For me, it was a good year for movies that did not come out in 2023, viewed on vivid, bigger-than-life, big-screens in Washington, DC, Los Angeles and Atlanta.

When does a movie become “old?”

The line of delineation is not whether it’s filmed in color or black and white. 

Divinity, a lo-fi, sci-fi horror feature that premiered at Sundance in January, led off October’s Screamfest Film Festival in Los Angeles and that I saw at the Plaza Theatre in Atlanta in November, is in black and white. 

Meanwhile, the South Seas adventures White Savage from 1943 and Cobra Woman from 1944 that I saw at the New Beverly Cinema in LA in July were filmed in eye-popping, candy-cosmetics color. 

Where to put remastered and re-released items like Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads concert classic, a chronicle of the band’s December 1983 stand at LA’s Pantages Theater — a documentary presented in muted blue and gray palettes but that pops with life and sweat and penetrating sound? 

In addition to being an incredible filmed music performance, there is a life lesson from frontman David Byrne: His hair jet black in December 1983, snow white in December 2023 and with four decades of pushing the artistic envelope in between.

I would have loved to have seen Stop Making Sense in the Pantages itself. But it was not meant to be, as the Pantages is a live performance venue. I settled for seeing it down the street on Hollywood Boulevard, at the TCL Chinese Theatres, during an October trip to California.

It’s hard to top an LA repertory schedule of Cobra Woman, White Savage and Stop Making Sense, but The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 freak-flag-flying psychotronic quest about an Alchemist (played by Jodorowsky) leading a thief and a group of people (Klen, Isla, Sel, you get the picture) from different walks of life, and planets, on a journey to enlightenment. There is also a chimpanzee and a dwarf and all kinds of stuff that doesn’t exactly make sense along the way. Sound too weird for school? Tell that to the three sold-out screenings at the New Beverly. 

I wasn’t organized enough to buy my ticket in advance, but I was lucky enough to be the last person admitted from the stand-by line that stretched down Beverly Boulevard. So I was invested. And what a movie to see with a crowd. Art for art’s sake. 

Dreamscape

Going to the movies is dreaming with others in public. The biggest movies are like collective dreams, with everyone seeing the same thing but all coming away with different interpretations. The craze this year over Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer lead to my local Alamo Drafthouse in DC screening some of his other big swings, including Inception, his 2010 adventure about dreams within dreams within dreams. As good and heady as Inception, was, I was particularly eager to re-watch the following week his 2020 sci-fi espionage Tenet.

I enjoyed Tenet when it came out, but some of that I chalked up to it being one of the first movies I saw in a theater after the COVID-19 pandemic settled its hooks into us. I couldn’t have explained the science of it, which is integral to the plot, but I still was into it as a movie. I was curious how a second viewing would go. 

To be honest, I came away a little more confused the second time, but maybe was more enthralled with the spectacle. 

Nightmare Fuel

Sometimes those big-screen dreams are nightmares. I didn’t see a lot of horror movies in my childhood, and when I did, it was typically snippets of something on HBO or in the less-than-optimal VHS format. 

So this October, around Halloween, and then allowing things to, ahem, bleed into November, I saw several “old” movies on the big screen, my contemporary self ready to see what I missed.
John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween, the prototypical slasher; Dario Argento’s 1977 Suspiria, the Goblin-infused, fluorescent-blood soaked giallo, and Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 mystery Don’t Look Now formed an amazing triptych of horror at the AFI Silver Theatre. 

A couple of weeks later while visiting Atlanta, apparently needing some more Carpenter-provided dread, I turned to the Plaza Theatre for In the Mouth of Madness, a movie by turns deranged, funny, satiric and jump-scary.

Camping Out 

Could The Rocky Horror Picture Show be a palate cleanser for all this cinematic carnage? 

The Plaza midnight screening (actual start 11:30 p.m.) of 1975’s cult/camp/horror/sci-fi/sex comedy/rock opera was indeed, complete with shadow cast and contemporary commentating from the staff. 

Example: When Dr. Frank-n-Furter (Tim Curry) falls into the swimming pool, the hecklers pounced, belting out the opening lines to the intro to Friends: “Well no one told you life was going to be this way (clapclapclapclapclap)” – just a short time after Matthew Perry drowned. Art evolves.

While it doesn’t fit into the horror genre, the 1978 animated The Lord of the Rings by Ralph Bakshi must have seemed at least horror-adjacent to me when I saw it as a kid, with its wraiths and orcs and slithery Gollum.

Seeing it in 2023, at the AFI Silver, I was struck by its unapologetic creepiness, its ambition and my satisfaction of being completely uninterested in comparing it to the Peter Jackson trilogy. Just another crazy, rotoscoped grotesque from the 70s.

Love Struck

To end on a light note, the Avalon in DC provided two close-to-perfect romantic comedies. As part of its centennial celebration, the Avalon screened one movie from each decade of its existence that screened at the iconic movie house.

Moonstruck is sui generis, an eccentric love story from 1987 by Norman Jewison that is almost impossible to imagine would work without its stars, Cher and Nicolas Cage. 

Cage has made so many movies now it’s hard to ponder life absent his decades-long experiment in German Expressionism. This is one of his bigs, though, as opera-loving, one-handed, sweaty bread-baker Ronny, who divides the life of Cher’s Loretta into before and after. And Cher is, well, Cher. A force of nature. Someone who can stand up to a character like Cage’s all the while falling in love with him. 

And then there was Shakespeare in Love. I wondered what it would be like seeing this at the Avalon in November 2023 after having seen it, on a date, on Valentine’s Day, in 1999. 

In between now and then, this movie got drowned in context. Harvey Weinstein’s Oscar campaign for it took a page from the political dirty tricks playbook. Then it beat out Saving Private Ryan, at a time when Greatest Generation worship was hitting its stride. Then we learned about Weinstein’s decades-long harassment of female actors. 

Lost in all this is that John Madden’s movie is a great movie. 

The writing by Tom Stoppard. The acting by, well, everyone (Joseph Fiennes, Gwyneth Paltrow, Geoffrey Rush, Tom Wilkinson, Ben Affleck, Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Judi Dench and on and on.) 

It’s a plush movie that is unapologetically romantic, funny, and a gift to theater nerds, anglophiles and just about anyone who is capable of being swept up in a movie.

Past Perfect

My movie year wasn’t all nostalgia. I enjoyed most of the movies that will pop up on “best of” lists, like Barbie, Oppenheimer, The Holdovers, Dream Scenario, and the like. 

But it was the “olds” this year that reminded me of the staying power of movies, the worlds they build and how they can hold our imaginations for a lifetime. 

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