EXT. HALFWAY HOUSE-NIGHT.
Dressed business casual, messenger bag bouncing at his side, STEVE runs from the 3 train subway station up to the house.

INT. HALFWAY HOUSE, 1ST FLOOR-NIGHT.
Out of breath, Steve enters a living room area crowded with bunk beds and several MEN standing and sitting around a 13-inch TV set. They are watching Don’t Mess with the Zohan. Onscreen, Zohan (Adam Sandler) and other Israeli men are playing hackysack with a cat.

The men in the room bust out laughing.

Steve sets down a newspaper with the headline OBAMA TO SPEAK…

STEVE
(laughs)
Oh, Zohan. Yeah, that shit is retarded.

Some of the men turn toward him and say, “What up, Steve?”

STEVE
What they watching downstairs?

BIG BISWAS shrugs his shoulders.

BIG BISWAS
Prolly a game…?

Steve glances at his watch: 9:48PM.

CUT TO:

INT. BASEMENT.
Steve comes down the stairs to find MR. OCTOBER, DIVA, and TOTAL LOSS sitting on the well-worn sofa. Behind them, SLIM sits on a weight bench. The big 30-inch TV set is showing commercials.

STEVE
Fellas, whatup?

The fellas grunt or mutter feeble responses.

STEVE
What y’all watching?

DIVA
Wrestling.

STEVE
Not gonna watch the speech?

DIVA
Speech?

STEVE
Obama.

DIVA
Obama’s speaking tonight?

STEVE
Yeah, at the convention.

DIVA
What convention? …Read more

“Yo, Steve, you got any movies, my dude?”

One of the youngbloods, a relatively new arrival here at the halfway house, is standing by my bunk with a look of desperation. It’s Sunday afternoon and he’s too broke to do anything but languish in here with us old timers. I slide my pile of Brooklyn Public Library DVD’s over for his perusal. After scanning the titles for a moment, he grimaces sadly and says, “I meant good movies.”

“There’s some good movies in there.”

He squinted at one box: “McCabe and Mister Miller? 1971? Man, I was born in 1983. Why would I wanna watch some wild west crazy shit made when I wasn’t even around?”

“Movies ain’t newspapers, youngblood. You’re missing out.”

“The old black and white Casablanca stuff y’all watch… nah, man, thanks, I’ll pass.”

I returned to the portable DVD player on my lap, to Carnival of Souls. I didn’t mean to lie to the young man– movies are newspapers, produced in a frenetic daily grind, stuffed with advertising, distributed in a blitz as far and wide as fiscally possible, then cast aside, forgotten the next day. But I figure asserting the notion of movies as something other than disposable infotainment would give him food for thought.

…Read more

Above: The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: Murder Case starring John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands

Television was always for suckers, but there was a time when we were all suckers, happily. Hef remembers. He was born in 1953, though his wear and tear and rock quarry voice initially made me guess 1945. His roommate and best buddy, Kid, is the same age but looks ten years younger. He remembers when TV was good and true, too. They are both living in the quiet afterlife that follows (if one survives) decades of dope and jail time. Plenty of time to conjure up the good-and-true era via the DVD player. The boys generally go for crime and punishment: Perry Mason, Daniel Boone, Annie Oakley, Superman, The Fugitive. What stands out in my eyes: Even the mediocre shows had a scintillating cinematic quality. The basic dynamism and construction Perry Mason is indistinguishable from its big screen counterparts–the serialized movie adventures of Mr. Moto, Roy Rogers, Charlie Chan and Sherlock Holmes. Those gems we watch on dollar store double feature discs with labels like “Saturday Matinee.” (Holmes and Watson show up in both their black-and-white big screen incarnations and their later color British television guises.)

John Cassavetes appears, like a comet, in his “Brilliant but Cancelled” beatnik detective show Johnny Staccato. And there he is again, as a desperate fugitive in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His gaze and the edge in his whispered threats to the young woman he’s holding hostage are XXX-rated. Indeed, this guy was too brilliant, too keen to realities that 50’s television could only sample in small doses, to be anything but cancelled. Another genius, Robert Altman, turns up as director of a heartstopping, hilarious Hitchcock episode in which we bite our nails over whether Joseph Cotten will escape the office he’s accidentally locked himself in– the same office where’s he’s just killed a woman. It’s Shadow of a Doubt crashing into Psycho. …Read more

Steven Boone joins SpoutBlog as a columnist covering politics and social issues and how they intersect with movies. Periodically, he’ll check in–as he’s done below–with firsthand accounts of watching movies with residents of a halfway house in Brooklyn.

A halfway house in East New York, Brooklyn. Spring, 2008. The male residents––ex-junkies, parolees and disability recipients––all gathered for their nightly movie ritual. Four to a room, two bunk beds, one cheapo DVD player and a 13-inch Coby TV set. Audio commentary provided by the audience of (on average) five men: two on the bunks, three hunched around the screen on milk crates. The core crew of film fanatics is Kid and Hef, two old-timer felons, each of whom could be mistaken for a black variation of Walter Brennan in Rio Bravo.

It’s a strange festival. Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins, Hoodlum, Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion, The Bank Job, Why Did I Get Married?, Tsui Hark’s Vampire Hunters, and lots of TV-on-DVD: Annie Oakley, CSI, Boston Legal, ancient anime shows. No rhyme or reason in the selections, just whatever’s on hand from the $3 bootlegger or the public library.

But a festival theme emerges, a word hovering in the air unspoken during each screening: justice. Michael Clayton, about a corporate attorney (George Clooney) who finds himself at war with a corrupt, murderous agrochemical business, is plainly about justice for this audience so intimate with crime and punishment. Lots of “aw shits” and “hot damns.” If Michael Clayton is the Opening Night feature, then the festival centerpiece must be the heist flick The Bank Job. …Read more