Approaching the end of the year, a survey of Baltimore’s movie theaters is overdue. On the surface, not much has changed since the start of the decade and the pandemic that closed theaters in the city from March 2020 to June 2021. That unprecedented 15-month moviegoing void felt like the end of the world long after the coronavirus itself proved to be relatively harmless; through 2021 and much of 2022, it didn’t look like movie theaters would ever recover—there would never be another banner year like 2019, 2004, 1999, 1972, 1960, 1959, 1941, 1939, and on and on and on…
The success of Barbie and Oppenheimer wasn’t a good sign, either: it was a bittersweet weekend, one that shouldn’t have been so special. The crowds that weekend were exceptional by today’s standards, but par for the course just 15 years ago. Seeing both of those movies at The Senator two days in a row was mostly depressing, because it felt like time travel to 2005, the worst year for American movies (at the time, not in retrospect—that would be 2009). Filmmakers haven’t failed us, audiences have, and Netflix in particular is destroying cinema literacy. They’ve distributed May December, the new Todd Haynes film with two A-list actresses and a breakout star, a movie that needs to be shown in theaters. Like Tár, this is a movie that people will talk about in the lobby afterwards, and days and nights later; unlike Tár, it’s under two hours and more broadly accessible, while at the same time darker and often more intense.
Many people will watch it because it’s on Netflix, but what then? Families and spouses will have conversations, but this is a great film that would benefit all of us by playing theatrically. May December is an example of serious cinema and its duty to dealing with difficult and essential subject matter, stuff that litters all of our lives first or second-hand, stuff that we don’t talk about. Movies bring these conversations out in people, they clarify, and hopefully, they can benefit someone. A film like Brokeback Mountain and the sensation it caused, positive and negative, was more important than Amazon’s Red, White, and Royal Blue. Where does that show exist? There’s no realm for streaming material, all closed systems that rarely breach each other.
Letterboxd, a website I’ve defended, has admittedly led to a generation of audiences and filmmakers who look at movies too literally, too broken down: 1 star for cinematography, 1 for performances, 1 for ambition. An inability to deal with movies on a larger level and on an immediate, visceral level: I know how this made me feel, how do I express that? Instead, there’s a focus on the parts over the whole: looking for arbitrary “identification” points, “likable” characters, heroes and villains rather than the film itself, whatever the film is doing and saying. Having a reporter asking actors and directors and cinematographers their four favorite films at premieres is an unprecedented media phenomenon, and the hostile reaction to relatively obscure picks like Onibaba and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover is no different than hostility towards “hipsters” and the eternal straw man “foreign black and white independent Eastern European film,” an anti-art attitude that America’s had forever.
Baltimore needs more revival theaters, more revival screenings. I’d like to do more at The Mercury Theater, but I’m busy making my own movies for now, and John Standiford is left as the only repertory programmer in town. He’s great, but our city needs more than one revival program. My partner at The Servant, Leigh Ann Josephine, lives in Los Angeles and has dozens of options, almost all on 35mm or 16mm, including films like May December and The Killer that never played theatrically here. I don’t expect the resurgence Los Angeles has seen lately, especially with Quentin Tarantino reopening The Vista along with a microcinema next-door screening 16mm and VHS.
With the Pratt Library’s generous rental program and considerable collection, another film series must come to Baltimore.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith