AMC "$5 Fan Faves" & Second-Run Theaters

During the pandemic a number of AMC theaters have been showing repertory stuff, as far as I can tell typically not "Golden Age of Hollywood" stuff, but things like "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "Ferris Bueller," and some others -- and according to the app I check every now and then, it looks as if they are selling out. (Obviously this is in theaters with reduced capacity, so a sell-out means something different from what it used to mean.)

I've tried to see if I could see "Scream" (1996) somewhere, and every time I check, it's sold out.

Has anyone gone to see any "$5 Fan Faves," as they are labeled? Is this an indication that we ought to have some second-run and repertory theaters? I sure do miss those places, big time.

 

I was planning on seeing AHDN but they.closed all the cinemas. I think it's a great idea but I'm not ready to go to a cinema anytime soon.

 

For some reason not a lot of AMC theaters near me.

I have 2 Cinemark theaters real close.

 

I'd pay $5 for them to play the old Wehrenberg theme.

 

For a certain generation, NOTHING exists before they were born.

When I was about eleven years-old, we got our first VCR (1981) and when we went to the town's only video store, I was gob-smacked at all the movies I had never seen/never heard of, all released before my time! They even had these little pamphlets that changed every month that previewed what was coming out on home video this month and the next. Titles like Midnight Cowboy, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver, Midnight Express and Enter The Dragon (which was ALWAYS out) intrigued me, because I quite simply had never heard of them. They had Laurel & Hardy collections as well, which we duly rented. I then went to the bookstore in the mall and bought a paperback book called "Movies On TV" just so I could get a synopsis of these movies coming out on home video.



Nowadays, certain folks are like, "Please, ONLY give me my childhood over and over again." To them, Ghostbusters is Citizen Kane.

 

I've always liked going to second run theaters. It's an incredible value. The problem, at least in my area, is that many of these are/were older cinemas located in malls. Malls were struggling even prior to the pandemic, and along with them, the associated cinema.

 

yeah i was lucky enough to grow up and live in a film buff town, and was able to see SO many classics from silents up to present day independents ON the big screen, as we had many rep theatres ... kubrick, bergman, fellini, godard, lang, truffaut, chaplin, tarkovsky, scorsese etc etc etc ..... it was a great time to be a film lover .... before the digital home video revolution ....

 

Repertory cinema changed my life. This is not an exaggeration.

We did not own a TV when I was growing up, but I lived a short walk from a university campus. The college cinema program was absolutely incredible. They would show at least one movie every night, and usually two every Friday-Sunday. This meant that it was common for 300-400 different movies to be screened during a year.

Prices were absurdly cheap, and the variety of movies was incredible.

I was always fascinated with the past, but being able to see the details of everyday life (even if it was an idealized one) from decades before I was born shaped my understanding of the world.

To this day I believe that people dressed more stylishly during the 1920s than at any time in history.

 

I love this kind of story. I can't claim an experience quite as substantial, but for nearly a decade (and it ended only last year), I lived about a block from an art-house/repertory theater here in Philadelphia, called Lightbox Film Center. Lots of new art-house stuff and plenty of retrospectives, plus the occasional action or SF throwback (e.g. they showed "They Live" a couple years ago). Lightbox was resident in a unique (as far as I knew) place called International House, which was essentially an independent dormitory for students at nearby universities. Unfortunately "IHouse," as it was known," was closed and got sold, and Lightbox moved downtown, so it's now about 25 blocks or so from where I live. That's still walkable, but it'll take about a half-hour, whereas I used to be able to finish eating at 7 p.m., leave my apartment, and walk to IHouse and arrive just in time to take my seat for opening remarks at a movie scheduled for 7 p.m. I loved it.

 

I miss the video-store experience, where your eyes could take in so many more movies by looking at the walls than you can see listed on the streaming services. And I worked in a Blockbuster, but the independent stores were always more interesting.

As a teenager in the late 80s, I had two books: Roger Ebert's Movie Home Companion (a late 80s edition; I wish I remembered which year but I no longer have it) and a book-club edition of Halliwell's Film Guide, which I still have and check out pretty often, in the last edition Leslie Halliwell himself wrote and edited before he died. Ebert's book had a mix, some older films, but more reprints of his reviews of recent releases to home video. Leslie Halliwell though was something else -- if you ever needed an argument for choosing films from the past, that guy would give it to you! I still remember the first time I read his essay "The Decline and Fall of the Movie." He comes across as quite the curmudgeon, but it's hard to argue with a lot of it, especially the parts about how the theater experience really declined (his description of many theaters as looking like "cheap funeral parlors" was sadly quite accurate).

 

When my local closed the owner told me his computer had 700+ rentals on the Spinal Tap VHS. It had to be retired after what must have been 1,000 plays and got fuzzy/tracking issues/tape stretches.