‘Carol’ explores Eisenhower era anew

I recant! No, not my negative “Star War: The Force Awakens” review. If that buys me a one-way MetroCard out of town, I don’t care. I mean my ardor for our neighborhood movie theater that never was. It took a ride across the borough to the historic Pelham Picture House to realize that this, not another multiplex, is what our community needed all along: a small venue to house a film society devoted to specialty, independent, short film series and the occasional first run film.

But then I stopped myself. I’ve been around too long not to know this feeling. It was too familiar for me not to know it and dread it: that stupid voice inside me saying, “We could do this.” So if you’re an area college and you have a film club or a film program or an auditorium, beware. You might be getting a call.   

As for this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Picture, may I drive by them all. I still haven’t gotten over the Best Picture snub of “Creed.” And I’m still not over Jack’s death at the end of the “Titanic” (especially now that I know it could have been prevented), so there was no way I was going to pay money to see him get mauled by his new co-star, that terrible bear from “The Revenant.” So it came down to “Carol,” which is what brought me The Picture House and my recantation.  

Worth leaving home for

It might be on your laptop by the time you read this, but see “Carol,” especially for the last act.  If you know Todd Haynes’ 2002 “Far from Heaven,” you are used to his creative anachronism strategy for 1950s melodramas. Take a vintage source — Douglas Sirk’s garish Technicolor romances for the interracial love story in Far From Heaven; Patricia Highsmiths’ 1952 underground lesbian novel “The Price of Salt for Carol” — and retell them with a sophisticated, modern empathy for the victims of the era’s repressive sexual mores.