Movies - the right way

El Paso Sheriff: What’s it mean? What’s it leading to? I mean if you told me 20 years ago that I’d see children walking the streets of our Texas towns with green hair, bones in their noses, I just flat out wouldn’t have believed you.
Ed Tom Bell: Signs and wonders. But I think once you quit hearin’ “sir” and “ma’am” the rest is soon to foller.
El Paso Sheriff: Oh, it’s the tide. It’s the dismal tide. It is not the one thing.
Ed Tom Bell: Not the one thing.

Here in the People’s Republic of Boulder, in April there is an annual “idea camp,” a intellectual festival called the Conference on World Affairs. Participants are mostly left-of-center, with an occasional retired general, cold war diplomat, or unconventional (non-liberal) thinker sprinkled in.

Among the most popular annual sessions is called “Cinema Interruptus.” They watch the whole movie (sorry, film) on Monday, and then watch it again Tuesday through Friday, pausing the playback often for questions or comments from the audience, thus stretching a two-hour event into an ten-hour intensive seminar. Insights from the novel. Yeats' poetry. Other influences.

This year’s film, “No Country for Old Men.” This year’s host while Roger Ebert continues to recuperate, is Jim Emerson.

It’s a Coen brothers production, so I’m all in. Tommy Lee Jones in a major role. Money. It won “Best Picture” from the Academy (a very artsy choice). But most of all it’s just loads of fun to be in a big hall with other people who watch movies properly:
1) Sitting all the way through, and reading, the credits,
2) When watching DVDs at home, turning off the phone (and often the lights),
3) On subsequent views, turn on the commentary track, and laugh along with the directors and actors.

(I'll post an old column on watching credits one of these days.)