The Joy of the New Beverly

Unfortunately for dedicated fans of arthouse film, the term "revival house" has almost come to be associated with "bargain theater," that is, those theaters, usually looking every bit their age with sticky floors and cramped seating, which show mainstream movies right as their theatrical run is about to end. With everybody watching movies on DVDs anyhow, it's a wonder those places stay open as long as they do.

Enter the New Beverly Cinema-a true revival house a stone's throw away from, well, pretty much everything. Having occcupied the corner of Beverly and La Brea for the past, say, forty years, the New Beverly is a theater dedicated to the reviving truly classic movies. Think seeing "1900" just as Bertolucci intended it on the big screen. Or a film festival dedicated to Hitchcock. All for seven bucks for a double feature. You got that right, seven bucks.

Tonight, after a Peruvian chicken dinner from Pollo a la Brassa, this film fan will spend his Friday evening watching a triple feature of 70's shlock-The Blood-Spattered Bride, Asylum of Blood, and Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary, a collection of Italian vampire films complete with guaranteed-horrific dubbing. Again, all for seven bucks. Add a three dollar popcorn to it, and you're set.

So, if you're in the area tonight and don't have definite plans, do stop by and support a local movie house that's as L.A. as a Pink's hot dog...

Why?

Around a month ago, I led a fairly-stable suburban life in the rural abode-meets-Walmart America town of Oxnard, California, amid fading beach houses of past generations of the Hollywood elite(gathered notably in neat little rows around the aptly-named Hollywood Beach). However, coupled life in suburbia turned out to be, well, coupled life in suburbia, and, eager for change, my restless wings(and a UHAUL truck devoid of headlights) landed me and my trusty chihuahua, Pancho, in the urban enclave known as Los Angeles Koreatown, the hanguk center of the United States and the headquarters of Radio Korea, but, as we shall see, this florid land of boba hipsterdom, karoake palaces, and impossible parking is, indeed, the ideal place for this post-college, pre-whatever twentysomething to create an urban nest. Yes, that's right, Los Angeles Koreatown, sandwiched between the Byzantine-Latino Quarter(try making sense of it without smiling-pretty tough), MacArthur Park, and a bunch of other neighborhoods meaningless to those outside our great urban sprawling city, and, quite frankly, to many of those without our great metropolis.

A blog carried the air of inevitablity about it. Where else is this aspiring "man-about-town" going to find release for his creative impulses? An underground 'zine? It's been done. LA Weekly? Maybe someday. LA Times? Perhaps when I can fill the parking space vacated yesterday by Andres Martinez. Le Monde? Come on...I may be an aspiring urban sophisticate, but I'm not quite French yet. NY Times? Although the parameters of urban living have been more or less set in this country by Manhattan and Brooklyn, I want this to be a creation of the West. No more going to New York City to write about California...