seen from China
seen from Sweden
seen from Finland
seen from China
seen from Belgium
seen from Australia
seen from Sweden
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from Finland
seen from Indonesia
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Bangladesh
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from United States
Let's cancel the apocalypse! Help Strange Little Stories bring this show to life in Edinburgh. | Check out ''Poor Life Choices' at the Edinb
The campaign to help take my live show 'Poor Life Choices' to Edinburgh is now live!
If you support in the first week, you get the special Early Bird discount of 30% off all rewards.
Every contribution, every reblog, every like and every reply makes a huge difference. I'm counting on your help!
The programming reflected the theater’s cast-a-wide-net mandate. This was the go-to place for the new Star Wars or Jackass or Hangover as well as midrange horror and action pictures, Oscars contenders, and even art-house flicks that had earned their way into the mainstream. It helped that it was within walking distance of Atlantic Avenue, with its restaurants and bars, and next door to a Barnes & Noble (with a magazine rack that carried buff bait like Sight & Sound, Empire, Cinéaste, and Film Comment). Because it was a neighborhood theater, just ten minutes’ walk from my family’s apartment at State and Hoyt, it played host to so many personally resonant moments it’s hard to know where to begin listing them.
There was the time when a packed house for The Simpsons Movie sang along with Homer’s song “Spider-Pig.” And the time I took my kids to see Where the Wild Things Are on opening night, waited too late to buy tickets, and ended up crammed into the furthest front-row seat on the right-hand side of the theater, mashed against the wall; I was miserable throughout the previews, but once the movie began, it was so wonderful I forgot about where I was sitting.
My daughter and I used to attend double features on weekend afternoons, each picking a film. One Saturday in December 2008, I chose the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and she picked The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The former was so dull we left halfway through (“My first walkout!” she said and high-fived me). I had been widowed two years earlier, and when Queenie (Taraji P. Henson) told Benjamin (Brad Pitt), “We’re meant to lose the people we love … How else would we know how important they are to us?” I burst into tears and had to leave the theater because I couldn’t stop crying. I continued in a stall of a men’s room that was otherwise unoccupied.
After a few minutes, the door opened, and I heard an employee pushing a mop bucket with a squeaky wheel. “Hey, dude, are you okay?” he asked. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I called out. “It’s that damn movie that’s got me like this.”
And now, a whole damn theater.
— Matt Zoller Seitz
* * * *
Dumb, loud spectacles and jump-scare slashers were the main excuses to watch anything at Court Street because you likely weren’t going to catch all the dialogue over the audience chaos anyway. On opening night of Final Destination 2 (2003), a screaming match broke out — as they often did — which escalated as a woman took off her shirt and slapped a guy with her bare breasts. In turn, her disapproving boyfriend started a fistfight with the stranger, which spilled out into the aisle. They tripped over an old man whose son (grandson?) started whaling on both of them. Twenty minutes later, a popcorn fight broke out. I got drenched in soda, but at least nobody pulled out a gun, as I’ve witnessed there on three occasions. From the widespread cackling over Kurt Russell’s drowning scene in Poseidon (2006) to the widespread confusion over the avant-garde comic mayhem in Crank: High Voltage (2009), the closest thing to a bona fide grindhouse theater in post-Giuliani NYC was never boring, even when the movies were.
— Aaron Hillis, film programmer
The vibe of the physical space was lame, generic corporate theater chain. The layout created constant escalator bottlenecks. And if you were foolish enough not to bring your own snacks, the concession stands were impossible to find. What made it fun was all the weirdos who went there. I remember seeing The Others in a completely packed house, stuck in the first or second row. The lady next to us reacted so loudly and enthusiastically to everything that happened onscreen that I figured it must be her new favorite movie ever. Then at the very end, after the big reveal (spoiler: Nicole Kidman was a ghost the whole time) and the camera pulls away in that final tracking shot, this woman stood up and screamed, “WHAT?? There’s no fuckin’ monsters in this??” and angrily stormed out.
This poor woman had held out hope for an hour and 40 minutes only to end her night with disappointment. I hope she snuck into Jurassic Park III, which was playing on the next screen over and did have monsters.
— Michael Bonfiglio, filmmaker
The Regal Court Street theater was my childhood movie theater. Once my horizons expanded to other theaters in the city, I stopped visiting for a long period, but having a MoviePass account in 2017 reinvigorated my drive to visit my home theater. I didn’t have to pay money for garbage movies like the Ed Helms–Owen Wilson buddy comedy Father Figures, which I watched with a moderate-size crowd on a weeknight. No one was laughing. Then came a moment when Wilson utters his signature catchphrase: “Wow.” A guy in the theater immediately shouted his best Owen Wilson impression at the screen: “Wow.” I echoed back one of my own: “Oh, wow!” Now several other people in the audience were chiming in with their own “oh, wows,” as if we were all declaring we were Spartacus. This went on for two whole minutes, everyone cracking up at the “oh, wows” now drowning out everything else onscreen. If that isn’t a compliment to the community that Regal Court Street built, I don’t know what is.
— Rendy Jones, film critic, Rendy Reviews
The Regal was the place to be as a 12-year-old on a Friday night. You’d start by hanging out at the Barnes & Nobles next door until it was movie time or the B&N staff caught on that it wasn’t water in that Poland Spring bottle the nine of us kept passing back and forth. My friends had more than a few sexual escapades in the building: One described the hand job he received during a crowded screening of Saw as “life-changing.” It was one of few places where customers felt at liberty to act out against corporate America. It was a free-for-all. You dropped trash anywhere but the garbage: in the theaters, the hallways, down the gap between the escalators, watching it fall five stories from the top floor. The staff — bless their souls — seemed to give less than a shit. You were free to shout obscenities, down your Bacardi Gold, or find out what kind of noise half a box of Sno Caps makes when dropped from fifty feet. Amid the dizzying chaos, maybe you’d even get to catch a movie, too.
— Matteo Mobilio, associate photo editor, New York Magazine
* * * * *
It was a place where the better show was often in the audience. It could be a lively pack of teens asking you mid-movie if you’ll run to the liquor store across the street to procure some vodka (“orrr peppermint schnapps,” slurred the white girl in the back) or a man sitting next to you eating a halved honeydew directly from the rind with a spoon while searching for nude photos of the star on his phone. Catcalls. Fistfights. Pandemonium.
It was a movie theater that could turn the wrong audience off from ever going to the movies again. It was also a theater that could gift the right audience one of the best nights of their lives. In many ways, it was a relic of a different approach to film exhibition; one that turned a blind eye to, if not embraced, wild-eyed riffraff heckling a terrible movie. And if you were lucky enough to ever witness that chaotic energy firsthand, you understand why so many New Yorkers are holding their torches high for the Regal UA Court Street theater.
— Mike Sampson, Alamo Drafthouse creative area director
[Vulture Magazine]
Mossy crow at Camp Bestival 2021
I’m at the combination parking-lot-and-Upside-Down!
It’s a Secret Cinema interactive theater /Retro Drive-In based on Stranger Things with Mr. Clarke MCing. Someone made this for me. And I’m on entirely the wrong coast.
Sonofabitch.
𝕊𝕠𝕗𝕥 𝕒𝕤 𝕓𝕝𝕠𝕠𝕕,
𝔸𝕟 𝕠𝕡𝕖𝕟 𝕙𝕖𝕒𝕣𝕥 𝕙𝕠𝕝𝕕𝕤 𝕟𝕠 𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕤𝕠𝕟.
𝕊𝕝𝕚𝕔𝕖 𝕞𝕖 𝕦𝕡,
‘ℂ𝕒𝕦𝕤𝕖 𝕪𝕠𝕦𝕣 𝕝𝕠𝕧𝕖 𝕨𝕒𝕤 𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕖𝕡𝕖𝕕 𝕚𝕟 𝕥𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕤𝕠𝕟.
❄️❄️❄️
📸: @landolanecreative
Three of the Frost Lords of the Cyadel family
From @evermoreparkofficial
Interactive theatre? more like "Watch with helpless joy as one quick impulsive choice from another actor proceeds to shape your character's journey for the rest of their in-universe life”.
Norse and Anglo-Saxon Stonework, ‘Vikings: Rediscover The Legend’ Exhibition, The Riverside Arts Centre Museum, Nottingham, 6.1.18.
Sunday’s Photo (early this time): When visiting Wayne manor for a party, you need to be very careful about where you venture. You never know who might crash the party.
For any who are interested in tickets for Geekender’s Costume Ball at Wayne Manor next Friday, there are still a few tickets left, but sales end at Midnight on Sunday, October 29th.
With Graeme Thompson as the Joker.
