Grown-Up Movies

There are two really good movies for adults playing right now, Argo and Flight both of which I'd recommend, with perhaps a slight bias toward Argo.

For those of you who don't know, which shouldn't be many, Argo is a new movie directed by starring Ben Affleck about an effort to "exfiltrate" from Iran six workers at the US Embassy who were able to escape and find their way to safety with the Canadian ambassador during the hostage crisis of 1979-1981.  It shouldn't work as well as it does, and certainly not from a contemporary standpoint where movies tend to be so loud and action-packed and overwrought.  But it wasn't always this way.  Before everyone spent so much money on special effects it was common to really cast a movie up and down the line.  Which Argo does, with Alan Arkin and John Goodman and Bryan Cranston all having major supporting roles  And even smaller roles filled very reliably, as an example the Canadian ambassador being played by Victor Garber (the captain in Titanic) or one of the hostages quietly filled by Tate Donavan.  And it's possible to generate a lot of tension very quietly, which this movie does.  There's a scene of a van carrying the "film crew" to "scout locations," when this van full of "Canadians" has to make its way through an angry crowd of demonstrating Iranians.  No money in the scene. Just a street in Istanbul (doubling for Teheran) and some extras, it could have even been done on a backlot Arab street in Hollywood.  But it's so well done, so well edited and the sound mixing so good and the quiet fright on the actor's faces so good that you don't need any much more than that

And because all of these little things are so well done, the film works even though the six hostages aren't well-developed chapters, and the CIA exfiltrator is a cipher with the most basic character traits (child he never sees).  That's the main reason why I'm surprised the film works as well as it does, because it doesn't develop the characters very much.  And yet the filmmaking so so muscular, so quietly powerful, taks such good advantage of the inherent drama of the situation, that it all works beautifully.

In its opening weekend, the "Cinemascore" service that polls audiences, came up with an A+ for this movie, which hardly ever happens.  And it wasn't a figment of something.  These days, it is common for a film to drop 40% from its first weekend box office to its second weekend.  Some genres like horror films will be happy to drop less than 50%.  Argo dropped more like 15%, which just doesn't happen at all any more.  It's a lot of good word of mouth and well deserved.

Flight, directed by Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future or Forrest Gump in the good old days, more recently motion capture like Polar Express) and starring Denzel Washington, shares one key trait with Argo.  It doesn't stint on casting where it needs.  John Goodman is in this as well, as a friend and dealer to Denzel Washington's drunkard airline pilot, who knows how to use coke to level Denzel off from his drunken binges.  Bruce Greenwood (brilliant in Mao's Last Dancer and good in many other things) is a rep for the pilot's union, Don Cheadle an attorney hired by the union. And while the film centers on a dramatic airline crash sequence that's hardly quiet at all, there've been lots of movies with well-depicted disasters in them.  The film works because it backs that up with all sorts of quieter scenes that let the actors shine.  There's as much will he - won't he tension to wondering what Denzel Washington's going to do with the connecting room mini bar as there is to that van ride in Argo, and this is even quieter.  Just one actor, and the actor not even in camera, just lurking there while we look at a single bottle of booze in a hotel room.

The film doesn't glorify alcoholism.  The alcoholic is played by Denzel Washington, so he's charismatic.  But he's also a drunk, and often not a very likeable one.  This isn't something Hollywood does well, very often. I didn't feel like I was being asked to like the guy, but I wasn't being asked to revel in wallowing with him either.

The one thing that doesn't work for me is the ending.  How do you end the movie?  You can't send the audience out with Denzel Washington still being a drunk, who would tell their friends to see that movie.  You can't end the movie with some kind of miracle cure because it just isn't true to the character in a movie that is trying to be very true.  So where do you find the balance?  There's a valiant attempt to find the third way, but it didn't work for me.  Back in the '60s or '70s I think the movie would have been a little darker and would have worked for back then but recently watching the ending of Marathon Man, which I'd never seen before, you realize that those endings just don't work any more unless you want your $3M film to have a highly regarded run in art houses.  Here, it's not $3M film, that won't even cover the star and director.

But these are both really good films, and worth going to a theatre to see.

True Romancing the Danger Zone

What do you say about Tony Scott?

Well, I don't think you'll be hearing this too many times in the obituaries and reminiscences that are going to be out and about in the wake of his tragic suicide, but I think I'd compare him most to Martin Scorcese. Yes, Martin Scorcese.

Because I think the experience of going to the movies isn't just about if a movie is good or bad but about the memories it creates. There are directors who don't create memories at all, I can't rouse myself to like or dislike a Betty Thomas film, let's say, Beverly Hillbillies wasn't good but I don't dwell on it. But at both his best and at his worst, Tony Scott created great memories.

There's Top Gun, which I'm now watching on Blu Ray. It was made 20 years before Blu Ray and yet if you're wondering if it's worth upgrading from a regular DVD, Top Gun could be the test reel. It wasn't the first movie I saw at the Loews Astor Plaza, but it was the first I saw after I started working in New York City, a few months before I moved to NYC, the first movie when the Astor Plaza was my hometown theatre. Like the best Tony Scott, it's got great special effects and lively music and an OD of testosterone. Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Gene Hackman, Christian Slater, Will Smith -- Tony Scott always loved his leading men. Many of the actors he worked with including Cruise, Denzel and Hackman, found the Tony Scott experience one worth repeating.

And there's the needless remake ot The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 which was memorably bad.

Scorcese has Goodfellas and The Age of Innocence, Tony Scott had Top Gun and The Taking of Pelham, and I'll give Tony Scott an advantage here because the bad Tony Scott films were never as excruciatingly dull and miserable to sit through as The Age of Innocence or The Last Temptation of Christ.

When I was in college, I saw a Scorcese movie I really really liked called After Hours, which I've never seen again.

That too has an almost analog in True Romance, which I saw in 1993 and didn't revisit for 18 years. It held up. I don't think I can call it a masterpiece, but it's full of charm and romance and spunk, it's fun. When I went to see Oliver Stone's Savages several weeks ago, with more recent memories of True Romance fresh in my mind, I sat through the movie thinking "wow, this is probably the best and funnest violent drug movie since True Romance." And the interesting thing was that the person I was seeing the movie with was thinking that exact same thing.

And then Tony Scott could come up with Man on Fire, a thoroughly entertaining and entirely reprehensible movie which tells us that all that is wrong in the world can be taken care of with a little bit of maiming and torture. Well, I did loathe and detest Man on Fire on multiple levels, but I'm never going to forget it.

There's the quintessential Tony Scott, movies like Crimson Tide and Enemy of the State that maybe aren't particularly memorable or particularly worth a repeat viewing but which were well done examples of everything Tony Scott could do well.

And when you have things that you can do well, you can sometimes make a movie that surpasses simply by being the best of all of your best qualities. I'd put Unstoppable in that category. It's just so unstoppably good at all of the good things it is. There's Denzel, again, no longer the young guy with a gleam in his eye but being oh so Denzel and sharing the stage with Chris Pine, who is everything the Tony Scott leading man could be. You can't help but think if Tony Scott were with us, probably someday he'd be back working with Chris Pine again. The special effects were quietly good, Tony Scott wasn't a Peter Jackson who can get lost in the joys of fake special effects. This is a train going down train tracks looking to make a real tight curve in a real midwest city. You can feel it rumbling down the tracks way more than you can feel anything that was going on in King Kong. Like a train slowly gaining speed, Unstoppable just chugs along and chugs along and then comes up with about as good a last 40 minutes as you can find in film, 40 minutes that won't have you looking at your watch or squirming in your seat or doing anything other than looking rapt at the screen until the final moment of release.

So ultimately, what I can say about Tony Scott is, that it would sure have been nice to have seen another Tony Scott film come along. I don't know if it would have been Top Gun or Man on Fire, but there's a darned good chance it would have created some kind of cinematic memory for me.

I mean, every time that Top Gun theme starts playing, Howard Faltermeyer's bah-da-da-da-dum da-da-dum da-da-dum, I've got to look up at the TV and see what it's underscoring, and there's Tom Cruise beautifully lit and radiating the same kind of charisma that we'd get every single time from every single leading man in every single Tony Scott film being what movies and movie stars are all about.

As one Marvin Hamlisch song says "nobody does it better."

other holiday movies

Also playing for Thanksgiving, three films inspired at some or another level by real life...

127 Hours is a specialty release that's been slowly broadening and will be in a screen or two in most major cities for the holidays. It's another book-to-film, this one based on the book Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aron Ralston. Ralston is a hiker who was forced to cut off his own arm to escape when a boulder trapped him inside a Utah canyon, and this real life story has been adapted by Danny Boyle, the director of Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire and many other movies including Trainspotting, Sunshine, 28 Days Later, The Beach, etc. And Boyle throws his all into making an energetic lively adaptation of the story. The movie starts out with a rush of energy, from the photography and editing and lighting and the music by A. R. Rahman, who also did the fantastic score and songs for Slumdog. There's just one problem. Once Ralston is stuck in the canyon unable to move, there's not much you can do to move the movie along, either. Flashbacks, visions, dream sequences, fancy editing, nifty dissolves. Boyle does all he can. But he can't overcome the fact that this just isn't a good thing to try and turn into a movie, and I got very sleepy-eyed as it progressed. Lots of good reviews for this one, but I can't recommend it.

Unstoppable, I can recommend wholeheartedly. That's gotten surprisingly good reviews, and it's because the movie is surprisingly good. With director Tony Scott, you never know what you're getting. I'd like to see True Romance again very very very much. Top Gun is a delightful guilty pleasure. Taking of Pelham remake was awful, Man on Fire was a wonderfully reprehensible movie. Here he's showing his A game, and as several times before has the inevitably wonderful Denzel Washington at his service, side-by-side with Chris Pine who put himself on my radar quite nicely playing Kirk in the Star Trek reboot. I didn't like Pine as much here, he seemed a little too dialed back and his face too hidden behind stubble, but Denzel was good as pretty much always, and nice supporting work especially by Rosario Dawson. She plays a chief dispatcher for the railroad that employs Denzel and Chris. The movie's about this big giant huge train that leaves the yard without an engineer and promises to go over on a big curve in a heavily populated city with tens of thousands of lives at risk. I can find fault with the cliches that the script trots out, which grow kind of tiresome. But as train rides go, this one can't be topped. When the serious fun begins with Denzel and Chris trying to back up to the speeding train, hook on, and slow it down with the clock ticking big-time, it's just one big non-stop sit-back don't-breath, enjoy-the-ride thrillfest in every best and good sense of what that means. Tony Scott's flair for the dramatic and the lively here fits his story quite well. It's hard to imagine a train set being as much macho fun as moving all those jet planes in Top Gun, but guess what it is. Just a lot of fun, once it gets going. There was an actual rogue train several years ago, but the movie doesn't resemble in anything other than a vague way.

Then there's Fair Game, which I was thrilled to see at the wonderful single screen AMC Loews Uptown on my last trip to DC. This is a cerebral version of Unstoppable. It's a movie about the case of Valerie Plame, whose cover as a CIA agent was blown by the Bush administration in a fit of pique when her husband cast doubt on claims being made by the administration about Saddam's WMD in Iraq. Doug Liman (first Bourne movie, Mr. and Mrs. Smith) directs, with Naomi Watts playing Plame and Sean Penn her husband. The experience of watching this is a lot like that of Unstoppable, with an OK first half followed by a much better second half. But it also means that the movie is better as a domestic drama depicting the aftermath of Plame's outing on the couple's marriage, than as political drama. I saw some of myself in Joe Wilson, as he stubbornly or heroically or tragically holds to his belief that he was right to speak truth to power even as it causes his marriage to crumble because the biggest collateral damage is to his own wife. Penn and Watts are both fantastic in their roles. But taken on their own terms, I would say Unstoppable is the better movie. The biggest problem I had with Fair Game was that iti isn't content to be about the Plames and diverts to show us the aftermath in Iraq of having her network rolled up when her cover is. Better to have kept the focus on him and her, because I didn't care about the Iraqi scientists in the context of this story. A movie that wants to be about politics ends up succeeding as something else. Unstoppable wants tomb what it succeeds at being. Fair Gane is worthier of being seen; I can recommend. But I can recommend Unstoppable more, um, unstoppably.

Apocalypse Now

In the past six months, we've had three movies full of debris-ridden interstates, broken pavement, downed bridges, overturned shopping carts as symbol of dead nomadic humans.

The first of those was Zombieland (seen in October 2009 at the Regal/UA Kaufman Astoria 14), which arrived during my blogging interregnum, and which I consider to be a thoroughgoing delight. If it wasn't written with its two leads in mind, it was certainly impeccaby cast with two actors who took full advantage of every opportunity the script had to give them. Woody Harrelson has had a very strong year ranging from his excellent deadpan laconic zombie killer here to the equally laconic but totally different soldier he plays in The Messenger. I'm not sure Jesse Eisenberg is yet capable of bringing life to an inert script; he certainly doesn'tmake Adventureland sing. But this young actor wasn't even 20 when he made Roger Dodger sing, barely old enough to drink when he delivered a performance of confused teenage snarak in The Squid and the Whale, and he does it again in Zombieland. We've seen the humorous horror movie before, from American Werewolf in London to Shaun of the Dead. Eisenberg's voiceover totally nails Zombieland and helps elevate it above even those good movies. It's not perfect; I didn't totally buy it when Eisenberg's character started thinking with the part of his anatomy around two or three feet down from his brain. Perfect, no. But fresh, fun, quick-witted, and a definite one to rent.

Awards season presented us with The Road (seen Saturday January 2, 2010 at Landmark's Sunshine, Aud. #4) . This was marketed as quintessential award bait, and that's a problem when you get the kind of mixed reviews this one did. On account of the reviews, I was ambivalent about going to see it, but a strong recommendation from Peter V. Brett ultimately pushed me into the theatre, and I'm extremely glad that I saw this. What makes the movie work for me is its pitch-perfect blend of a harrowing post-apocalyptic setting with a heart-warming father-and-son story. The film pulls no punches in its depiction of what the world would be and should be. Horrible things happen at almost every turn. They're often handled with as much directorial delicacy as I think the subject matter could allow, but because we're viewing them through the lens of characters we care about quite a bit, the events have real emotional power. We're not able to distance ourselves. I think this might be one reason for the surprisingly mixed reviews. If you take the topic and make a dull, leaden movie... well, you can call that art, and then easily say nice things about it because of the dulling, distancing effect it has. So David Cronenberg can make you squeamish and get great reviews because you're set apart from it all, and here you don't have that luxury. Viggo Mortensen is excellent as the father, the son is played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, who isn't entirely immune to a kind of youthful over-emoting but for the most part plays this unnatural role with winning naturalism. Charlize Theron is tender as the mother. And Guy Pearce, who had a brief but powerful role in The Hurt Locker has another excellent cameo here.

And talk about your odd juxtapositions, I also saw a midnight showing of The Muppet Movie, the very next movie in the exact same auditorium, didn't have to leave my seat.

And then finally, we come to The Book of Eli (seen Sunday February 7, 2010 at Clearview's Chelsea, Aud. #9). Occasional commenter Myke keeps questioning my taste in movies so he will be quite disappointed to know he was right to warn me away from this. Here, you've got Denzel Washington as a Mad Max type of post-apocalyptic traveler. I like Denzel a lot and don't miss much that he's in, but this movie does pretty much nothing to show off his star power and charisma. So why did he pick this, and why pick him to waste him? Gary Oldman has some fun in a bad role that's been done 609 times before as a post-apocalyptic villain. The first two thirds of the movie are taken up with a lot of been-there done-that very uninteresting battle scenes. Toward the end of the movie, there's a very nifty twist that puts the movie a little into Sixth Sense/Fight Club territory. I think it may work. Part of me would love to go back and see the movie to see just how well the twist works, which in Sixth Sense is near perfect and in Fight Club really not at all, except to do that would involve having to watch 90 minutes of really un-interesting apocalyptic fight stuff. Furthermore, these kinds of twists work best in movies that have some underlying smarts, while I think this movie is essentially very stupid. Where does Gary Oldman get fuel for his fleet of cars? Why isn't he dethroned when his loyalists are decimated by Denzel Washington? Why doesn't he look to check out that the Bible is for real the moment it's given to him? And then in the crowning stupidity of the movie, after we've gotten the neat Sixth Sense/Fight Club/maybe even a bit of Twilight Zone nifty twist, we get this shot of the precious Bible (no spoiler here that this is the eponymous Book) being tucked on a shelf between The Torah and the Qu'ran. Nobody involved with the movie is aware of the fact that The Torah is the first five books of The Bible, so that it's at least a little bit wrong and I'd venture to say a little more than that for characters to act like there isn't a Bible to be had in the world? OK, yes, the Torah is only part of the Bible, no New Testatment, no Prophets, etc., having a copy of the Torah isn't having a copy of the Bible. But let's just say that a few minutes before the movie was getting totally jazzed about the opening verses of Genesis -- which are sitting on the shelf next to the Qu'ran at the time. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I was much happier afterward to see Dear John (seen Sunday Feb. 7, 2010 at Clearview's Chelsea, Aud. #8). I saw this every bit as much to see Channing Tatum as I'd gone to The Book of Eli to see Denzel. I don't want to say that Dear John is genuinely good, but it delivers totally and pretty much without apology on what it promises. It's sappy but charming. It's almost 19 years ago to the day, also in the Chelsea, that I saw the pretty dreary Once Around by director Lasse Hallstrom, which was followed by the really good What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and that's the kind of career Hallstrom's had, careening wildly from the insufferable to the intriguing to the overly or overtly sentimental. This is well-cast genre fare. There are worse date movies or chick flicks for guys to be dragged along to.

Implausibility and Amiability

So the implausible first...

The Taking of Pelham 123, seen Saturday afternoon June 20, 2009 at the UA Midway, Auditorium #1.  If you Love NY 1 Slithy Toad.  Else 2.

Talk about finding laughs in all the wrong places. 

The 2009 remake of The Taking of Pelham 123 has its virtues.  The lead performances by Denzel Washington and John Travolta are quite pleasant to watch.  That almost goes without saying for Denzel Washington.  With Travolta, you never know quite what you might get.  But here, he's a good foil, playing a subway train hijacker against Denzel Washington's subway dispatcher.  There are some nice turns in the supporting cast, like James Gandolfini as the Mayor of New York City.  If you can live with the fact that 2009 is simply not 1974 in any way or shape or form, you can accept that the movie is acceptably updated and remade.  Oh, it goes too far.  The first movie ends in an almost anti-climactic and certainly very subtle kind of way, and the new version goes all the way into loud 21st century movie-making.  Something in-between might have been nicer.  

But...

My oh my but...

for all the money and talent and resources that were spent on this, did it have to treat NYC geography so stupidly, so sillily, so cavalierly, so ineptly? 

Some things, you can give the filmmaker artistic license.  My movie-going companion, editor extraordinaire Moshe Feder (he discovered Brandon Sanderson for Tor), noticed which I did not that some of the Grand Central subway scenes were shot at the #7 train platform instead of the Lexington Ave. #6 platform.  That we can live with.

But here is a movie where:

1.  The midtown HQ for the subway system is located at the tip of lower Manhattan in the Staten Island Ferry terminal.

2.  After the #6 train is hijacked, the authorities continue to run express trains on the adjacent tracks.  Even if they don't stop at Grand Central, this is ludicrous.  The Lexington Ave. line would be shut down in the neighborhood.

3.  The captured train goes south from Grand Central to some secret "Roosevelt" station that goes into the Roosevelt Hotel.  Which is North of Grand Central, and not on Lexington Ave.  Except that this secret Roosevelt station leads into the Waldorf Astoria hotel, which has a private platform for the Metro North commuter rail but not for the the subway system.

4.  The movie invents a Brooklyn Federal Reserve bank.  And then the NYC police that I've seen do incredible street-clearing jobs for things like the UN General Assembly somehow manage not to be able to do a decent job of clearing a route for a motorcade carrying $10M from this fake Federal Reserve bank, solely so that there can be Exciting Illogical Crashes along the motorcade route.

5.  It takes less time to drive from the Waldorf to the Manhattan Bridge than it does for a half dozen policeman to walk 20 yds. along the Manhattan Bridge bike/walkway.  

6.  And of course the police don't stop subway trains going across the Manhattan Bridge even though they know that's where the villain is heading.

7.  The hijacked #6 train is somehow going to head off to Coney Island, even though there is no way that  I know of for a train on the Lex. Ave. IRT lines to switch on to any of the lines that go out to Coney Island.

8.  When the train emerges from underground on its way to Coney Island, it does so where the #7 train emerges from the tunnel leading into Main St. Flushing in Queens, with a brief glimpse of Shea Stadium in the background.  Poor Shea Stadium, perhaps its final screen appearance and it has to be here. 

9.  The Mayor takes a train to 57th or 59th St. in order to go to the Staten Island Ferry terminal 5 miles away.

10.  Neither the Mayor nor his aide have a cell phone while riding the subway, so the only way to alert the mayor to what's happening is to have cops run up to an elevated platform and hop on a train just moments ahead of the doors closing.

You get the idea.  

The filmmakers had the money and the cooperation and everything else they needed to make things right, or at least a reasonable version thereof.  And instead, they make it wrong.

I got a lot more laughs out of this than I think I was supposed to.

After a little bit of a break to visit the Barnes & Noble in Forest Hills, I returned to the Midway and saw...

Hangover.  Seen Sat. evening June 20, 2009 at the UA Midway, Auditorium 4.  3 slithy toads.

The Proposal.  Seen Sat. evening June 20, 2009 at the UA Midway, Auditorium 9.  2.5 slithy toads.

Neither of these movies had as many laughs as Pelham 123, but both had me smiling for pretty much their entire duration.  Hangover gets the edge in my ratings because it doesn't wear out its welcome while I was occasionally checking my watch in The Proposal.  Also, Hangover is kind of ludicrous at every level but intentionally so, and when you buy into it you buy into it.  While The Proposal too often stretches plausibility even within the parameters of its premise.

But I enjoyed both and was glad in both instances to have seen.

Some random observations on both...

I haven't seen this mentioned in the reviews I've seen, but Hangover is a comedic retake on a 1998 movie Very Bad Things, which is a much darker but similarly conceptualized Vegas bachelor party gone bad from director Peter Berg, who later went on to such Much Better Things as Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom, and Hancock.  Will Hangover director Todd Phillips (Old School) take a similar turn in his career.

Hangover may be one of the best Vegas travelogues I've ever seen, certainly since James Bond film Diamonds are Forever.  Oh, a lot of movies do Vegas from the standpoint of a casino, but the views from the Caesar's roof in Hangover are a different animal entirely, sexy and vibrant and seductive in a way that the baccarat table is not.  And you see the city from a gritty street level view as well.

The end credit sequence in Hangover is excellent.  Kept the entire audience in its collective seat, and made it hard for me to watch the credits because I kept wanting to look at the other side of the screen.

Ryan Reynolds grows on me as I see him in movies like Definitely Maybe and The Proposal, to the point that I almost regret not seeing Van Wilder.

We don't see enough of Mary Steenburgen.  I've been fond of her from the earliest days of her screen career in Time After Time and Ragtime, thru her excellent turn in Philadelphia.   She did several films with John Sayles, but it was another Mary, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (also not seen enough) who was in Sayles' Limbo and disappears in Alaska.  Yet I feel as if that Mary disappeared to be reincarnated in Alaska as this Mary here.  Does this make any sense to you?

Yet neither Mary Steenburgen nor Sandra Bullock really seem to be aging, which is one of those unfortunate facts of Hollywood life that women are never supposed to age.  The men can and do, but heaven forbid you age as a woman in this business.

The depiction of the publishing business in The Proposal is probably as unrealistic in its way as the depiction of NYC in Pelham, but this movie isn't really about publishing while Pelham is supposed to be living and breathing NYC.   

After my movies I ate at Pizzeria Uno for the first time in an unusually long time, and it was like comfort food to me.  It's 26 years now since I first treated myself to a sit-down meal at an Uno's, and the one in Forest Hills has the Michigan Daily Weekend section "Best of Ann Arbor" thing on Uno's from 1994.  I love walking into an Unos and seeing this hanging on the wall.  It connects me to my youth.  I would have compiled the campus film listings in that same issue of the Weekend section.

Oh, to be young again.

It was a good day.  I'm still smiling about it.

Oh, a quick final note on the Midway.  This movie theatre on Queens Blvd. in Forest Hills was a semi-grand mid-size movie palace in its day with a very nice lobby.  When I first started to see movies there in 1986 or 1987, it was one of those awful hack job quads.  The two downstairs screens were narrow and tunnel-like leading to small screens at the far end.  The balcony theatres had larger screens but like a lot of those theatres the movie projected from the center out while the balcony seats were designed to face toward the center so you kind of had to tilt your head the entire time you were watching the movie.  Some people in the comment section at Cinema Treasures praise the balcony theatres because those old balconies did have stadium seating, and I don't entirely disagree, but I also never entirely liked the geometry of those balcony twin jobs.  In 1997, the theatre was rebuilt from the ground up.  The lobby was kept, but the theatre beyond was demolished and rebuilt into a surprisingly pleasant 9-screen theatre.  The theatres aren't particularly big, but they all have at least a decent-size screen, the sound is usually good, and the nice lobby with its grand staircase is still intact even though there's a certain modern movie-house tawdriness that detracts some.  It compares quite favorably to some of the fully modern theatres in NYC like the smaller screens at the Kips Bay or the dreadful Kaufman Astoria.  Every time I do get out there I think I should get out there more often, except there isn't a truly large screen like at many of the Manhattan houses, and there's more to do heading in to Manhattan than further out into Queens.