This past week my "cultural event" was planned to be the Venice Art Crawl on Thursday night. Unlike First Fridays, Venice's monthly foodie event, the VAC is an art show event held every third Thursday as a local artist showcase, similar to other art crawl events held around LA in Downtown and Silverlake... to name a few. The cherry on top of the Sundae which was this past week's event was that the VAC fell on St.Patty's day so it was going to be AMAAAZING!! But then...see...I arrived at Hotel Erwin Thursday afternoon ready to go and my ID was MIA. Leave it to me to lose my ID on St.Patrick's Day. Classy.
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| View from my room at Hotel Erwin in Venice Beach |
This left me with the weekend open for an amazing LA experience so OBVIOUSLY I did what I do most weekends and went out for a double feature at my fave local movie theatre Friday night. Now I know what you're thinking - movies Carter? seriously? PREDICTABLE! - but wait!! The arclight Hollywood a little piece of WeHo history! Well, maybe not the arclight itself but the adjascent Cinerama dome? HELLS YES!
Pacific Theatres' Cinerama Dome is a movie theater in Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard designed to present widescreen, 70mm Cinerama films. It opened November 7th, 1963 after a reported construction time of 16 weeks and Cinerama, Inc had plans to open over 600 theaters of this kind built worldwide within 2 years. Up until the opening of the dome, Cinerama was known for it's groundbreaking three-projector process but the first premiere hosted at the new Cinerama dome for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World marked the dawn of "single lens" Cinerama. From 1963 until 2002 the Dome never showed movies with the three-projector process. In 2002, after a 2-year closure, the Cinerama Dome was reopened as part of the 14-screen ArcLight complex (a division of Pacific Theatres) and for the first time ever began showing movies in the three-projector format. It's one of only three such theaters in the world today! [note: I apologize in advance to anyone who is fascinated by this and goes to Wikipedia to learn more only to discover that I got all my info there. Sorry I'm not sorry.]
Gotta love my local movie theater! And while I didn't see anything in the Cinerama dome this week...I pulled a double feature Friday and saw Limitless and Win Win. Limitless was fun but Win Win is the movie that stayed with me...and not just because Paul Giamatti is on my "list" - *wink wink* - but because this film really hit home long after the credits stopped rolling. At it's surface, Win Win is about a down on his luck lawyer moonlighting as a high school wrestling coach (Giamatti) who stumbles across a star athlete and things start to look up until the boy's mother shows up fresh out of rehab flat broke and threatens to derail everything. Classic indie plot aside, this movie brought up a lot of memories from my own high school days spending time with my high school trainer O'Neil Medley. In one particular scene in Win Win, the team is rallying after a match and the coaches ask Kyle, the star athlete, about a move he did while wrestling where he bursted up from a hold with a sudden energy just when we thought he would lose and then won the match while his opponent was off guard. Kyle resists sharing his technique with the team at first, being standoff-ish and a bit of a loner, but then says simply "I pictured the opponent holding my head under water...and I'm drowning. My only option is to break free or die. I tell myself to do whatever the fuck it takes." The room is quiet for a moment or two with the coaches staring at Kyle in amazement. They then clap their hands and go "you heard it team - our new strategy is 'whatever the fuck it takes.'"
I couldn't help but crack a bittersweet smile at this. It was classic O'Neil. I could almost hear him saying to me "Get your mind right!" And from that point on...the movie had me. I appreciated all of the nuance in Giamatti's performance and let Kyle remind me of what it feels like to have someone notice something special in you in that age. O'Neil had a talent for seeing potential - for singling you out and really seeing you. During my time at Greenwich Academy I think few people understood our relationship as I wasn't an athlete and never trained with him. But O'Neil and I - we had our van rides listening to Whitney Houston during volleyball season and Nip/Talk discussions over oatmeal raisin cookies and redbulls. He always saw me.
When I graduated from Cornell and was moving out West I was so terrified of what the future held and I'll never forget seeing O'Neil on graduation day that year when Steele and I walked to GA to pickup Morgan. He kept asking me when he could come visit LA and wanting more job details while grinning ear to ear. I'm so grateful to have had that moment with him - and then to have been with my family months later when we got the news he had passed away in a motorcycle accident - and then to have been in a position to have been able to go home and grieve a loss that so impacted me and my family.
Win Win is a story that celebrates those people in the world that see potential and fight for people who sometimes don't know how to fight for themselves. It reminded me to get my mind right and hopefully this post will inspire you to too!
....for those of you thinking ok Carter...all I read was "double feature" and stopped reading because you were thinking WTF! Big spender $$! Know that I may or may not have snuck into Win Win. Also may or may not have bought a senior ticket. No way I'm doing a double feature at WeHo prices! AND BEFORE YOU JUDGE ME know that in other news - Bill Paxton was shot and killed in the Big Love series finale this evening. So you know what - a little less judgment and a little more sympathy please. Thank you.
CTOWN OUT!
No no NO Carter -- You bought a STUDENT ticket!
ReplyDeleteWait, what? That's not what it . . . Oops, I left my glasses at home. And my contacts just fell out so I couldn't see. I mean, my grandmother bought me this ticket!
. . . and THEN you snuck in to Win Win. Just helping you get your story right.