Go out and see a movie - Please!

Constant companion and I caught a 4 p.m. matinee of the latest Pedro Almodóvar film yesterday at Spectrum 8 Theatres in Albany - and got a private showing, as no one else was there. Admittedly, when the mercury hits single digits, it takes fortitude to leave the house, but we love movies and enjoy seeing them the old-fashioned way, so we bundled up and headed out.

Parallel Mothers is a great movie, by the way, with plot twists, first-rate acting, a deeply felt perspective on the legacy of conflict, and the wonderful, colorful Spanish settings that Almodóvar always delivers. But we left the theater feeling a bit depressed by the experience. And it didn't help to see from the street that the drinks establishment next door was chock full of patrons.

With everyone streaming at home from a hundred platforms, spooked by the Omicron variant, and just plain self-absorbed, it's hard to have much hope for the future of the small movie theaters that dependably screen the sort of movies we love: independent, foreign, plot-driven, devoid of car chases and explosions.

I've chosen to have none of the home-based means by which the majority of us now enjoy films. No cable, no Netflix, no Amazon Prime - just antenna-fed TV and DVDs from the library, augmented by online rentals from Kino Lorber, a foreign-film distributor that fills the gaps left by the Spectrum. That leaves plenty of money in the budget to pay for tickets.

Currently, the Spectrum (an eight-screener on a main thoroughfare in the city) is showing several new releases that will contend for Oscars, including Licorice Pizza, Drive My Car, The Tragedy of Macbeth, and Nightmare Alley. I hope to see all of those before they leave the big screen, and will make an extra effort to do so. 

Going out to a movie still fills me with anticipation, freshens my step, and then fulfils that latent desire to be enveloped in the dark, alone or with friends, wrapped up in a story, with brilliant images, resonant sounds, and anonymous fellow theatergoers who sometimes have a word or two of comment during the credits.

I used to regularly run into friends at the Spectrum, and even made a new friend on occasion as we paused in the lobby to share our responses to a good film. Now, it's usually just the staff, who somehow still have jobs, but these days clearly seem to have not enough to do.

The Spectrum is part of a national chain (Landmark), which has theaters all over the United States, most of them in far larger markets than ours. I suppose those venues are making enough money to help keep this one open. But it's not something I would want to count on for long. 

So, please, if you value the presence of a great independent movie theater in your region, and wouldn't want to see it close, get up off the couch, grab a coat and the keys, and go support it. You'll be glad you did.

Note: I'm in Albany, so the Spectrum on Delaware Avenue is my go-to cinema - but there are several other small, independent movie theaters in the Capital Region that equally deserve your support, including the Criterion in Saratoga Springs and the Movieland 6 in Schenectady, both of which are owned by Bow Tie Cinemas, a national chain with 38 venues - coincidentally, the same number as Landmark.

We went to the Spectrum!

Here's the evidence. You can see our
assigned seats highlighted in yellow
by the box office attendant.

I've been regularly attending movies at Albany's Spectrum 8 Theatre since it opened in 1983 (and its progenitor Third Street Theater for years before that), so you can imagine the excitement my companion and I felt last night as we set out to see Minari on the first day this venue was operating in more than a year. It was like being a kid again.

You also may be surprised to learn that I do not have Netflix (nor Amazon Prime, nor Hulu, etc. - not even cable TV), so with the theaters shut down since last March, and the library prohibiting on-site browsing until a week or two ago, the last year has had its challenges for my movie viewing habit. This was somewhat alleviated by the following compromises:

1. Netflix et al at a friend's house: A few of my friends and I came to an understanding early in the pandemic that we would trust each other's behavior enough to remain in each other's pods (thankfully, with perfect results, i.e. none of us got or transmitted COVID). And one of those couples has a bunch of streaming services and a generous heart. So, from time to time, we'd make a movie date and the four of us would cozy up in their living room to watch something special (among them: My Octopus Teacher).
2. Borrowing from the library (in my case, Albany Public): This has always been a primary source for me, both to pick up on recent stuff that I'd somehow missed (often due to too-short local runs) and to fill in any of the many gaps in my viewing history. Once the library began to accommodate curbside pickup, I began to regularly request and then borrow whatever I could think of to ask for that they had available (trickier than browsing, as you have to know what to look for, but still quite useful).
3. Hoopla: Another library service, this is a free streaming platform (well, free to use - I assume the library pays something for it) that has a very big selection of not always very desirable movies (from what I've heard, Kanopy is better, but Albany doesn't offer it). Through that, we haven't seen any current or recent hits, but in a pinch it proved to be a lifesaver, and we discovered some really cool stuff, especially documentaries (such as one about the thousands of rabbits that flourished in the no-man's-land between the two sides of the Berlin Wall).
4. Pay-per-view streaming: Some films that probably would have come to the Spectrum had it been open were not available on any of the other services, and could only be seen by paying a fee. Considering that we would have gladly forked over a twenty to see the best of these in the theater, paying $12 to watch them at home was well worth it (that's the usual rate for good stuff, though some movies are cheaper, depending on the source). This was great, once we got it going, but there were a couple of hitches at first, due to our not being hooked up for streaming to begin with. The really tricky part was finding an adapter to connect my new-ish laptop to our 12-year-old unsmart TV - and then waiting several weeks for it to be delivered, back when global commerce was totally disrupted by the "Wuhan" virus. But it worked out pretty great in the end, highlighted by our viewing of my favorite movie of 2020, Martin Eden. 

By the way, last night was the fourth time I've been to the actual movies since the pandemic re-openings began, and my recent experiences seeing two films at The Madison Theatre in Albany, and one at Criterion Cinemas in Saratoga Springs were very good - I will gladly return to either of them as needed. 

But, now, we have our favorite Spectrum again, and I am stoked, both for the sheer pleasure of it and because it means it won't be long before I've seen enough of the best films of last year to be able to write my annual roundup - maybe even before they announce 2020's belated Oscar winners.

Note for the potentially nervous: At all three theaters I've attended, you get an assigned seat, there's plenty of distance between groups, and masks are required - so it's as safe as you're going to get in this world.