Another late night, as I have just returned from Lexington and my first visit to its wonderful Kentucky Theater in almost a year. Turns out this was probably my only chance to sample this year's Summer Classics Series, and it was a good one: Disney's 1954 action drama 20000 Leagues Under the Sea starring James Mason, Peter Lorre, and Kirk Douglas -- who, 52 years ago, looked only slightly younger than he does now (though the floppy goldilocks in this one gave him a somewhat different look).

The movie was preceeded by a chapter in the 1940 weekly serial The Shadow, an absolutely ridiculous thing to watch. Filled with unintentional(?) laughs, although the henchman who said "Hold your horses, this ain't cheesecake I'm cuttin'!" surely was in on the joke. Slotted between The Shadow and the movie was a "classic" Mr. Magoo cartoon -- surely one of the more annoying animated characters to hit the screen, and not helped by the volume being way too high. (Hey, it's Mr. Magoo who is half-blind and half-deaf, not us!!)

The Kentucky is an historic grand theater built in 1922, just before the grander and much more ornate Louisville Palace a few years later. (One of my favorite buildings in the world, I'll be telling you more about the Palace as we get to know each other). I'd say its nearly 1300 seats were at least 80% full tonight, which is incredible support for a so-so classic movie on a Wednesday night. We were entertained by live Wurlizter organ for 30 minutes before the show, and then it was enthusiastically kicked off by someone in charge dying to share with us all kinds of interesting trivia about the making of the movie.

Beyond current mainstream releases, Lexington seems to have become a much more movie-friendly city than Louisville -- where the Palace's summer classics series has been scaled back and the features are now projected from DVD rather than film. (Exception: last summer's Lifeboat was projected from an old VHS tape, since the DVD wasn't available yet!) I was reading one of Lexington's free weeklys tonight, and discovered that Lexington has a new eight-screen arthouse multiplex, like Louisville's Baxter Ave. Filmworks used to be until a couple of years ago. Sniff! Ah, but there are still good times to be had at Baxter Filmworks. Last Saturday night, I stepped out of a late showing of a decent new Woody Allen movie and was surrounded by dozens of strange-looking characters ready to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show... the sequence of events made me feel as though I were back at the Vogue in the 1990s. And a couple of weeks before that, Baxter Filmworks featured a midnight screening of Star Trek II - The Wrath of Kahn, which was rendered into a comedy by an unusually rowdy crowd. Fun!