Flickgrrl

Robert Osborne, high priest of movie lowdown and primetime host of Turner Classic Movies, was honored by the Bryn Mawr Film Institute at its annual gala last Saturday. I had the pleasure of introducing and interviewing the interviewer's interviewer. During our lightning round, I asked him favorite movie kiss, fave sports film and best courtroom drama.

Notorious was Osborne's pick for best smooch.

Field of Dreams was his choice for sports flick.

Witness for the Prosecution was his verdict on courtroom movie.

As far as kissing movies go, for me Notorious is up there with Queen Christina, Roman Holiday and The Year of Living Dangerously.

For sports films, I'd go with Pride of the Yankees, Body and Soul, Slap Shot, Semi-Tough, A League of Their Own , Jerry Maguire , Love & Basketball and Bend it Like Beckham.

Courtroom? 12 Angry Men and My Cousin Vinny. Also like the Congressional and Senate hearings in The Quiz Show and The Aviator.

What are your choices?

While reading Steven Rea's hilarious advance on Grindhouse, the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino ode to exploitation movies and the funky theaters that showed them, I fondly recalled my most memorable grindhouse experience. That would be the triple-header of the Pam Grier films Foxy Brown, Coffy and 'Sheba, Baby circa 1975 at a now-defunct house in downtown San Diego. The audience: randy sailors, the obligatory men in trenchcoats and me. The atmospherics: The floor was sticky (due to cola syrup or other fluids, or a combination thereof) and the atmosphere was humid (due to poor ventiliation or elevated hormones, or combination thereof). I was there for the female-empowerment scenarios: Grier, a pistol-packin' mama, known to the younger generation as the heroine of Tarantino's Jackie Brown , was about the only big-screen babe of that era who didn't defer to men. Nevertheless a coot in a coat mistook me for a working girl and dropped a fiver in my lap. When I didn't follow him he made noise. So much that the portly manager/projectionist shuffled down. He found it hard to believe I was there for the movies, but he vaguely remembered me from the audience at the spaghetti Western My Name is Nobody and became my unofficial grindhouse bodyguard. I'd like to thank him for enabling my movie education. (I've personally thanked Grier.) While I'm sure that Rodriguez and Tarantino will do their best to replicate this grindhouse experience, the gestalt might be might be unreplicable. For those who want to make a DIY attempt, that very Pam Grier triple-feature I referenced is available through MGM video in a four-disc packaged titled -- natch -- "Fox in a Box."

Your most memorable grindhouse memory?

The honor of co-starring with Meryl Streep and delivering a performance that wipes the floor with the most honored actress of her generation belongs to Diane Keaton, who did just that in Marvin's Room(1996), one of many unforgettable dramatic roles from the actress celebrated for her comic gifts. At a Lincoln Center tribute to Keaton on Monday-night, Streep summed up Annie Hall's singular gifts: "She breaks men's hearts and mends women's." Apart from Katharine Hepburn, no other Hollywood actress has enjoyed a leading-lady career as long and varied as Keaton. Over four decades on screen, Keaton's impressive roles number Mrs. Michael Corleone, Ms. Annie Hall, the seeker of Mr. Goodbar, Louise Bryant (in Reds), founding member of The First Wives Club, The Mother of the Bride, and Erica Barry (of Something's Gotta Give). Though her eccentric timing and emphasis-on-the-wrong-syl-LAB-le delivery always made me laugh, I didn't take her seriously until Reds and Shoot the Moon (1981 and 1982) where her naked honesty made co-stars Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson and Albert Finney look like they had something to hide. Her stammering eloqence is stamped on every role she plays, every movie she directs (including the underrated Hanging Up and Unstrung Heroes) and every get-up she dons. She affects monochrome all the better for us to appreciate the blazing colors of her moods. She affects the attitude of a scatterbrain perhaps to distract us from her deep focus?

For an actress who's made 35 feature films in 37 years, she has an enviably high ratio of hits to misses. I have at least 20 favorite Keaton movies. My top ten? Manhattan, Marvin's Room, Mrs. Soffel , Baby Boom, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Annie Hall, Shoot the Moon, The Godfather, Part II, Something's Gotta Give and Reds.

What are yours? And why?

Ever since I reported that National Amusements, operators of the Bridge in University City, was buying the Ritz Sixteen in Voorhees, there's been a lot of hand-wringing among Ritzheads. I've received dozens of e-mails and phone calls from Ritz regulars worried that their movie mecca will no longer be a kid-free zone, will no longer show artfilms and quality mainstream fare, will morph overnight into a popcorn mill like the Loew's Cherry Hill. There have also been gripes that National Amusements isn't keeping the Ritz name, but it couldn't as Landmark Theatres bought the rights to the Ritz brand when it acquired the Philadelphia operations of the Ritz theaters.

One Ritzhead, Grietie Connolly of Southampton, NJ, praises the Sixteen's "absence of extremely loud advertising" and "the fact that children under six are not admitted and that there are no teenagers under 16 without parents. She says, "That is what makes the Ritz a special and relaxing place to go" and worries that, "If all this changes, we will have to be content with Netflix."

As another, Phil Arkow, who works in Center City, puts it: "The Ritz has created its own community. We need to continue to have a place to call our own." Arkow copied National Amusements' Shari Redstone his e-mail. Her reply, in part, was that because "the purchase and sale agreement is not yet completed, I am limited with the information I can share with the public" but that "National Amusements will continue to offer a mix of independent and mainstream programming....superior customer service...continue the Ritz Filmbill, Talk Cinema and everybody's favorite Toblerone chocolate."

My colleague Joe Baltake, erstwhile critic for the Philadelphia Daily News and Sacramento Bee, had this to say: "When the Disneyfication of Times Square was complete, Rudy Giuliani commented how nice it was that parents could bring their children there. To which Fran Lebowitz replied something to the effect, 'Parents and kids have the entire country, couldn't they have left this for adults?' Much as I Iike children, it was always nice to see a film at a Ritz with nary a kid in sight."

Anything else Ritzheads want to say to Ms. Redstone? One thing I'll say: I like The Bridge and I have found National Amusements unusually responsive to customer service.

That's Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui pictured left, wielding a hammer in a pose obviously modeled on the vengeful central character in South Korean director Park Chanwook's disturbing 2003 film, Oldboy. The film, which I personally could not stomach, received a four-star review from Roger Ebert and won a jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival. It is about a man imprisoned in solitary confinement for 15 years and, once freed, goes on a bloody rampage mowing down his captors.

The Oldboy connection raises the chicken-or-egg question of whether violent imagery causes violent acts. Does a toxic movie incite toxic action, or is a sick soul unusually suggestible to toxic images?

This pertinent question is periodically asked, but never conclusively answered. We asked it when John Hinckley, under the influence of Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, attempted to assassinate Pres. Reagan. Like Bickle, Hinckley said, he was trying to impress Jodie Foster, the young co-star of the 1976 film.

We asked it again after the Columbine massacre when assassins Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were found to be fans of the Leonard Di Caprio film The Basketball Diaries -- in which Di Caprio's character has a slo-mo fantasy of himself, clad in a long trenchcoat, entering a classroom and killing fellow students -- the question had tragic currency.

Now Cho, who took a break between murders to mail an Oldboy-influenced videotape of his isolation and anger and ranting to NBC News obliges us to ask this question again. Right now I'm in mourning for the senseless loss of lives. And I'm incensed that Netflix.com would seem to be cashing in on Oldboy by featuring it as a suggested title to those who rent foreign films.

Right now I agree with the federal judge who in 2002 dismissed the lawsuit claiming that moviemakers and game-makers shared blame for Columbine. Judge Lewis Babcock ruled that a decision against the moviemakers would have a chilling effect on First Amendment protections for free speech. He said something to the effect that setting aside his personal distaste, there is a social utility in expressive and imaginative forms of entertainment, even if they contain violence.

In other words, filmmakers and audiences vicariously can experience violence at the movies rather than perpetrating it in life. Ideally popular art can be society's safety valve. At Virginia Tech, the valve burst.

That's Benoit Ferreux in Louis Malle's Murmur of the Heart (1971, Le Souffle au Coeur), in which he plays a 14-year-old French bourgeois seduced by his shamelessly sensual Italian mother (Lea Massari). In the '70s, at the height of the sexual revolution -- my own, and the culture's -- I thought it the jazziest of comedies about erotic initiation. Upon its re-release nearly 30 years later, what struck me as taboo-breaking and liberated in 1971 I would call child abuse in culturally conservative 1989. The movie was no less compelling, but by '89 I was now a parent and not a child, and I had a more sober response to this Gallic "Oedipus." I walked out struggling with the question of whether a 14-year-old was a consenting adult.

Sometimes a movie seems to change. Sometimes it's the cultural context that changes. And sometimes it's my opinion. Changing your mind about a movie if you're a civilian is victimless. Changing your mind as a professional critic has ramifications. As a point of pride, Pauline Kael saw films only once. She believed her immediate response was most honest. For Manny Farber, viewing, and re-viewing, movies enabled him to experience them from multiple perspectives, to compensate for the variables of cultural change and intellectual growth.

Sometimes a movie conceived for one generation does not always speak to the next, for instance Easy Rider. A critic who liked a movie when she saw it on the big screen might wonder a decade later what she saw in it -- kind of like an ex boyfriend.

Are there movies that have improved, disappointed or otherwise changed over time for you? Why do you think that is?

Ok, it's a Power Point -- view here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljbI-363A2Q&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eyoungjinyoo%2Ecom%2F -- not a documentary. But there is more mind-opening material here in the presentation from Prof. Youngjin Yoo (pictured left) associate professor of Management Systems at Temple University's Fox School of Business, then I've seen since An Inconvenient Truth. It runs about six minutes and is guaranteed to get you thinking globally.Thanks to my husband, Paul (none dare call him Mr. Flickgrrl), for forwarding.

What are the implications for your line of work? I have seen the future of documentaries and this is it.