High adventure in the great outdoors at the Cleveland Marathon.
Do you hate movies? Let me amend that: do you hate movies that even slightly challenge your assumptions about plot structure, character motivation and the like? If so, then I heartily endorse relocation to Cleveland. Then you can spend the third weekend of January every year with likeminded individuals in Case Western Reserve University’s Strosacker Auditorium, heckling films at their Science Fiction Marathon.
I’m being somewhat facetious, of course. The majority of the Cleveland crowd is not nearly as bad as it was when my cohorts and I started attending the Marathon six years ago. Part of this is probably due to the event’s recent ban on alcohol; part of it is probably due to the cyclical nature of the crowd. But there remains a virulent strain of the audience which seems to attend the event with the sole purpose of flaming away at any film not made in the last five years or featuring the cast of a cult sci-fi show that no one watched (see SERENITY.)
For the second time at a Marathon (I’m looking at you, Boston faithful), I slept through a screening of GOJIRA because the audience couldn’t stop heckling the “hilarious” plot and characters. Ralph Bakshi’s gonzo WIZARDS was roasted as if it were outtakes from an Andy Milligan home video. Every fadeout in Darren Aronofsky’s PI was greeted with select shouts of “Roll Credits!” Ha ha…heh heh…..yeah…….
The debate over Marathon snarking has been ongoing through the years. I’m no martinet on the subject, but I’ve always viewed the Marathon concept as one that celebrates film in all its varied states. The good stuff is savored, the bad stuff is roasted and the unknown stuff is appreciated and possibly re-evaluated. As each successive event (in all three cities) passes, I fear that we’re disappearing further and further down the post-modern rabbit hole, swathing ourselves in a sense of superiority to those “old, bad films” without the amenities of modern effects. A highly ironic moment of this year’s Cleveland Marathon was the presentation of a vintage 16mm LucasFilm special fx short from before the release of EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, in which Mark Hamil opines that sfx are great but can never replace story, plot, characterization, etc. The audience (myself included) laughed it up, but I fear that some of them didn’t really get it.
Nonetheless, there is still much to praise about the Case Marathon. The 16mm short was one of several in the lineup, ranging from the standard politically incorrect cartoons (Bugs Bunny in HARE MEETS HERR, with Hitler famously intoning “Heil Me!”) to lighter fare (the well place DONALD IN MATHEMAGIC LAND before PI.) The lineup was particularly strong, highlighting a dystopian future theme with screenings of AEON FLUX, 1984, SCREAMERS, WIZARDS and ZARDOZ. Yes, ZARDOZ. Nothing, even the years of reading about it on this board and elsewhere, quite prepared me for the sheer nutty brilliance of this movie. I would absolutely love to see it again in Boston or Columbus.
The two surprise films were BUBBA HO-TEP and X-MEN 2. It was nice to see the former again without the attendant hype. Other fare included INNERSPACE and the 1932 version of THE MUMMY. The Marathon ended with X-MEN: THE LAST STAND, but our crew, faced with the ride back south, decided to exit stage right instead. As I ended the night with a plate of freshly grilled pancakes at a local restaurant, I and my cohorts agreed that despite the hecklers, the Cleveland Marathon remains a fun experience, the perfect low impact spring training for the Boston and Columbus versions.
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