You know, Dear Listener, that The Film Talk is striving for something rare: to be a truly international cinema podcast. Your genial co-hosts Jett & Gareth are men of the world, widely travelled, for whom it would not be an overstatement to assert the core truth of country music: wherever they lay their hats, that’s their home.
While we both now make our caves in the land of Buster Keaton, William F Buckley, Andrew Dice Clay, and the late Bea Arthur, our first encounter with each other was in the hallowed space of Belfast’s only arthouse theatre (or, as the somewhat ridiculous government-endorsed lingo has it: ‘specialist cinema’), the Queen’s Film Theatre. QFT, more than any other venue, formed my cinematic consiousness over the past two decades – beginning rather inauspiciously with a late night screening of ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’, later becoming the place where I first saw Kieslowski films, bumped into Albert Maysles, discovered Hirokadu Koreeda’s ‘After Life’, listened to Howard Shore play the temp tracks he shows David Cronenberg when he’s scoring a movie for him, fell for Emmanuelle Beart in ‘Nelly et M Arnaud’, saw a triple bill of ‘Miller’s Crossing’, ‘Lost Highway’ and ‘The End of Violence’, (never saw a David Lynch film anywhere else) and even had a door held open for me by Mike Leigh. Couldn’t happen in too many other places.
QFT has been a magical place for me; operated as something close to a labour of love for many years, especially when it was one of the few entertainment venues that stayed open in the toughest days of the conflict in and about northern Ireland. It’s changed of course; updated furnishing, rebuilt screens, different seats; some of the romance of the old theatre that you could only get to by knowing where the almost-secret back alley was has gone, but it’s still the place where people in Belfast who want to be surprised by cinema end up every week. I saw ‘In the Loop’ – which could well turn out to be my favourite film this year – there just a few days ago.
And now, QFT has launched a new website – much easier to use than the previous one, which had some of the quaint characteristics associated with Web 1.0
The new www.queensfilmtheatre.com is gorgeous to look at, intuitive to use, and the only criticism I can offer is that no one has yet invented the Star Trek transporter machine, so I can’t get to see the films screening there unless I fly to Belfast. QFT is that rare thing – a cinema with heart, with a touch of the personal, a movie theatre where you can feel at home. We hope that The Film Talk offers something similar; for now, I’m happy to begin this week by paying tribute to one of the best places in the world to watch movies. And we’d love to hear from you, Dear Listener, about your own cinema shrines – please comment below.
