I’m swooning this morning over a 16-page PDF, advertising the fall programming schedule for Los Angeles’ Silent Movie Theater, which has recently been remade as a full-service rep house. Growing up in Los Angeles, the old Silent Movie was a key constellation on the moviegoing map, along with the New Beverly, the Nuart, the Music Hall, that shitty discount Cineplex Odeon on Fairfax and Beverly, and the (recently-shuttered) Rialto in Pasadena. Now that I’ve been spoiled by New York theaters like Film Forum and the Pioneer, I understand that none of these places were all that adventurously programmed when I was frequenting them in the mid-to-late 90s, but within Los Angeles’ oppressive strip mall non-culture, there was something exciting about watching something like King Kong with live organ accompaniment at the Silent, or even just getting a car full of people to drive out to Pasadena to see a print of Ghostbusters that actually had scratches on it.

But with the new Silent Movie, Los Angeles finally has the rep house that it probably doesn’t deserve. The program for the remainder of 2007 is wildly exciting. I’ve listed some highlights after the jump; you can download the gorgeous PDF program here.

[Via Filmmaker Blog]

• November 27: a special event to celebrate the release of the fifth issue of McSweeneys’ DVD magazine, Wholphin.
• The five films of Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel cycle, spread across four Fridays in November, with the months’ fifth Friday devoted to Tsai Ming-Liang’s love letter to The 400 Blows, What Time is it There?.
• Chris Kattan and Preston Lacy, who play Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle in the upcoming film Life of the Party, will join an unnamed Arbuckle historian on November 18 for a matinee program dedicated to Arbuckle’s shorts.
• A series called “Home Alones” looks at a number of films about children left to their own devices. Yes, the Chris Columbus blockbuster rounds out the program, but it’s proceeded by films like Nobody Knows and the winningly bizarre Charlotte Gainsbourg incest drama The Cement Garden, essentially demanding that we look at Macaulay Culkin’s finest hour in a darker context.
• A tribute to Toho Studios spans Matango, a psychedelic zombie movie directed by a POW camp survivor; Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster; and Destroy All Monsters, which the Silent program describes as “the Robert Altman film of the Toho vaults.”