Movie Review: The Curse of La Llorona

The Curse of La Llorona ** / *****

Directed by: Michael Chaves.

Written by: Mikki Daughtry & Tobias Iaconis.

Starring: Linda Cardellini (Anna Tate-Garcia), Raymond Cruz (Rafael Olvera), Marisol Ramirez (La Llorona), Patricia Velasquez (Patricia Alvarez), Sean Patrick Thomas (Detective Cooper), Roman Christou (Chris), Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen (Samantha), Tony Amendola (Father Perez), Irene Keng (Donna).

 

We are now six films into the so called Conjuring Universe, and sometime tells me we aren’t going to reach the 22 films currently in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – this universe seems to be running out of steam. After the first two (very good) Conjuring films – both directed by James Wan – the next four have been fairly uneven – with really only the extremely effective Annabelle: Creation being all that good. The original Annabelle failed in trying to be a Rosemary’s Baby type film, and last fall’s The Nun was a kind of by the numbers genre exercise. I kind of hoped that would be the nadir of the series – but now comes The Curse of La Llorona which is an even more uninspired film – and one that’s really stretching the definition of a shared universe. And I don’t know what to make of Annabelle Comes Home – the next in the series due this summer (who knew?) which kind of looks like the first Goosebumps film – but with more death.

 

The Curse of La Llorona is set in 1973 Los Angeles, where single mother Anna (the ever talented, ever underutilized Linda Cardellini) is raising two kids on a social works salary after her cop husband died a year ago. One of her clients is Patricia Alvarez, and when Anna is sent to her home to check why her two sons haven’t been attending school, she finds them locked in a closet – and over the very loud objections of Patricia – removes them from, the home. Of course, Patricia wasn’t really abusing her sons – she was protecting them from La Llorona – a woman out of Mexican folk tales, who as we saw in the opening, drown her kids when she found out her husband was having an affair – and then grief stricken, killed herself as well. Now, she roams around looking for children to replace the ones she drowned – which she will do by drowning them for some reason.

 

Of course, we know that it will be Anna’s two children who are targeted next – and we will have to go through the motions of people not believing the creepy things that are happening to them, and everyone around thinking they have gone crazy, or that Anna has become abusive. There will be trips to the Church to talk to a very serious Priest (who is, apparently, the connection to the Conjuring universe, as he was in Annabelle – or so this movie tells me, as I don’t remember him). The priest will hum and ha, and then suggest a guy he knows, who works outside the church – the better to get results. And this will be Rafael Olvera (Raymond Cruz from Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad) – as a tough guy, but one who knows precisely what spells, chants, charms and beans will stop La Llorona. And we will get a big face off on a dark and stormy night.

 

To be fair to The Curse of La Llorona, all the movies in this series – the good ones, and the bad ones – are more than a little clichéd. It’s just that at their best, the films have managed to make those clichés work through style, and the commitment of the performances. James Wan is a great director, who knows just how far he can push you before the tension becomes unbearable, and then goes just a little bit further. By comparison, this film was directed by Michael Chaves, making his feature debut – and he just doesn’t have the same chops – not yet, anyway.

 

In short, this series started as something not original, but extremely well executed, creepy, scary and expertly crafted. Now, in its sixth feature, it’s become as uninspired as any mainstream horror product can become. I hope they can get it back on track – but this one is a dud.

Movie Review: Wrestle

Wrestle **** / *****

Directed by: Suzannah Herbert & Lauren Belfer.

Written by: Lauren Belfer & Suzannah Herbert & Pablo Proenza.

 

On the surface, Wreslte is another one of those inspirational sports documentaries that have been made continuously over the past few decades ever since Steve James’ Hoop Dreams (1994) kind of redefined the genre in a brilliant way. Wrestle doesn’t quite reach those heights – and yet, it is more clear eyed in its depiction of a wrestling team at a poor school in the poor city of Huntsville, Alabama over the course of a single wrestling season. These are people in the heart of Trump’s America, but they are the type of people that no one – certainly not Trump – pays all that much attention to. It focuses on four high school boys – three black, one white – all of whom have issues bigger than wrestling, and their white coach from New York, who had some same issues a decade ago when he was a teenager, and is now trying to help them navigate them. The results are mixed.

 

The coach is Chris Scribner, who had issues with drugs and alcohol when he was a teenager, and was told that trying to start a wrestling program at this school – J.O. Johnson in Huntsville – would be a failure. But the wrestling program has gone pretty good so far. He has some talented kids on his team – ones that have a chance to go to State. The film focuses on four of them. Jamario Rowe is a bit of a hothead who doesn’t always do what is supposed to do. He is an emotional kid – he has a white girlfriend, who is pregnant – and their relationship is drama filled to say the least. His mother wants to support him – but knows he’s going to do what he’s going to do. Jaquan Rhodes is bigger and quieter than Jamario – again has a supportive mother, no father in the picture. He’s also a little lazier. He struggles to make weight, and can be as definitive as Jamario, but in a quieter way. Teague Berres is the one white kid the film focuses on. He may has ADD or something similar – he certainly has trouble staying focused and committed – and all the pot he smokes certainly doesn’t help. The kid who seems to have it most together is Jailen Young – being raised by his grandparents, after he mother walked out on the family. He is smarter than the others, and more committed. He has a plan – and while he has some of the other complaints as the others, he isn’t as easily dissuaded.

 

The film was directed by Suzannah Herbert, and co-director Lauren Belfer, and they stay out of the way. You don’t hear from them as they follow the kids or the coach, who seem to have become comfortable enough around the cameras that they basically ignore them. The film addresses a lot of issues – bias in policing for example, without beating you over the head with it. Jaquan ends up with a criminal record because of a small amount of pot found in his car. Jailen is harassed by a white cop for public urination, who is way too into harassing this kid. Meanwhile Teague seems to be able to smoke all the pot he wants, and no one notices (not to mention, he pulls a scam that could easily be described as theft, again with no consequences).

 

The film follows the four wrestlers as they try to make the top 8 in their weight class for the state, to make the finals. They know if they do well there, then a wrestling scholarship maybe in their future. With that, they can go to college. Without it, they probably will never get there. Coach Chris, seems to be focused on that – getting them to their potential. He doesn’t seem to quite understand everything they are going through – the black kids hint at this, but never quite say it. Scribner seems to realize this, but lets it pass.

 

The movie climaxes at the state championships, where all four of them are competing. Not everything goes as planned however – and in the end, we are left with what is probably the more realistic ending than we normally see. Things are not going to turn out well for all the students – or the school or the coach.

 

Wrestle is a very good documentary – one that doesn’t beat you over the head with what it has to say, but says it loudly and clearly just the same. Yes, it’s about wrestling – but it’s about more than that as well.

Movie Review: Tito and the Birds

Tito and the Birds *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Gabriel Bitar & André Catoto & Gustavo Steinberg.

Written by: Eduardo Benaim and Gustavo Steinberg.

 

I’m not one for complaining about kids today – or how easy they have it, or how lazy, spoiled and entitled they are all. But sometimes, when I watch a film like Tito and the Birds – a beautiful, animated film from Brazil – I do wonder a little if we can be overprotective of our children in North America. This is a dark film – a somewhat scary film, and a mature film that tackles some rather timely and complex themes – and yet it is still very much a film made for children. The filmmakers here trust the children in the audience to get what they are talking about – which they will likely do on a more basic, instinctual level – while the parents in the audience will see its more real world analogues. And more and more often when I see animated films from outside of North America, I see more mature films than we get – and I wonder if maybe we think our children don’t understand – or can’t handle – as much they really can.

 

Tito and the Birds is a film about Tito – a small, Brazilian boy of about 10, who still feels guilt about that time a few years ago where he messed up one of his inventor father’s experiments – resulting in his mother kicking his father out of the house for good. His father was working on a machine to communicate with birds (I know, it’s just something you kind of have to go with here) – and in the years since, Tito has continued to try and perfect that machine. That will become more important as a pandemic hits first the city, then the country, then the world – a disease brought on by fear, that gradually turns the people who catch it into big, round blobs with big eyes. There are those who go on TV to stoke those fears for their own personal gain – and then Tito and his friends who do everything possible to get things under control.

 

The backgrounds in Tito and the Birds look like beautiful oil paintings, that fittingly turn darker and darker as the film progresses – threatening to overtake the characters, and bath them in perpetual darkness. By contrast, the character design is deliberately cruder – not quite childlike, but not that far away either. Of course, when they change into those big blobs, they get even cruder. The contrasting styles works very well to give the film a strange, dark, interesting look and feel.

 

As a political allegory, the film is pretty straight forward – which is good for children, as they will be able to pick up on it. It’s not a simple left/right issue either – it’s more about how those in power use fear to try and control those below, and keep that power. There are certainly examples of that in Brazil – where the film is from – and around the world right now.

 

At only 73 minutes, Tito and the Birds gets everything done fairly quickly, which is a good thing. The premise of the movie is too goofy to really sustain much thought or much more than the 73 minutes. But it works while the movie is on, and makes for an interesting dark children’s film. It won’t be from everyone – or every child – but perhaps it shows that we can try and scare our children – at least a little bit more.

Movie Review: The Haunting of Sharon Tate

The Haunting of Sharon Tate no stars / *****

Directed by: Daniel Farrands.

Written by: Daniel Farrands.

Starring: Hilary Duff (Sharon Tate), Jonathan Bennett (Jay Sebring), Lydia Hearst (Abigail Folger), Pawel Szajda (Wojciech Frykowski), Ryan Cargill (Steven Parent), Bella Popa (Sadie), Fivel Stewart (Yellow), Tyler Johnson (Tex Watson), Ben Mellish (Charles Manson).

 

I imagine the reason why The Haunting of Sharon Tate got made was because Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is also coming out this year, which in part is about the Manson murders, which has its 50^th Anniversary this year. The film is basically the worst case scenario of what Tarantino’s film may look like if he were to do something similar to what he did in both Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained, which is to rewrite horrific times in history as a revenge thriller – an alternate history of how things could have turned out. And yet, I think there is a difference between alternate history, and what Daniel Farrands and company have done with The Haunting of Sharon Tate. While Inglorious Basterds used fictional characters – fictional Jewish families, fictional Nazis, etc. (with a real people thrown in at the sides), Daniel Farrands have used real people, in a real situation. There is a difference between Tarantino’s Shosanna exacting revenge on the Nazis, and what happens here. It would be as if in Tarantino’s film, he had made a film in which Anne Frank and those in the attic become kick ass Nazi killers. One is a legitimate use of alternate history, the other is just gross exploitation. And that is what The Haunting of Sharon Tate is.

 

The movie uses a supposed quote by Tate, a year before the murders, where she foretold her own murders (the sourcing of that quote is highly dubious to begin with) to essentially make this film’s version Tate (played, in an awful performance, by Hilary Duff) into some kind of psychic, receiving premonitions of the upcoming murders. The first half of the movie sees Tate as a woman who is uncomfortable in her own home – lashing out at the people who were staying there for her as she and her husband (an unseen Roman Polanski) were away. The film doesn’t quite blame victims Abigail Folger and Wojciech Frykowski for the murders, but it doesn’t not blame them either. Tate is haunted by visions of people breaking into her home, upset that a strange man named Charlie keeps stopping by to talk to the former resident of the home. A tape – playing an actual Charles Manson written song – just starts playing one night. Her beloved dog runs off and is later found horrifically murdered. A walk in the Hollywood Hills turns creepy when two young women seemingly stalk Tate and Folger. None of this – as far as I can tell – is based on anything other than that dubious quote a year before the murders from Tate where she had a bad dream.

 

With about 45 minutes left in the movie, the Manson family members invade the home – and in the audience you prepare yourself for what you think may be an extended bloodbath. But Farrands actually dispatches with the murders – the way we know them – fairly quickly. He then circles back – with Tate waking up in the middle of the night as if it had been a dream. She spends the next day increasingly paranoid about what is going to happen that night – and when the Manson family comes back and attacks them again, this time they are ready. The five victims are able to band together, and fight off the attackers – ending with this version of Tate looking at the dead bodies of herself and the other victims, as if in another dimension.

 

There are lots of things you could pick apart here. The historical inaccuracies here are a lot – it leaves out the caretaker in the back trailer who survived the attacks altogether, as if he didn’t exist. It does the same thing to the other Manson girl who was along for the ride, and saw everything, but didn’t participate but who became the star witness. Poof, they aren’t there, because, of course, it doesn’t really fit the narrative. Pretty much everything in the first half of the movie is just completely made up. There are more – a lot more – things that don’t match the historical record. And that is the least of the problems with the movie.

 

The acting is terrible. I don’t know what Duff is trying to do with her accent – she is trying to match Tate’s somewhat strange high class little accent, but doesn’t get it right, and just sounds strange. But at least she seems to be trying to do something. The rest of the cast basically seems bored, and are going through the motions. The dialogue is laughably bad. The direction is horrible – trying to scare the audience with a bunch of cheap jump scares. The whole movie has the look and feel of a cheap made for TV movie.

 

But my biggest problem with the movie is really what it implies about the victims here. That they brought it on themselves, that if only they had fought back, they could have survived. It’s an offensive reframing of history, treating the Manson murders as a cheap entertainment, and then blaming the victims for their own demise. Turning the whole thing into a kind of supernatural home invasion thriller. Tarantino has been criticized for the way he handled Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained – not unfairly, but not in a way I agree with either. But he didn’t approach things like this. And I do not believe he will do it in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – but we shall see. But no matter what, I don’t believe it is possible for him to make a worse film than The Haunting of Sharon Tate – or anyone else this year for that matter. As for Farrands, I don’t think he’s learned anything. His next film is called The Murder of Nicole Brown Simpson.

Classic Movie Review: Sans Soleil (1983)

Sans Soleil (1983)

Directed by: Chris Marker.

Written by: Chris Marker.

 

Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil has for a longtime been one of my biggest cinematic blind spots. The film always ranks high on surveys of the best documentaries of all time, and is the highest ranked film (at least of those readily available) on the They Shoot Pictures Don’t They annual list of the 1,000 greatest films – based on a lot of surveys combined together – that I had not seen. Marker, in general, is a blind spot for me – I have seen his masterpiece La Jetee from 1962, but nothing else of his. This film has been on to watch list for years – and I’ve always put it off. Now that I have seen it, I think it was right of me to put it off until now. In my younger days, a film like Sans Soleil would have driven me nuts and probably bored me to tears.

 

That is because Sans Soleil is a strange film. It’s a documentary, but with fictional elements. It’s a montage film and a travelogue and a home movie. There are parts that are a strange tribute to Hitchcock’s Vertigo – which La Jetee was too, really. It is a film in which a fictional female narrator reads the letters of a fictional cameraman describing what they seen and encountered in their travels – a lot in Japan and Africa but also other places – like the stop in San Francisco for the Vertigo tour, or rural Iceland in which children walk together hand-in-hand representing innocence and happiness. It uses stock footage, and footage Marker shot himself. The sound in the movie is never synced with the images. The film is very personal for Marker – he is doing everything here, from the writing, to the music to the editing, etc. – and yet it is also deliberately distancing himself from it. He doesn’t even take a traditional director credit for the film.

 

A film like Sans Soleil is challenging – but in a way that I can find more frustrating than rewarding. It does, kind of, remind me of the what Godard has been doing for a while now as well – making these indecipherable film montages in which Godard goes off on political tangents and rants, that you either understand or don’t – care about, or don’t care about. Godard can be cranky – and he most often is – but he can also be playful in these films, most notably Goodbye to Language 3-D. Most of the time though, he seems disappointed in us – those in the audience, and people around the world.

 

Marker’s film is different though. It is a view of a Western thinker, a Marxist, looking outwards at the world he sees. You can say that at times Marker does seem to eroticize the people he seems – “othering” them in ways that only a white Westerner would, and you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong. But Marker isn’t looking down on anyone in the film, and he finds fascinating connections between the different cultures he surveys – and relates it all to the broader human experience.

 

More than anything, the film is about memory - how flawed memory can be. We don’t really remember what happened, only what we think happened. It is a film about history – and the flaws there as well. It is a film about modernity – seen through the innovations at the time, including Pac-Man. It is Marker reaching out and trying to find connections – finding some, losing others. And that’s primarily what makes it different than Godard’s films – which are very insular to his own worldview. Godard is confident he is right, in a way I don’t think Marker is.

 

Or perhaps I’m completely wrong about Sans Soleil and I totally misunderstood it. So be it. As the narrator says in the film “Not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure”.

Classic Movie Review: Smithereens (1982)

Smithereens (1982) 

Directed by: Susan Seidelman.

Written by: Ron Nyswaner & Peter Askin & Susan Seidelman.

Starring: Susan Berman (Wren), Brad Rijn (Paul), Richard Hell (Eric), Nada Despotovich (Cecile).

 

Susan Seidelman’s indie debut from 1982 is both a snapshot of the era that produced it, and a kind of universal portrait of what it means to be young and deluded enough to think you have something important to say, even if you are objectively not producing anything of importance. You could make a few changes to Smithereens to update it to 2019, and people would call it a damning portrait of Millennial entitlement, even if it was made just as the first millennials were just being born. Every generation thinks the one that comes up after them are uniquely privileged and lazy – they’re not really, but we all like to think of ourselves as special.

 

Wren (Susan Berman) is the lead in Smithereens, a privileged, white Jersey girl, slumming it in Manhattan in the early 1980s. She works a dead end job in a copy shop, printing off pictures of herself, emblazoned with the phrase “Who is She?” which she then plasters around the city – on subways, etc. She wants to be a part of the punk scene – lying her way into clubs, sidling up to musicians, suggesting that they start a band together even though we have no real evidence that she has any talent whatsoever – we never see her play an instrument or sing, or anything else. She is convinced of her own greatness – even if no one else sees it.

 

In as much as Smithereens has a plot, it is a kind of exploitive love triangle. Brad Rijn plays Paul – an artist recently arrived in New York from Montana, who lives out of his van in the worst part of town (this, being 1982, means all parts of New York are bad – where he stays is worse). He sees Wren early in the film, and grows infatuated with her – following her around like a lost puppy dog, at first oblivious to the way that she basically uses him, and ignores him when it’s convenient to her. Eric (Richard Hell) is the part of the triangle – a punk musician that Wren sets her sites on, and won’t let go – even if it’s clear to us in the audience that he doesn’t like her very much. She’ll do when there’s no one else around – but if there’s a better offer, he’s going to take it. As pathetic as Paul is – he realizes that Wren is using him far quicker than Wren realizes that Eric is doing the same to her.

 

Wren is a forerunner to many of the “difficult” female characters that have garnered praise in recent years – like say Charlize Theron in Young Adult, or Greta Gerwig in a couple of Noah Baumbach movies (Frances Ha and Mistress America) – although she falls somewhere in the middle of those two extremes – she isn’t quite as hateful as Theron in Young Adult, nor as lovable, even in her self-delusion, as Gerwig in Frances Ha. She’s a young woman trying to skip a few steps in the maturation process – going straight to success, without quite figuring out who she is, or what she really wants to do. She doesn’t see herself clearly, and that allows her to do the same to everyone around her. She has to know how Paul feels about her – and exploits that for her own benefit – while still acting as if she is oblivious to it whenever he brings it up. At the same time, she isn’t able to see Eric for who he is – even as he all but announces it to her in one scene. Most of the cast here was first time actors, but Hell was already a kind of underground rock star at the time, and he exudes that kind of dangerous energy that you know you should resist but cannot. Rijn on the other hand was green as an actor – and it shows, but in a way that works for the character. He’s so earnest he cannot possibly lie. Both bounce off of Berman – who showed real promise here (why she barely acted again, I don’t know).

 

Director Susan Seidelman was only 30 when the film came out – and was probably a little before her time, both in terms of being a female filmmaker – still much rarer than it should be – but also in terms of the types of films she wanted to make. You can see a little bit of early Spike Lee or Richard Linklater in Smithereens, and even if the film is undeniably rough around the edges, that works towards it charms. She got sucked into mainstream movies right after – her follow-up was Desperately Seeking Susan with Madonna, and also made She-Devil with Meryl Streep and Roseanne. She has spent the last few decades mainly doing TV work. It saddens me to think of what may have been for Seidelman had she come along just a decade (even half a decade) later – when indie film was really at its height in America. Smithereens is far from a perfect film – but it showed such potential, that sadly, wasn’t really fulfilled.

Remembering the Princess

Last week, the Princess Cinema in my hometown of Waterloo, Ontario announced that after 34 years of continuous operations their landlord, The Huether Hotel, was evicting them – giving them until the beginning of June to vacate the premises – presumably so that a VR company could move into the space. I’m not going to go into the reasons behind that - it’s not what I want to write about. There is word that perhaps there could be negotiations, so hope that the Princess could survive is not completely lost – and I do hope that something gets worked out. Because losing the Princess would be losing a part of Waterloo history – a cultural landmark for the community and a place I love dearly. But this post is about my memories of the Princess - and why I love it so.

 

The first movie I saw at the Princess was American History X – that Edward Norton starring, Tony Kaye directed movie about a skinhead who gets released from jail, and wants to leave his racist past behind, but finds it harder than he thought. This must have been either late 1998 or early 1999 – as the film was released late 1998, although it often took a little time before those films got to the Princess. I had heard about the Princess before then – I had been a burgeoning cinephile living in Waterloo since I saw Pulp Fiction in 1995 (when it came to VHS – another movie lovers icon lost to history) – when I was just 15. I didn’t start going to the movies regularly until the fall of 1997 however – in other long lost K-W theaters like King’s College, the Capitol and Fairview. For reasons lost to history however, it took me a year to go to the Princess to see a movie. But once I did, I never stopped.

 

Between 1999 – my last year at WCI, and 2004 – when I graduated from Conestoga College, I would bet that barely a week went by without me visiting the Princess. There were times when I would have no idea what the movie playing even was, but if the Princess thought it was good enough to play, I trusted them enough to go see it. I saw some of the best movies I have ever seen at the Princess, and was introduced to many of what would become my favorite filmmakers there. It’s where I first watched a Pedro Almodovar movie (All About My Mother) or a Dardennes brothers movie (Rosetta). My first experience with Canadian icon Atom Egoyan on the big screen was there (Felicia’s Journey). It’s where I had my mind blown by Being John Malkovich. It’s where as a cynical 18-year-old who thought he didn’t like musicals, I fell in love with Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy, or related to an old man driving a lawnmower across several states in David Lynch’s The Straight Story. It is where I was energized by Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, disturbed greatly by Tim Roth’s The War Zone, charmed by Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park, confused by Alan Rudolph’s Breakfast of Champions, mesmerized by Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey, laughed alongside the dreamers of Chris Smith’s American Movie and saw that Shakespeare could be done in a completely new way in Julie Taymor’s Titus. And those are just the films from 1999 who experience I had at the Princess have seared themselves into my brain. I also saw some of my favorite classics projected there on the big screen for the first time – Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Hitchcock’s Rear Window and the re-release of my all-time favorite film – Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (this was the Redux version).

 

I could continue to go on (Requiem for a Dream, Dancer in the Dark, The Virgin Suicides, Mulholland Drive, Bowling for Columbine, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Ghost World, Far From Heaven, Talk to Her, Y Tu Mama Tambien, etc, etc, etc)– but you get the point. I was there a lot – and continued to be there a lot until I moved away from Waterloo in 2005. I spent a year in Toronto, and another three in Burlington while I continued to work in Toronto. I didn’t go to the Princess much in that time. I tried to go a few times a year when I went home to visit my mother. When I moved to Brantford in 2009, the Princess became a bigger part of my life again. Sadly, it was the closest art house cinema to me, even if it was nearly an hour each way. Again, I began seeing some of the best films of any given year at the Princess – including my favorite film of last year – Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. The last film I attended at the original was the charming Stan & Ollie. I hope it’s not the last time I get to go – I am anxiously awaiting a calendar for what could be their last weeks in May.

The Princess will go on of course – they have the Twin, which is a charming theater in its own right, and which I have experienced many fine memories – and the recently opened Playhouse in Hamilton is a slightly closer drive for me – so I am grateful for that. But the Original Princess will always remain my favorite place to see a movie. No, it doesn’t have the seating of the multiplexes – and I do remember during my screening of Novitiate during a rain storm that the roof was leaking. And you could sometimes hear music through the walls as you watched a movie. But it has charm – and character. Ascending those stairs to see a movie always fills me with excitement and anticipation.

 

So, if this is the end of the Original Princess, I guess all I want to say is thank you. I don’t know the owners of the Princess personally – I am a quiet, introverted movie lover who more often than not attended screenings by myself. I kept to myself when I went there. But that place means a lot to me – and my journey to becoming the cinephile I am today. It’s the best place I know to watch a movie – and if this is the end, I will miss it more than I can put into words. So thank you Princess Cinema for all you have done for Waterloo movie fans - and for me personally. I wouldn’t be the same without you.