Comments from briancr

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briancr
briancr commented about Movie Tavern by Marcus Tucker on May 15, 2008 at 4:03 pm

Northlake Festival 8 has reopened as part of the Movie Tavern chain. I will be attending the grand opening 5/16/08 to see Iron Man.
The last movie I can remember seeing at the old theater is the Spike Lee movie Do The Right Thing. It was the opening Friday for the film and the screening was sold out. The crowd was mostly twentysometings, fairly evenly mixed racially, and somewhat raucous. They had the volume for the film cranked up but a lot of the lines in the early scenes still got drowned out by the laughter of the audience. You could feel a certain amount of tension in the air though, like maybe the white people wondering whether they should be laughing. Towards the end of the movie the audience got quieter, the laughter more tense. It was damn near silent when the riot scene started. The movie seems a bit dated now, but it was electrifying at the time and one of my more memorable moviegoing experiences.
A side note: the N'lake Festival shopping center was a very popular car cruising site for teens in the late eighties. It probably put off a lot of adults from seeing movies there on weekends. Don’t know if this had anything to do with the closing of what seemed to be a very popular theater.