Friday, July 24, 2015

Moving day approaches, plus the Cinematheque

I'm moving this week, and I have a back injury. Ill-timed, wot? My upper right ass quadrant and the muscle above it scream in pain if I bend it or tense in the wrong way. Off to the doctor's to see if he can fix it before I have to move, in a few days' time.

Speaking of which, have I mentioned that I will be giving up my apartment in Maple Ridge at the end of the month? I will still be visiting Mom and sleeping on her couch but I spend so little time in this space - where I now sit, in fact - that it has stopped making sense to pay the rent on it. Will be splitting rent instead at my girl's, and living in Burnaby. There's a ton of writing I want to do but with the move I may be a bit distracted. Plus my back doesn't really like my office chair right now, y'know?

But meantime, holy shit, have you seen the Cinematheque program for the summer? Not only do they have some of my favourite noirs ever - like In a Lonely Place and Pickup on South Street (which I was very pleased to hear Chris D. pick as his favourite Sam Fuller when I spoke to him; and speaking of Chris D., they'll be playing the film that No Way Out - the 80's Kevin Costner thriller with the memorable part for Chris - is an adaptation of, The Big Clock, with a great Charles Laughton performance) BUT (this sentence is getting unmanageably long but I blame the codeine) they will ALSO be having a noir sidebar of pscyho westerns (Johnny Guitar and Rancho Notorious!) AND - oo! screenings of de Palma's Blow Out  - his greatest film and the one all de Palma dissenters need to actually see before they write him off as a faker -  and Pakula's legendary, strange The Parallax View, as part of another noir sidebar of 70's conspiracy thrillers. This is some seriously inspired programming, and may actually get me out to the theatre, once my bum heals. How can it be that this is the only screening of The Parallax View I can actually recall happening in Vancouver? (Granted, my memory doesn't go back to its initial release, but given the rep of this film, shouldn't it play every few years or something...?).

Plus there's also a Neil Young film retrospective! Hmmm....!

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