Vampires Vs. Granville Street

Sigh. A couple dozen folks came out for the relatively recent Let The Right One In tonight at the Vancity Theatre, but attendance was very disappointing for Martin (my fondness for which I detailed in a previous post) and (the highly compelling) Habit - the two other films I could stay through and still make my bus home. I live in fear that the Vancity Theatre - the theatre with the most comfortable seats, nicest screen, most welcoming staff and some of the best programming in the city - will eventually be driven under by lackluster attendance; I imagine Suspiria was fairly well-attended at the Cinematheque, but somehow movie lovers just don't come out in the same numbers to the Vancity. I'd kind of suggested the idea of Martin a few months ago on this very blog, in fact, so I was particularly disappointed, looking around at the mostly bare seats. I imagine even The Rio regularly nets more attendees for their relatively unimaginative midnight movie fare...

Afterwards, as if to rub in that my cinephilia is somehow outmoded, aberrant, an atavism, I then had to walk to my bus - since I included a pizza pitstop - through the horrors of the Granville corridor, where what seemed thousands of yelling, drunken young idiots had descended to celebrate Hallowe'en and try to get fucked. The costumes, oddly, didn't make it particularly stranger than your average night in the "entertainment district." It fills me with despair to contemplate the values of the people on that street - the shallowness of their self-display, their general lack of manners, taste, or tact, and most of all the hideous apelike whooping sounds they make... I fear for the future of Vancouver's cultural life; one senses it will only get worse.

On the way back to the suburbs, I listened to GG Allin sing Warren Zevon's "Carmelita" over and over and felt melancholy...