The Security Apparatus Loves Brain Damage

Berkeleyside has an interesting article about an exhibit about the history of movies in Berkeley.  The security apparatus bizarrely loves promoting brain damage on high school and college campuses, but the best amenity on the Berkeley campus was the university art museum's Pacific Film Archive.  It alone had better film programming than anything available in the DC area, but that's not surprising given that this area is still kind of a cultural wasteland.  Their film programs were academic and exhaustive so they would show literally every movie ever made by a director (I don't know how people keep all of those Ozu "Late Spring," "Early Summer," "End of Summer" movies straight).  One time they had a Terrance Davies series (which at the time was only four or five feature films and a movie made up of short films).  Before a screening in front of about ten grungy grad students on a random Wednesday night in Berkeley, Davies popped out unannounced and proceeded to deliver a rambling anecdote about how his earliest memory was of his alcoholic, psychotic father throwing one of his older siblings out of a second story window.  He then said, "As for the movie you're about to see ("The Neon Bible" bizarrely starring Dennis Leary), to be honest I wasn't really able to carry it off, but I learned enough that I could do a much better job with "The House of Mirth."  Enjoy!"  And with that he left and probably proceeded to get drunk somewhere.  Then there was the screening in a Chaplin series that the extremely old son of Chaplin's longtime cameraman Rollie Totheroh attended along with a grandson and some great-grandchildren.  They raucously cheered every time Rollie's name appeared in the credits.

Oh, but UVa has football players like Adrian Burnim and Anthony Poindexter assaulting people on and off the field, so that makes the security apparatus happy.