Bourne #3. And it can be reviewed as a polemic, yet another Iraq polemic after movies of highly variable success from Stop Loss as a very good and underrated one to In the Valley of Elah as a less successful one, or Rendition and De Palma's Redacted (watched one on HBO on Demand, didn't see the other) and etc. etc. And let us not forget Hurt Locker, which was photographed by Green Zone cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, who worked with Greengrass previously on United 93.

I should probably start by talking about the film from the thriller standpoint, that being the more successful part of the movie. But I'm not. Let's talk politics.

In the lead-up to the Iraq war in late 2002 and early 2003, I was very ambivalent about the whole affair. I was fairly certain that Iraq did not have Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Just a gut feeling, really. We were looking so hard for them, so very very very very hard, and we weren't coming up with anything, not even the Colin Powell address at the UN, that was looking very convincing to me. Seemed to me if they were there that all of our money and effort and searching would have come up with something. Maybe not a smoking gun, maybe just a smoldering soap sculpture thereof. But something.

At the same time, I didn't feel as if the war was necessarily a bad idea. Saddam Hussein was a very bad actor. We were enforcing sanctions on his regime with the weight of a six-figure troop deployment without much of a helping hand from anyone else. Either we were going to have to get some help in enforcing sanctions, we were going to have to give up on the idea because it was unsustainable to continue to enforce them unilaterally, or we were going to have to charge forward. Now, given those choices, which in the real world are we going to choose?

So I didn't dislike the rush to war, per se. I did feel as if we were being lied into a war when we didn't need to be, and that to me was a bad idea.

I recall at the time that the left-wing serious UK newspaper The Guardian did a major series exploring the question of whether or not Iraq had WMD. That kind of reporting was pretty much absent from the major US newspapers. The press defenders will find this exception or that, but the Guardian articles were long, major, front-page, well-researched, pro-and-con heavily reported articles. I don't think anyone can seriously point to a series in the Washington Post, NY Times, or Wall Street Journal, the three biggest opinion leaders in US journalism, that matched. Compare, let's say, how much ink the NY Times has given in recent months to errors in radiation treatment at US hospitals, and you'd have to look awfully hard to find something like that in 2002 or 2003 on the WMD question. No, the major newspapers were highly credulous. The poster child for this has become a former NY Times reporter Judith Miller who was a go-to conduit for planting the official US line on the WMD question.

And Green Zone is coming from a very similar place.

Matt Damon is playing a Chief Warrant Officer (itself a bit of a surprise, we don't have too many movies with Warrant Officers at the center, Andy Gudgel will like this!) who is tasked with searching potential WMD sites in the months after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. We come in as he's doing his third such search, and for the third time coming up empty. He doesn't like risking men to come up empty. He starts asking where the WMD are, where the intelligence is coming from, other questions that don't have answers. He's in such a high dudgeon about this that he ends up going off res to do his own side ops, ultimately trying to take in a possible source of the misinformation. He runs up against a buzzsaw of an obstacle played by Greg Kinnear, a Paul Bremer stand-in (for those of you who don't remember, Bremer was Dubya's appointee to pretty much run Iraq as head of the Coalition authority) who doesn't like people looking very closely at the sourcing for the WMD intelligence. The climactic scene of the movie is Damon going to take in source chased by special forces units tasked by Kinnear with getting the source before Damon does, and with doing to Damon whatever needs to be done.

The ideological climax of the movie is a confrontation between Damon and Kinnear after where Damon says words very much to my liking, that the reasons why we go to war matter.

But while the movie climaxes with a confrontation between its two leads that very much warms my heart, the movie has to hit too many wrong notes in order to hit the right ones. It isn't likely that the Damon character would self-generate so many of his own orders. There are more successful paranoid conspiracy films that might get us to believe the Special Forces unit would kill Damon in the climax if it came to that, but I couldn't buy into it here. That they might tussle with Damon to get a little black book, yes, that they might kill him, no.

I always felt that we could have been led into war in 2003 for better reasons than the WMD, but the movie doesn't have that ambivalency. That one reason wasn't a right reason, and the war must therefore have been wrong. There's no sense that the war might still have been a right one to wage for other reasons.

There's even the question of whether those who were lying us into war were lying about it, in the sense of purposely and knowingly giving us false information, and I'm not sure I'd go that far in every instance. The war was oversold, and some of the people who did that should take ownership of their lies and mistakes (greeted as liberators, y'all remember that?), but this is an area with more grey than black and white.

But I can't fault the movie too much for that, either. Fiction films don't do very well with greys. You don't put Matt Damon in this role in order to have him Hamlet-ized with inner conflict. I'm not sure what the right or better approach would be. God knows there isn't going to be much of an audience for an even-handed documentary that attempts to show the world the "truth" about the lead-up to the war. The sub-conscious reason of needing to go to war to escape the sanctions enforcement conundrum hasn't been aired very much at all, that's for sure. We don't have an All the President's Men that can serve as a way in to the story. We don't have the consensus we did 25 years ago that allowed All the President's Men to be seen as a genuine good vs evil story.

I will fault the movie because I think its efforts to bring in the "whole" story about the WMD lie result in some of its worst offenses as filmmaking. We have a Judith Miller stand-in. Here she's a reporter for the Wall St. Journal who pretty much printed the press releases from her government sources about the source named "Magellan" who was pointing us to WMD, and implied is the same source for the bum steers Damon's being given. She's not a very good character in the script, or not well depicted by Amy Ryan. She radiates oily journalism, and not much else. And then Matt Damon's guided from within the government by an old CIA hand who doesn't like these politicos like the Greg Kinnear character. This is a lesser performance by usually reliable character actor Brendan Gleeson, who performs here like he wandered in accidentally off the set of The Third Man or The Quiet American. Gleeson may not be entirely to blame. The script comes up short in explaining who this character is, what the does, and how he relates to the other characters. I had a hard time figuring it out for the entire duration of the movie.

All that being said, there are lots of things in Green Zone that are well worth praise.

Let's start with Matt Damon.

It's around twelve years and twelve weeks since I took a note to self that Damon could act, when I saw him, the week before Titanic opened, in The Rainmaker at the Loews Astor Plaza and in Good Will Hunting on the Loews Lincoln Square Imax screen. [As an entirely irrelevant aside, I saw Rainmaker with my old SMLA colleague Mark, who also joined me for Green Zone.] I'm tempted to say he was born to play the lead role in Green Zone, only problem with that is he's so talented that he was born to play an awful lot of things. His prior two films are Invictus and The Informant, he's every bit as good in those as he is in Green Zone, and the three roles are as alike as snow flakes.

Every note he hits in Green Zone, he hits it right. Physically, he walks around in the movie like he was born in the US Army, went to kindergarten at the Warrant Officer school. He utterly inhabits the role. The role as written is filled with implausibility, but the role as acted has none. You never question that he'd start to follow his own orders and that his reports would follow. Some credit to the script that not all of them follow unquestionably.

Paul Greengrass is capable of doing different things in his work. United 93 and Bloody Sunday are two different varieties of verite. This movie is in the fast-paced, fast-cut, vertigo-inducing hand-held camera style we found in the first two Bourne movies. It's brilliantly crafted, in a mirror opposite way to the surprising leisure of Inglorious Basterds.

I don't know what inspired me to do this, but in the climactic scene of Green Zone, I decided to count the number of cuts, and there were upwards of 200 of them in these few minutes when Damon is chasing the Iraqi he wants to bring in and being chased in turn by the evil Special Forces unit. Upwards of 200! Yet Greengrass and his editor Christopher Rouse make it cohere. One of the things I noticed was that you never lost even a fraction of a second picking up the action after a cut. The central human figure at the beginning of one shot is always to be found in the same place as at the end of the shot before, usually going in a direction that was followable. Because many of the characters were in uniform, and because some shot sequences would cut from a character being chased shot from the back in uniform to the character who was chasing shot from the back in uniform down the same alley way, it wasn't easy to count all of the cuts because you almost didn't realize you were with a different character. Sometimes this gives more of a general sense of chaos than of the exact specifics of the action. But when you needed to know the exacts, you knew the exact, and when it was sufficient to be caught up in the overall chaos of the scene, you were caught up in that.

This kind of thing doesn't happen without a lot of work and a lot of planning. You can't do this in the editing room without having the right shots on film. There needs to be a stunning level of coordination on set between the director and the cinematographer and pretty much everyone else in order to make all of these shots line up when it gets to the cutting room.

When Michael Bay cuts around like this in Armageddon, or when some other Jerry Bruckheimer acolytye does this fast-paced whirlybird editing, the word we usually use for it is "incoherent." Alas, I just don't have the stomach to go back and watch Armageddon to see if I can come up with the precise reason why their incoherence is Greengrass' brilliance, but I think I can guess that you won't see the same kind of exact placement of action from shot to shot that we see in Green Zone.

Should you see Green Zone? This is one of the reasons why I decided to do away with toad ratings for the movies I blogged about. As full-throttle military action, you can't do much better than Green Zone. All of the people complaining in the Hurt Locker backlash/whisper campaign how it had the wrong uniforms won't have anything to complain about here. Many of those same people will probably be more upset than I am with what the movie has to say about the underpinnings and politics of the Iraq war than I.

I got to see an advance screening of this, courtesy of the Museum of the Moving Image, in the Universal Screening Room. The studio's Manhattan outpost is located in a historic publishing location, 666 Fifth Avenue. This building housed Bantam Books for many many years, and the flagship location of B. Dalton was on street level. As can be expected for a screening room, it wasn't particularly big. But it had very comfortable seats, sufficient ceiling height to all for a full theatre-sized screen, and an excellent sound system. The one problem was that there isn't much of a rake to the auditorium, so you have to hope nobody tall is sitting directly in front of you.