I’ve been living on the outskirts of Philadelphia for nearly 25 years (that is, my entire life) and have been writing amateur film reviews for only five or so, but, embarrassingly, I have only recently learned to take advantage of the art house Ritz Theaters chain in the city. For the longest time, I was afraid of the big, bad city and relegated my movie watching to big chains in the burbs. Even so, I feel a bit nostalgic and a bit upset to learn that the three Ritz Theaters are being sold to a national indie theater chain.
I first experienced the Ritz 5 when Pat offered me a pass to an advance screening of the extraordinarily awful The Sixth Day and, perhaps in small part due to that experience, erased the chain’s existence from my memory. Then, when I started having Saturday afternoon outings into the city with a friend, we started to take advantage of the fact that the theaters – three within a four-block radius – offered smart, sophisticated movies with little or no danger of selling out and early screening times. Some of my all-time movie-watching memories have occurred in those theaters over the past few years: I took in Pride and Prejudice, The Oh in Ohio, and Little Miss Sunshine at one or another of the Ritzes, just to name a few.
It doesn’t look like the new shopkeepers will change much about the experience – they offer similar film fare in New York and L.A. to what the Ritzes offer now – but the mere fact that a small theater chain, more or less independently owned, is no longer a hidden gem but part of a psuedo-conglomerate is a sad sign of the money-grubbing times, especially when it comes to Hollywood.