Thursday, March 9, 2017

The Last Picture Show for the Last Picture Show

Bruce Mitchinson told Gossips this morning that for Fairview Cinema 3's final weekend he has booked The Last Picture Show, Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 film based on a novel by Larry McMurtry. 
The choice of movies is poignantly appropriate on several levels. The Last Picture Show was released the year after Mitchinson started his movie theater career and two years before Fairview Cinema 3 first opened. At the center of the plot is the closing of the Royal theater in Anarene, Texas, a dying town where the diner, the pool hall, and the movie house are the only places to go. The following paragraph is quoted from Roger Ebert's 2004 review of the film:
[The Last Picture Show] opens on Saturday, Nov. 12, 1951--the eve of the Korean War, and the beginning of the end for movie houses like the Royal, where Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) grapples in the back row with his plump girlfriend Charlene (Sharon Taggart), while enviously watching Duane (Jeff Bridges) kiss the town beauty, Jacy Farrow (Cybill Shepherd). On the screen are classics like Red River and Wagonmaster, which speak to the legends of this land, but already the ugly little black and white sets in local living rooms are hypnotizing the locals with Strike It Rich! and other banal trivialities that have nothing to do with their lives or anyone's lives.
The movie was nominated for eight Academy Awards, among them Best Picture and Best Director, and hailed as "the most important work by a young American director since Citizen Kane." In 1998, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

 If you have never seen The Last Picture Show, or if you haven't seen it since 1971, you can watch the movie trailer on YouTube. But don't miss your chance to see it next weekend at Fairview Cinema 3. The movie will be shown on Friday, March 17, Saturday, March 18, and Sunday, March 19. Showtimes are Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings at 7 p.m., and bargain matinees at 1 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.
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1 comment:

  1. Steve DunnMarch 9, 2017 at 12:07 PM

    Great movie that. I remember seeing it when it came out, on the advice of my older brother, and was so impressed, that I then read Larry McMurtry's novel, and when Lonesome Dove came out, snapped that up as well. What a wonderful writer McMurtry is, as he transports you away into another place and time. Indeed, given how much I hate airports these days, I far prefer such cerebral travel, than actually transporting my aging carcass somewhere. It's a lot less annoying, and you get to take a time machine forward or back in time to boot.

    Ah, the joys of literacy. Which brings to mind just how important our now magnificent Hudson Library is, and our need to support it, on a sounder basis than it operates now, but I digress. But this topic shall return, I promise you! :)

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