Cave-in by theater owners gives champion cave-inner Mitt Romney an opening

Out of CineCon in Las Vegas comes the startling news that several movie exhibitors are considering changing their rules on cell phone usage during screenings. No, not automatically giving the bum's rush to anyone who whips out his iPhone at the movies; rather, facing facts that the kids who comprise the bulk of audiences want to be able to tweet and text anytime, anywhere.

IMAX's Greg Foster offers his singular perspective:

[My] 17 year old son 'constantly has his phone with him. We want them to pay $12 to $14 to come into an auditorium and watch a movie. But they’ve become accustomed to controlling their own existence. Banning cell phone use may make them 'feel a little handcuffed.'

It does become quite hard for an impartial observer to consider that any normal teen would not become restless during a 2-hour and 22-minute screening of "The Avengers," unable to to text his friend with the essential information that Scarlet Johansson is smoking hot and just gave him a boner.

Mitt Romney seized the moment. Speaking at a Massachusetts matinee of Jason Statham's "Safe," he rallied the young crowd:

I have a lot of friends who are theater owners. With less regulations, theater owners create jobs in the private sector. Ushers, projectionists, people who sell the popcorn, people who clean up the auditoriums. Good jobs. When I hear of a problem like this, I ask myself what the Gipper would do. Ronald Reagan was in the movies, you know. And you never once heard him complain about teenagers texting or using cell phones during a show.

This is a free speech issue, my friends, a matter of individual rights. If we continue to outlaw legal communications in a public place, we a going down a slippery slope. Soon the president will want to ban the right to keep and bear arms in a movie theater, and the only people who will have guns will be the bad guys fighting Jason Statham.

Romney next swinged to a photo-op at an opening of "The Five-Year Engagement," where he told the middle-aged crowd:

"Barack Obama refuses to let the Justice Department use text messages to track illegal aliens. When I m elected president, I will. And I will remove this noise pollution that does so much to spoil the movie-going experience for millions of middle-class Americans."

Sean Hannity immediatey praised Romney for his clarity on the isue.

The Republicans should think about planting apple trees come November

Film director Werner Herzog:

Martin Luther was asked, what would you do if tomorrow the world would come to an end, and he said, 'I would plant an apple tree today.' This is a real good answer. I would start shooting a movie.

Many future Republican voters are unaware that the Titanic was a real ship, that sank

That was so far-fetched, that Leo and Kate thing, until...uh!

Ken Russell, 1927-2011

From "Crimes of Passion," his sick, sexy, funny masterpiece from 1984, with Kathleen Turner as the call girl China Blue and Anthony Perkins as a streepreacher. The New York Times obit calls it a flop from which the director never recovered.

Movie posters...

...lost in translation. Please, everyone, now Google "Santorum." (The next GOP front-runner, heh, heh.)

The Greater Reading Film Festival returns today

The 6th Greater Reading Film Festival kicks off today, and Harold and Kumar are nowhere in sight. You can, however, catch a Nic Cage movie that's astonishingly good ("Red Rock West") and get to engage in a conversation with the director (John Dahl), conducted by moi, via Skype. That's all on Saturday afternoon.

Other highlights include a Friday afternoon presentation by filmmaker/educator Jim Hubbard, who taught cinema at NYU. Jim will screen a short he shot 50 years ago, "New Orleans." i won't call it "film" because it marked one of the first stabs at introducing videotape to the TV market. Rounding out the program are two student films and a dialogue with Jim.

Saturday night includes a screening of Mike Figgis' "Timecode," an exercise in logistical virtuosity that sort of plays like Hitchcock's "Rope" times four. Figgis shot the film with four digital characters, following different characters in interlocking stories and the footage unfolds simultaneously, with the screen divided into quadrants and the audio adjusted so the audience knows which quadrant is most significant. It's not as tricky a viewing experience as it sounds. Afterward, I'll conduct a chat with photographer Andrew Orton, whose Reading Public Museum exhibit of production stills of famous directors -- including Figgis and Dahl -- is tied in with the festival.

Other filmmakers will be on hand to screen and discuss their works.

aside from tonight's opening reception at the museum, all screenings will be at the RC Theaters 11 at 2nd and Washington.

You can check out the complete schedule here.

Now be there!

Give the gent an Oscar

Regarding "The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence":

In a shrewd casting move, (director Tom) Six appears to have recruited his discomfiting lead actor, Lawrence R. Harvey, from a forgotten race of bespectacled troll people. He's shaped like a gumdrop, or maybe an avocado, but jiggly and balding, with buggy eyes that do the lion's share of his acting work. He has no lines, so far as I could tell, just a sequence of snarls and stares; every once in a while, when his centipede-plans are going particularly well, he breaks into a wormy smile. Harvey deserves an Oscar.