When I wrote in my last post that I put a new French documentary in my Netflix queue after reading about it in the New York Times, I implied that French documentaries aren't typically the sorts of things that find their way into movie theaters in Knoxville, Tennessee. Actually, that was more than a little unfair. Some years ago the Regal Cinemas chain, headquartered right here in K-Town, converted one of its older multiplexes, Downtown West, into an art house showing mainly indies and foreign films. It's got eight—yes, count 'em, eight—screens, and I think that's pretty impressive for a southern city of this size. (Before the Downtown West conversion, we had an independent art house with just two screens, and my wife and I were enormously grateful for that.)
Because of Downtown West, there actually is a chance that Two in the Wave (that French documentary I was blogging about) will make it to Knoxville. Of course, even eight screens don't guarantee that every offbeat or subtitled film in current release will arrive here—far from it. For example, I kept waiting and waiting for Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles to show up, but no luck, so now that one is in my Netflix queue.
Yet, even if we don't get everything of outside-the-mainstream interest, I did want to set the record straight about my current city of residence. This very afternoon I saw the Swedish thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at Downtown West, and in the neighboring auditoriums such films as The Ghost Writer, The Mother, and The Square were playing—none of them exactly standard fare for the "hinterlands." I don't usually tip my hat to large corporations, but in this case, I'll say, "Thanks, Regal."
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