the lack of a movie theater convenient to downtown has long been conspicuous. it’s no secret, after all, that the primary demographic for contemporary cinema ranges from late adolescence to early thirties, which falls neatly in line not only with the increasing gentrification of downtown and its outlying neighborhoods but also with the 800-lb gorilla separating it from West Knoxville: the 25,000 attendees of the
University Of Tennessee, previously served most conveniently in their moviegoing needs by the screens at West Town Mall. considering the thousands of those lacking either personal transportation or the parking deathwish that is Leaving Campus On A Weeknight, it’s little wonder that so many college students are content to BitTorrent shitty bootlegs and huddle around a 19” monitor. combined with the theater industry’s apparent embargo with South Knoxville, it’s actually kind of a shock that it took so long to make this happen.
but it did happen, amidst much ado. state grants were handed out, preservationists were mollified, architecture was criticized, et cetera. and now the Riviera is open, and the focus drifts toward the practical. is it a nice theater? (not that it matters, beyond our tax dollars’ role in it – go to Wynnsong if you don’t believe me.) more importantly, what sort of movies will they be showing? the post-opening schedule wasn’t made available until a few days beforehand, but late in July Regal announced that the Riviera would be prefacing its Grand Opening with three themed days of $1 films and concessions with the proceeds from each day going to a different charity. a similar pre-opening event at Pinnacle yielded screenings of It’s A Wonderful Life, Top Gun, the first two Indiana Jones movies, and the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, so film fans all over Knoxville held their breaths. could this be a rare chance to show Regal that Knoxville might be just as interested in seeing the occasional favorite of yesteryear as the standard-lowering late summer nonsense of today?
the answer: an enthusiastic no! the bow of Regal’s upscale downtown moviehouse apparently didn’t merit such crowd-pleasing, theater filling fare, as its programmers opted instead for easy choices like Spider-Man 3 (not even as old as some of the charity days’ supplementary second-run films, and certainly not old enough for anyone to have forgotten how disappointing it was) and Tim Allen’s Yuletide classic Christmas With The Kranks.
Regal Marketing VP Russ Nunley was generous enough to assuage my own resulting Krankiness with assurance that past corporate experience actually shows that Riviera’s three daily themed films is fairly generous for an eight-screen theater, and that familiarity sells more tickets than prestige. “during the preview events our goal is to entice as many people as possible to see the new facility in the hopes that they enjoy the experience and then tell family and friends to spread the word,” Nunley explains.
so what’s a snooty film fan to do, stuck with two days off to devour sixteen hours worth of favorites from the lauded Late Spring Of 2007? the prospect of all that $1 Golden Flavored Topping-y popcorn, sugary soda and air-conditioning was hard to pass up, so why not? for the price of one normal movie ticket I could treat myself to a gloriously run-of-the-mill film festival, and see if there were any pleasures to be had.
TUESDAY – Vigilante Justice & Dead Daddy Issues
i anticipated the sell-out crowds that greeted the Pinnacle’s charity festivities, especially given the day’s “Superheroes For United Way” theme, showcasing recent hero-flicks Batman Begins, Superman Returns, and the aforementioned Spider-man Stumbles (personal wishlist: The Incredibles, X-Men 2, and…well, Batman Begins) so I was surprised to find no line outside the Riviera. a quick trip to the box office and concessions, though, gave me enough time to take in the Riviera’s lovely (though somehow surprisingly small) lobby, which features as its centerpieces three blown-up photographs of Gay Street from the 20s to the 40s, each of them revealing a different angle of the original Riviera Theatre, which occupied the very same space from 1920 until it was torn down in 1988 after a decade of inactivity.
i decided to kick off my Rivierafest with DJ Caruso’s Disturbia, the story of a young man (Transformers’ Shia LaBeouf) whose erratic behavior after witnessing his father’s death lands him on house arrest just in time to spend his summer vacation spying on the neighbors, including a beguiling girl next door and a yuppie who may just be a serial murderer. this is, of course, a loose variation on Rear Window, with a little of The ‘Burbs thrown in for good measure; such a pedigree would render most teen-centric remakes all but stillborn, but while Disturbia certainly lacks their respective brilliance and levity, it carries itself confidently as a thriller and inhabits its reimagined story with an endearing sincerity. both LeBouf and villain David Morse (in a lamentably rare meaty role) turn in fine performances, and though it could have done with a bit more ambiguity where Morse’s character was concerned, Disturbia is admittedly one of the finer B-thrillers I’ve seen lately, and started out the day on a note of pleasant surprise.
second was Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, in an even smaller auditorium than Disturbia. (I’d come to find out that while several of the Riviera’s theaters are quite sizable, boasting the highest overall seat-to-screen ratio in town, the ones along the western wall are as small as a cozy 109 seats.) i’d been impressed with the film when I first saw it, and though the novelty of Batman-taken-seriously dulls somewhat upon a repeat viewing, it’s still probably the superhero genre’s most successful work where psychological, emotional and procedural realism are concerned. Nolan shakes every last detail out of how a troubled billionaire playboy might go about turning himself into a creature of fear and justice, and sews them back into a creatively structured origin story that skimps on neither the pathos nor the horror that a good Batman film deserves. sure, they didn’t quite nail the cowl, and Katie Holmes fearlessly proves her own uselessness amid an otherwise perfect cast, but Batman Begins still rewrote the book on how to treat an icon to a worthy character study.
Superman Returns, on the other hand, suffers much worse upon a second viewing, and following a screening of Batman doesn’t help. approaching the other half of the World’s Finest with a realist bent surely wouldn’t have done the material any favors, but neither does Bryan Singer’s choice to wallow sloppily in Superman’s assumed iconic glow, leaning far too heavily on the continuity of Richards Donner & Lester’s first two Superman films and all but forgetting to shape the rest of the film’s lazy emotional meandering into a compelling story. Kevin Spacey strikes a smart, faithful tone as archvillain Lex Luthor, but Singer sadly refuses to follow his lead, relegating him to a dramatically inert plot while dedicating all of his energy to making everyone else flat and uninteresting, except for Lois Lane, who is well-developed insomuch as she’s quite deeply callow and unsympathetic.WEDNESDAY – Advice From Disinterested Screenwriters On Being A Father
after battling a much direr parking situation at the State Street garage, I arrived at the Riviera just in time for the opening credits of Tom Shadyac’s Evan Almighty, shown in a surprisingly large auditorium befitting the film’s epic commercial and creative failure. the facile $200 million religious pander-fest revisits Bruce Almighty’s Evan Baxter (a bored, paid Steve Carrell) as God badgers him into building an ark in hopes of strengthening the bond with his three anonymous sons, with the downplayed side effect of saving two of every animal from a watery holocaust centered in suburban DC. sure, acknowledging the implied genocide of its central conceit would be kind of a comedy killer, but, then, so is the script, which is so bad that multiple scenes between Wanda Sykes, Steve Carrell, John Michael Higgins and Jonah Hill rarely even manage a laugh. Evan Almighty will no doubt find a second life as last-minute entertainment at junior high youth group lock-ins, but as a comedy (let alone the most expensive one ever made) it’s pretty worthless.
wednesday’s theme was “Christmas In August”, but none of the choices appealed to me save for Elf, which I’m content to wait until Christmas to watch again. (wednesday wishlist: A Christmas Story, Home Alone, and Die Hard.) instead, I moved on to the third installment of a franchise for which I harbor an intense distaste, but have somehow managed to see all three of; crass and unambitious, Shrek The Third is little different than its precursors, bouncing back and forth between unfunny children’s humor and unfunny adult humor in an insulting half-simulation of archrival Pixar’s warm and witty, genuinely family-friendly aesthetic. thankfully, unexplained technical issues repeatedly halted the get-em-while-they’re-young standards-lowering, and I must say that listening to the little oracle behind me rain spoilers of minor physical humor down on her sister was just as compelling, and twice as funny, as seeing it play out onscreen. 
Disney’s Meet The Robinsons, however, proved a maniacally weird antidote to Shrek, despite a ten-minute wait for them to start up the projector. i regret missing it in 3-D earlier this year, but even in two dimensions it impresses, thanks primarily to its swift spirit and madcap good-naturedness, and even though it sags in places it brings a sort of restless originality to Disney’s diminishing animated efforts.THURSDAY – Hud
i was only able to see one film on Thursday, but it was the one I would have otherwise gone out of my way to see. Martin Ritt’s modern western Hud was presented alongside Steel Magnolias and Walk The Line under the guise of “WIVK Day On Theatre Row”, showcasing films with local ties (wishlist: James Agee’s Night Of The Hunter and Charade, the first film shown when the New Riviera was reopened in 1963), and was undoubtedly the prize of the Riviera’s pre-opening event. starring Paul Newman and Knoxville native Patricia Neal, the film takes a hard look at a family of latter-day cowboys, paying special attention to the way teenaged orphan Lonnie (Brandon DeWilde) tries to reconcile his respect for his grandfather (Melvyn Douglas) and his fascination with his callous, cavalier uncle Hud (Newman). like the other six films (which don’t even include Knocked Up, which I’d already seen twice), Hud draws heavily on themes of fatherhood, but doesn’t succumb to any of the sentimentality; no, Lonnie never seems preoccupied with his father, but studies the two men in his life carefully, finding out just for himself just who he wants to be.Hud sees itself to a dour, cynical ending, the likes of which only come up these days in finicky indie flicks. (it’s a testament to Ritt and his film that Hud is nonetheless considered a classic.) but as the lights went up at the end and the projectionists no doubt prepared to replace the black and white dinosaur with a print of Balls Of Fury, there was a definite feeling among the audience (the largest I’d been a part of in three days) that we’d all shared a satisfying experience, taking in great cinema with the wonder they surely felt in that very spot eighty years earlier, before movies were just marketing, before everything was so crass.
(from the KNOXVILLE VOICE)
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