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Am back and refreshed from a lovely vacation. I spent some if it laying around my apartment catching up on my reading, but over Christmas I was in Montreal with my husband. Our trip prompted the question, "Whither Canadian Cinema?" Returning home, browsing through digital cable offerings, we found our answer on the Lifetime Movie Network.

I have a guest post up at the House Next Door with my recap of 2006 at the movies--read to find out why a Top Ten was beyond me this year. The rest of the contributions are great, though I am mystified by the love my fellow House-mates seem to have for Miami Vice.

In an appendix to the House piece, I can add Dreamgirls and The Good Shepherd to December, which will close out my 2006 theater-going experience. The Good Shepherd screening was actually an anomaly--perhaps because it was 9:45 pm on a Thursday night--the crowd was quiet and engaged and no cell phones went off. (However, big thanks to Universal for only accepting Guild cards in LA--way to make the rest of us feel special.)

But at Dreamgirls, I came closer to killing someone than ever in my life--and I routinely drive a car in Queens, so that's really saying something. About 10 minutes into the movie, a crowd of teenagers entered the theater. One girl was loudly talking on her cell phone as they walked up to the top row. Then, they called out to one another while taking their seats, oblivious to the fact that the movie had already started and people were trying to watch a movie that they PAID MONEY FOR. The worst blow came during Jennifer Hudson's devastating solo. At one moment, the music cuts out, leaving Ms. Hudson unaccompanied for the emotional climax of the song. Apparently one of these kids had been (mockingly?) singing along with the diva, for when the music cut out I could not hear Ms. Hudson's beautiful voice--only the off-key tones of a teenager screeching along at the top of her lungs. This goes beyond "well, people are used to watching movies at home so they talk a little more." This is behavior that should be codified as criminal assault. And like theater management would do anything about it. It's a travesty. I think that 2007 will see me staying home even more.

In other words, to take a page from Time Magazine: the number one reason I stayed home in 2006? YOU.

David Denby's piece in the New Yorker addresses this issue (and so much more):

Consider the mall or the urban multiplex. The steady rain of contempt that I heard Hollywood executives direct at the theatres has been am-plified, a dozen times over, by friends and strangers alike. The concession stands were wrathfully noted, with their "small" Cokes in which you could drown a rabbit, their candy bars the size of cow patties; add to that the pre-movie purgatory padded out to thirty minutes with ads, coming attractions, public-service announcements, theatre-chain logos, enticements for kitty-kat clubs and Ukrainian bakeries--anything to delay the movie and send you back to the concession stand, where the theatres make forty per cent of their profits. If you go to a thriller, you may sit through coming attractions for five or six action movies, with bodies bursting out of windows and flaming cars flipping through the air--a long stretch of convulsive imagery from what seems like a single terrible movie that you've seen before. At poorly run multiplexes, projector bulbs go dim, the prints develop scratches or turn yellow, the soles of your shoes stick to the floor, people jabber on cell phones, and rumbles and blasts bleed through the walls.

If we want to see something badly enough, we go, of course, and once everyone settles down we can still enjoy ourselves. But we go amid murmurs of discontent, and the discontent will only get louder as the theatre complexes age. Many of them were randomly and cheaply built in response to what George Lucas conclusively demonstrated with "Star Wars," in 1977: that a pop movie heavily advertised on national television could open simultaneously in theatres across the country and attract enormous opening-weekend audiences. As these theatres age, the gold leaf doesn't slowly peel off fluted columns. They rot, like disused industrial spaces. They have become the detritus of what seems, on a bad day, like a dying culture.

I did see some 2006 movies on DVD, at Sundance, and on Pay-Per-View that I liked a lot: Iraq in Fragments, An Inconvenient Truth, and Notes on a Scandal. My over-rated votes go to Babel (best review ever is here) , Thank You For Smoking (did anybody else think that the pacing was off?), and The Proposition (I thought I didn't like Nick Cave before, but this has me convinced he is the most over-rated hipster of all time). I purposefully avoided World Trade Center and United 93, because I don't need to relive the day, or, worse still, be entertained by it. I missed out on The Departed and Inside Man, but hopefully will catch those before the Oscars, and I plan to see Children of Men, Curse of the Golden Flower, and Pan's Labyrinth before they leave theaters. Because I'm not ready to give up on the movies, yet... I think...