More Nickelodeon gripes

In which I continue my festering disdain with the scheduled selections for the theatre of the Columbia Film Society.

Why isn't Gus van Sant's "Last Days" on the upcoming roster?

Why did thay show the trailer of Godard's "Masculin Feminin" a few months ago, but have never scheduled the film?

Why is it, while I'm at it, that the Nickelodeon has shed its sense of film history? Over the past twenty years, I've sat through some amazing films at the Nickelodeon from the far distant past: Godard's "Weekend," Blier's "Going Places," Makavejev's "WR: Mysteries of the Organism," Fassbinder's "Berlin Alexanderplatz" -- all 15 hours, spread out over a wonderful month -- Fellini's "8 1/2," Carne and Prevert's "Children of the Paradise," Renoir's "Grand Illusion," Antonioni's "La Notte," Wertmuller's "Seven Beauties" (the subtitled one), Hitchcock's "Rear Window" and "Vertigo" (maybe the greatest double-feature I've ever sat through.)

I once took Katie to see Kurosawa's "Rashomon."

We used to have extraordinary discussions at the Nick on "Man Bites Dog" and "Exotica" and "Un Chien Andalou."

There was once a Luis Bunuel festival. Why? Because I suggested it. And it happened just like that.

There was a time you could do things like that -- a time when a few spaces every month were reserved for the classics of cinema, when there was actually a place in Columbia that could feed anyone with a real cinema fever.

Now it seems the place is purely a creation of some bland blind committee with no real handle on what is worth seeing, and no real sense of film history.