Body Heat

The lobby of Amsterdam's Tushinsky Theater -- I'm in love with the joint.

I imagine I’ve gone on already, kvetched mercilessly about my giant hatred, my utter intolerance for temperatures in excess of 80°.  Heat does evil things to me -- like put me to sleep when I’ve got so much damn stuff to get done today.

When it’s not knocking me out it’s driving me to seek out over chilled movie theaters. Now, me being all deaf and shit, the cinemas have to have closed caption capabilities or it just needs to be a subtitled foreign film. Surprisingly, not such an easy thing to find, even in this major metropolitan area.

"On the way into the theatre, viewers pick up a reflective plastic panel mounted on a flexible stalk. The panel sits in a seat cupholder or on the floor adjacent to the seat. A large LED display is mounted on a rear wall that displays caption characters in mirror image. Viewers move the panels into position (usually below the movie screen) so they can read the reflected captions and watch the movie. "

 I want to see Hysteria, of course. It’s British, so subtitle free. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel? Also British -- no subtitles.

In Chicago, on days off from the carnival, this was my escape.

Smaller movies like these, documentaries and my beloved animation fests don’t get captioned until they go to Small Screenville and sometimes not even then. I was mega eager, totally feverish to see Sherman Alexie’s film The Business of Fancydancing and made it numero uno in my Netflix queue the minute I found it there. It arrives. I’m 12 shades of psyched and have infected Jen and Oni with my wickedly, zealous anticipation.

 And then...and then we pop the disk into the DVD player. NO subtitles. You know, Netflix doesn’t note whether a film has them or not and this is the second flick to arrive with this grumble and curse inspiring surprise. The disappointment -- it burns!

Now, I totally understand, it costs around $40 a MINUTE to close caption a film. That’s an extra four to five Gs on top of all the other mountainous bones it takes to bring your baby to the big screen. Mega doughage for the very independent, indie filmmaker.

An old Cambridge haunt of mine

Still, STILL, I really truly want to see The Business of Fancydancing and I’m so bummed. I can’t see it in theaters OR at home. OK, I can SEE it -- just not understand a bit of the dialogue.

Grumble, kvetch, piss, moan.
Luckily, I’m also a big fan of the giant sci fi and horror-ish films. Yea me and my slatternly entertainment tastes. Today, as the thermometer broke the 90° mark, Jen, Oni and I went to the Braintree AMC 10 -- hey, ten screens, SOMEthing’s gotta be closed caption AND worth getting out of the soul simmering heat for.

And there was -- Men in Black III. It was awesome. Maybe next weekend Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter will be in the deaf theater!