Hartford Courant from Hartford, Connecticut • Page 43

8 pm 9pm 57 'CASUAL CLASSICS' HARTFORD SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA THEBUSHNELL TONY BENNETT FOX THEATER FOXWOODS LUCKY JEANS, LUCKY MAGAZINE, "LUCKY NUMBERS," BRITNEY'S "LUCKY" THE HARTFORD COURANT FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2000 SECTION Hartford's New Movie Showplace ilt 0 St -er wrsr Eager Buyers Snap Up All PlayStation 2s By VALERIE FINHOLM Courant Staff Writer The teenagers started lining up Wednesday night outside the 1 new Target store in New Britain. As the sun rose Thursday, they were joined by more teens, as well as some moms, dads and grandparents, all hoping for a chance to plunk down $299.99 for Sony's new PlayStation 2 video game. At 8 a.m., the doors opened. By 8:30, Target had sold 61 consoles its entire allotment to the first 61 people in line. "It was very orderly," said assistant manager Bruce Hellyer, who said customers waiting in line had made out numbers themselves and passed them along to those waiting in line.

It shaping up to be a Furby kind of Christmas for the PlayStation 2 since Sony announced that a parts shortage would limit its initial shipment of the new entertainment system. Stores across Connecticut reported being sold out by GOTOD12 7 ir Jf' i X7 if A ..4 'Yards' Rings True As Family Tragedy By MALCOLM JOHNSON Courant Film Critic This time, James Caan gets to be The Godfather. Seated at a desk in a baronial suburban house, the tottering king of "The Yards" finds himself in a scene very like the one that surrounded Marlon Brando in Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 classic. The desk is simple but elegant, the lighting sub Crown Theatre's 17-Screen Complex Opens Today On New Park Avenue THE NEW CROWN PALACE 17 theater complex on New Park Avenue in Hartford brings back some of the elegance of the old moviehouses that once lined downtown. The 17-screen complex has neon lights, columns, balconies, an arc of night sky in the lobby lit by fiber optics and an IMAX-like screen.

land Hills, use it because of its superior sight lines. The seats in the Crown Palace, built by the Ford Motor Co. (but without faulty radials, quips Thomas E. Becker, Crown's director of special projects), have high backs, similar to those on planes and trains. The Palace 17, designed by James Martino of Port Washington, N.Y., boasts stucco and stone exteriors, with columns and peristyles and balconies flanking an arching marquee over the central entrance at 330 New Park Ave.

Inside, a spacious lobby with a neon-labeled concierge booth at one end and a wide red, blue and yellow candy stand at the other is overhung by the piece de resistance, an arc of night sky lit by constantly changing fiber optics. "A throwback to the old atmospherics," says An- GOTOD5 Hartford's downtown picture palaces live on only In fading memories and old photographs, and the "nabes" have disappeared one by one, with only a few survivors. But beginning today, Hartford makes a comeback as a theater town with the opening of the imposing yellow-and-blue Crown Palace 17 Theatres on New Park Avenue. With 16 conventional screens and the world's first Odyssey giant screen, the $15 million showplace represents a major investment in the Parkville section of the city.The latest by ous in the Crown Theatre chain of Norwalk will seat 3,600 hi! stadium auditoriums ranging from 100 or so seats to 340, all equipped with THX Dolby sound systems. Besides the 275-seat Odyssey, two of the other houses are large, with more than 300 seats each.

The other 14 are in the neighborhood of 100 seats. Whatever their size, all of the theaters boast wall-to-wall screens, elegant blue-and-red draperies and curtains and tiered seating, which rises more steeply than in conventional theaters. Some of the area's rival theaters have already converted to stadium seating, and all of the newer theaters, such as the Loew's in Plainville and the Showcase Cinemas at Buck- By MALCOLM JOHNSON Courant Film Critic Chilling Sequel To 'Blair Witch' dued, the atmosphere turbulent. James Gray's first film since "Little Odessa," the 1995 Russian-Jewish variation on "The Godfather," sometimes recalls earlier, better pictures. In the end, for example, the ex-con Leo Handler, charged with regret by the low-key Mark Wahlberg, comes across as a variation on Brando's Terry Malloy in Elia Kazan's great 1954 "On the Waterfront" Gray, who co-wrote "The Yards" with Matt Reeves, is not just paying homage to master-works of the American cinema, however.

Basing his film on the experiences of his father, Gray tells a grim, unadorned tale of a family tragedy, centering on corruption in New York's subway system. Caan's cool, courtly Frank 01-chin, an elegant self-made man with thinning hair, runs a sprawling plant that builds and repairs cars for the Metropolitan Transit Authority. Leo, first seen riding the rails back to his mother's apartment after his release, later sees Frank, the new husband of his mother's sister, about a job. Frank recommends schooling to become a machinist. But Leo needs money now, to support his ailing mother, VaL acted with sweet nervousness by Ellen Burstyn.

Thus he falls in with Willie Guttierez, the buddy whose car-stealing ring helped land him in jail in the first place. As played by the increasingly impressive Joaquin Phoenix in a GOTOD7 With Nancy Schreiber as his director of photog- raphy and Sarah Flack as his editor, Berlinger has assembled a crazy quilt of intersecting images that are both jolting and disorienting. Beginning with a 1 jjHiiifimUMMiMl- in ill v. -my rr a aJMtMraaawa tranquil "Book of Shadows" blends newsreel footage pertaining to the "Blair Witch" phenomenon with quick flashes of torture, bdndage and By MALCOLM JOHNSON Courant Film Critic i Admirers of the documentary "Paradise Lost The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills" will again be caught up in themes of rabid small-town injustice in Joe Berlingers "Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2," a sequel that easily surpasses the original in its artifice, its storytelling, its atmosphere of growing terror. Berlinger, whose Gothic documentaries also include the stark "Brother's Keeper," has fashioned a baroque tale of five innocents who venture into Maryland's Black Hills in pursuit of necromantic thrills, only to find themselves twisted, by sinister, incomprehensible forces: The director, who co-wrote the screenplay with Dick Beebej posits the disappearance of Heather, Josh and Mike as a given.

Again, the actors in the principal roles use their own names. stabbings as well as images of a young" man in a mental hospital As it turns out, this slobbering unfortunate is to be the guide to a foolhardy expedition back to Burkittsville. Tourists flocked to the tiny, drab Maryland hamlet after "The Blair Witch Project" captured the attention of America. Berlinger opens witlj an evocation of the craze. At first, the film seems vaguely GOTOD7 BRUCE BIRMELIN ARTISAN ENTERTAINMENT JEFFREY DONOVAN'S tales of the Blair Witch land him in a mental hospital in "Book of SCREFN SCENE V2 'THE LITTLE VAMPIRE' i 'BAMBOOZLED' 'LUCKY NUMBERS' Please see film reviews, pages D6, 07.