BUSH IS SCARY!

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CinemaTrek. Cleveland is a terrific movie town and you can see a lot of great films here. But one of the city's deficiencies is that there is no projection booth with two working 70mm machines. The CWRU Film Society used to have this capability, but doesn't now, as far as I know. A number of theatres have one 70mm machine hooked up to a platter, so 70mm films � a wider film gauge (twice the width of standard 35mm film) used mostly for large-scale epics like Lawrence of Arabia and 2001: A Space Odyssey � can be shown here. What can't be shown are special or archival 70mm prints that must be projected reel-to-reel on two machines, with a changeover every 20 minutes. Unique or rare prints are not allowed to be cut and spliced, which is what has to happen if they are projected from a platter.

Now, to be frank, there aren't a lot of 70mm prints that would require this special treatment. But in May I traveled to the American Film Institute's Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland, to see one of them: an original 70mm print of Sergei Bondarchuk's seven-hour, Oscar-winning 1960s epic War and Peace. Another is the new Janus/Criterion print of Jacques Tati's 1967 French comedy Playtime, which has been struck from a newly restored French negative and is about 20 minutes longer than the 108-minute version released in America. To show this print of Playtime, you need not only two 70mm machines but a 70mm DTS reader for the digital sound. (This is a different from a 35mm DTS reader, which many theatres have.)

So no one in Cleveland can project this new 70mm print of Playtime. But someone in Columbus can, and on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, July 29, 30, and 31, the Wexner Center for the Arts at OSU is going to do just that.

This screening is worth a trip to Columbus; Playtime is one of my all-time favorite films. Playtime was the third of four movies in which Tati played his bumbling alter-ego Monsieur Hulot. Hulot, a gawky, genial, pipe-smoking klutz in hat, overcoat, umbrella, and too-short pants, is constantly, hilariously in conflict with the trappings, gadgets, and "conveniences" of modern life. Tati also directed his Hulot films, and they contain lots of long shots and very little dialogue. One perceptive critic called them "comedies of motion." Playtime is Tati's grandest vision -- a spoof of soulless modernist architecture for which Tati constructed mammoth sets of concrete and glass that completely obliterated traditional Paris and its quaint, beautiful buildings (the Eiffel Tower is seen only in glass reflections). Then he turned Hulot and a bevy of American tourists loose in these structures and observed them like ants in an ant farm. The result is a wry and spectacular goof on contemporary urban life, with some of the best gags ever committed to celluloid.

If you'd like to see this movie in Columbus with me, you can. On Thursday, July 29, the Cinematheque is taking its first-ever "CinemaTrek." We've chartered a luxury coach that will leave the Cleveland Institute of Art at 3:45 pm sharp for the 7:00 pm show of Playtime at the Wexner Center. We will return to the CIA around midnight. The cost for the round-trip, including film admission, is only $20 per person. If you'd like a box supper to eat on the bus, add $9 more and we will order one for you. Send checks to the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, 11141 East Boulevard, Cleveland, OH, 44106. Be sure to include your phone number or e-mail address so that we can confirm your reservation. We need to receive all money by Monday, July 19. Seating is limited, so act now.

I don't think even I am a big enough dork to do this...