Flickgrrl

Imagine that you bought a plane ticket to San Diego. How would you feel if the airlines asked you to monitor the behavior of fellow passengers in exchange for frequent flier miles? I would be surprised that as an airline guest I was asked to perform hostly duties. And that's why I'm surprised that Regal Theaters is expanding its Guest Response System to 114 theaters, including its multiplexes at RiverView and Neshaminy. Regal is proposing to give selected ticketbuyers pagers to alert management to problems in the audience or on-screen. Already it's being called "the pocket snitch" and "movie narc." I'm all for improving the tone in movie theaters. And I'm all for finding a better method of alerting the projectionist that the film is out of focus and that the sound is too loud. But shouldn't this be the responsibility of management and not the clientele? Thoughts?

The world of film lost a beacon of social justice when Ousmane Sembene, the eloquent Senegalese novelist and filmmaker, died Sunday at his home in Dakar at the age of 84.
The film career of the man celebrated as the father of African cinema was bracketed by Black Girl (1965), depicting the racist treatment of a Senegalese nanny by her French employers, and Mooladé (2004), the commanding portrait of a tribeswoman who protects girls from the ritual of female cicumcision.
The theme of many Sembene movies is that it takes a village to raise a consciousness. He personally fought colonialism and government censorship to get many of his films made. In cofounding the Panafrican Festival of Film and Television, Sembene was instrumental in bringing to light the works of other struggling artists.
Son of a fisherman, the self-educated Sembene worked on the docks, on the railways and was conscripted into the French Army during World War II. For almost a decade he worked on the assemblyline at a Citroen plant in France.
Prompted both by his horror at the racism in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, with its fetishized images of black athletes, and by the experiences of colonialism, Sembene pledged to “Africanize” cinema.
Drawn from his own life on the waterfront in Marseilles, The Black Docker, his first novel, was published in 1956. He wrote five other novels and five collections of short stories.
Sembene was well into his forties when he became a filmmaker, growing more poetic and pointed with each succeeding film. He won top honors at the Venice Film Festival for Mandabi in 1968. But his greatest films are Xala (1974), a comedy about sexual and social impotence, Ceddo (1976), a parable about an 18th-century tribe that resists conversion by Catholics and Moslems, and Mooladé, his final film, which won a prize at Cannes.

E-mail from Shari Redstone, principal of National Amusements. Start preparing questions.

Thank you for your sharing your thoughts regarding National Amusements’ purchase of the Ritz Sixteen in Voorhees, New Jersey. We always appreciate hearing from our patrons and recognize your feelings about changes at the theater.

So that we may better understand your concerns, Shari Redstone, president of National Amusements, is cordially inviting you to join her at the Showcase at the Ritz Center for a forum discussion. The event is designed so that we may answer your questions and share with you information about our company, programs, and the plans we have for Showcase at the Ritz Center.

Carrie Rickey respected reporter of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Harlan Jacobson, of Talk Cinema will join Ms. Redstone and interview her on the top concerns expressed by patrons. Steven Duchovnay of the Cine Filmbill will also be joining us. This session will be followed by an opportunity for our guests to ask Ms. Redstone questions. Guests can then enjoy a complimentary film screening immediately following the forum.

We hope that you can join us for this event on June 27th at 6:00 pm at the Showcase at the Ritz Center. Light refreshments will be served. Seating is limited, so please RSVP as soon as possible to Wanda Whitson, at wwhitson@nationalamusements.com or 781-461-1600 x336.

In Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, the title character loses the election, but the movie inevitably gets voted the best American film ever, as it did last night when the results of the American Film Institute's top 100 films were revealed on CBS. Here's the top Ten: 1 CITIZEN KANE; 2 THE GODFATHER; 3 CASABLANCA; 4 RAGING BULL; 5) SINGIN' IN THE RAIN; 6 GONE WITH THE WIND; 7 LAWRENCE OF ARABIA; 8 SCHINDLER'S LIST; 9 VERTIGO; 10 THE WIZARD OF OZ. The rest of the list is here.
These titles are classics for good reason, even though I'm more partial to Coppola's Godfather II, (ranked # 32) and Hitchcock's North by Northwest (ranked #55) than the films by those directors that made the top 10. Still, I scan the lit and ask, Best. Films. Ever.? Certainly the most popular, as the new additions to the list last compiled in 1997 include Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, Saving Private Ryan, Titanic and The Sixth Sense.
I would say half the films on the top 100 -- Titanic is not one of them -- combine popularity with resonance and universality and would probably get my vote. I'm happy The Searchers vaulted from 96 on the last AFI Top 100 to number 12 here. Happy that films made in the last 30 years (Raging Bull and Schindler's List) cracked the top 10.
But as with most elections, the best candidate might not get nominated. I'm one of the 1500 movie professionals who cast a ballot. There were 400 titles nominated and we each got five write-ins. It rankled that of the 400 that made the nominations cut, only 4.5 were directed by women. I can't remember how many were directed by people of color, but it was even fewer. (One,Do The Right Thing ranked #98 at the final count.) As a point of principle, my write-ins were films directed by women, including Clueless, A League of Their Own and Something's Gotta Give, Mikey & Nicky and Lost in Translation.
There is more gender parity when it comes to actors and actresses represented: Robert De Niro, Jimmy Stewart, Faye Dunaway, Katharine Hepburn and Diane Keaton are represented by three or more films. Steven Spielberg is the most-repped director (five titles), with Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Billy Wilder each with three films and Frank Capra, Charlie Chaplin, Francis Coppola, John Huston and Martin Scorsese three apiece.
Which movies do you most wish made the list? Which movies do you most wish hadn't? I know the AFI's mission is American film, but would the list be more useful if it included foreign films?