MY EXPERIENCE WITH MOVIE PALACES.

MY EXPERIENCE WITH MOVIE PALACES. David Denby loved the movie-going experience in the beautiful movie palaces of the past. I realized in reading the article how little I am influenced by the movie theater in which I watch a movie. I can remember only one instance. Back in the seventies, before Times Square was gentrified, I watched a Michael Caine movie, GET CARTER, in a crowded and faded Times Square movie theater. It was a revenge movie. Michael Caine’s character spent the movie wreaking revenge for the death of his niece. The audience loved each revenge killing. At one point, Michael Caine, who was on a balcony beating a bad guy within an inch of his life, suddenly stopped, shrugged his shoulders and tossed the guy over the balcony wall. The audience went wild. Years later, my son Nick, aged 12, persuaded me to take him and a friend to PAYBACK, a Mel Gibson revenge movie, which was R-rated. This Mel Gibson movie had a lot of violence, and midway through the movie Nick leaned over to me and said, “This isn’t your kind of movie, is it?” I thought to myself, “Little do you know.”