PopSmart

I was talking to two longtime and, like me, retro-obsessed Atlanta artists Mark and Red Sandlin yesterday. We were sitting at the Dancing Goat in Decatur lamenting the absence of repertory film in Atlanta, and they told me tales of all the great classic film theaters that used to thrive in the city until I wept with phantom nostalgia for places I had never seen. Atlanta should be proud, however, to have the Plaza Theatre, whose regular screenings of classic film represent one of the city’s last beacons of a dying film culture. It is killing me that I am heading out of town this weekend and will miss the Jan. 26 matinee with the Silver Scream Spook Show’s grand guignol hijinks of King Kong (1933), featuring lovely Fay Wray and her monkey boy. The Silver Scream Spook Show is so committed to turning younger kids on to classic film, kids 12 and under get into the 1 p.m. matinee for FREE. This is 2008, for godsakes — nothing is free anymore, which makes me love it all the more.

There’s nothing better than seeing film in the slightly seedy but sublimely old-fashioned downstairs house and feel transported back to my early days fresh out of college in New York at the Biograph (gone), Theater 80 St. Marks (gone) and Film Forum (still kicking). Nothing, not even the wonderful ease of movies by mail, will ever replace that magical shared energy of seeing great film alongside strangers in an old building, communing at the church of cinema.

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