Watch This

Maybe you’ve seen 1,000 movies. Maybe not. (You can’t count all six times you’ve watched the last hour of Malice on TNT while waiting for your jeans to dry.) But if you want to speak with authority about the 392 movies you have seen, consider girding your gut reactions by reading film expert David Thomson, who is in town tonight. His new book Have You Seen … ?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films, is an ideal primer to a serious chunk of the celluloid canon as well as to Thomson’s dry counsel. “It doesn’t matter whether I like them or you like them,” Thomson says by phone from his Bay Area home. “They are films that pretty well anyone is going to think of when you ask them to list the big pictures. They are also frequently enormously interesting to discuss.”Film pierces very deep, goes deep into your soul,” he continues. “We feel sentimental about film because we start going to the movies when we’re very young. It’s an important part of growing up. You’re there as part of a crowd, and you feel that others feel the same, and yet you’re not quite sure. It’s still a solitary and isolating thing. As you get older, you realize that moviegoing is one of the things we have to measure our lives against. You remember a film from childhood or youth, and you may not see it again for a long time, and it’s not the same movie. But it is the same movie — you’ve changed. Watching movies is a willful return to a simpler world.”Tonight at 6:30, Thomson comments on the Kansas City Public Library’s ongoing “True Brits” British film series with a lecture called “A Personal Introduction to Michael Powell.” The English director, noted especially for his work with co-writer Emeric Pressburger (The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus), remains an almost universally praised figure whose work has never gone out of style with filmmakers, scholars and cinéastes (or with Thomson, a fan). After you hear Thomson’s take, see a different Powell movie every Monday night in October and November in the library’s Film Vault.He’ll stick around tonight at the KC Central Library (14 West 10th Street) to sign copies of Have You Seen … ?, which will be available for sale from Rainy Day Books. Admission is free. See kclibrary.org or call 816-701-3407.

Tue., Oct. 14, 6:30 p.m., 2008