| The best of what you can’t get in Banff
Two winters ago I moved to Banff and began missing things about Calgary. The list is long, but always includes The Uptown Stage and Screen, The Globe Cinema and The Plaza Theatre, as well as Caffe Beano, Megatunes and The Mercury, among other haunts. While I miss much about my dusty old hometown, what I noticed first in Banff was a sort of low-grade melancholic yearning for all the quirky art house and alternative films I'm missing in Calgary.
Banff has a famous cinema of its own, The Lux Cinema Centre, located a block off Banff Avenue on Bear Street. The first movie I saw at the Lux was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This is deceiving – the best a moviegoer can do in Banff is to mainstream the prescribed Hollywood dose of dumb and dumber. A past week featured K-19, Road to Perdition, The Crocodile Hunter, Mr. Deeds and Men in Black II – a non-choice of the formulaic, sentimental and asinine.
Meanwhile, in Calgary, films worth seeing come and go in rapid seven-day succession. Laurent Cantet's L'emploi du temps (Time Out) received rave reviews and played for a week. At least Monsoon Wedding had a good long run at The Plaza.
Some might say, "Banff has a good video store, can’t you rent the movies that don’t make it to the Lux?" No, actually, I can’t. Last year I was lucky to see Sexy Beast on the big screen at the Uptown, and no home entertainment setup can compare to the 40-foot bad-ass Ben Kingsley you get in a real cinema.
Of course, there are many cities better known for their movie houses than Calgary, but at least it has three good ones. |
