Cahiers du Los Angeles
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #189. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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Now this.
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In the past, I’ve written about watching Kubrick’s oeuvre on my phone. I’ve been honest about how I don’t particularly care for the pretentiousness of the “cineaste” crowd. Maybe it’s because I failed to become one of them. I did try. I had dreams of becoming a film critic. A scholar. I was a fan of Roger Ebert. I read Pauline Kael. I studied Cahiers du Cinema. In the end though, my scholastic ambitions weren’t limited to film, and I broadened my scope. I settled on being a film buff.
So as a film buff, when I visited LA a couple months ago, I felt obligated to indulge a bit. I had been to La La Land once before, but I was in Santa Monica for IndieCade, and I didn’t have a car. So, I just did Santa Monica. Which, to be fair, was very enjoyable – the beach, the pier, the pervasive scent of marijuana, following me every step of my journey – I did enjoy Santa Monica.
This time though, I was in West Hollywood (WeHo, apparently) and I had a car, so my enjoyment of LA increased significantly. I drove up to the Griffith Observatory and lived out my GTA fantasies of . . . driving slowly and carefully observing parking rules? I walked down the Hollywood Walk of Fame and quickly realized that “hallowed club” wasn’t quite as exclusive as I had previously thought. I guess I thought Orson Welles deserved a spot closer to the main drag. Well, on second thought, they knew where they put him.
Regardless of Hollywood’s disrespect to my GOAT, I had to partake of their wares, so I went and saw Sinners in IMAX. It was worth it. This theater was an AMC iMax in “the Grove”? In short, Sinners ruled, and the theater was just fine for a contemporary chain. I spent too much money on a pretzel and had a beer when I walked into the theater, but the giant screen and absolute brilliance of Sinners made the Americana of it all very worthwhile.
I also took the opportunity of being in one of the hometowns of cinema to go to a theater owned by one of the iconic lovers of film and feet: Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema. After all, it was a 15-minute drive from my hotel, and they were playing one of the movies on my Letterboxd watchlist. So, after a long day of talking to professors, I went back to the hotel and got my shit together to head out to the movies.
The New Beverly felt smaller than I expected. I think it only has one screen, and the lobby is a tight pack for two hundred people. But the fact is, around 200 people (my approximation) showed up on a Monday night to watch a double feature of Krzysztof Kie?lowski’s The Double Life of Veronique and Three Colors: Red. Two Polish films from the early 1990s drew a surprisingly large crowd! I even missed some of the pre-show cartoons because the line for concessions was so long.
But I did not miss the introduction by a deeply art house-coded guy. He had shoulder length, thin, brown, curly hair that looked like he washed about an hour before he got to work, or hadn’t washed it in a week – hard to tell. He wore a black denim jacket over the classic Nirvana smiley face t-shirt. His face was round, and when he started telling us the rules of the road, I just let the pure pretention wash over me. I would expect nothing less from the introduction at Tarantino’s movie house.
Our man let us know the basics. At the New Beverly they never did digital. It was always, only film. And that’s why the version of Red was pretty severely degraded for the entirety of the first reel. This was “pure cinema,” as he said. And if we even dared to look at our phones during the movie, we would be banned for life, never to return to these hallowed halls.
So, I turned my phone off and settled into some 1990s Polish cinema. And I was, well, tired, and neither of these films had one of the most innovative musical/dance numbers in recent history. I’m not sure I quite “got” The Double Life of Veronique and while I liked Three Colors: Red, after successfully staying awake through Veronique, that sneaky, creeping bastard sleep finally got me at about 10pm. I didn’t even quite register how long I slept for until I read the synopsis on Wikipedia later, and let’s just say I definitely missed out on some key plot points. I don’t think double-features should really be on the docket for the father of a three-year-old.
Despite my sleepy state, I did enjoy the final movie more than the first, and I felt enriched by my experience at “the cinema” in LA. In fact, I very much liked my time in LA at large! While everyone apologized for the weather, I found 70 degrees and rainy quite pleasant. I ate some delicious food (shout out the sandwiches at Something About Her), I bought some great records (shout out Nivessa Vinyl Records for the amazing bootlegs I found) and I watched some pretty great movies. I’m starting to think, there’s nothing stopping me from applying to be the concierge at the New Beverly Cinema, but I kind of doubt Nirvana shirt will ever leave.
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Noah Springer is a writer and editor based in St. Louis. You can follow him on Bluesky @noahspringer.com.
