Last Sunday was the final showing for the season of Cinema Club. I drove in with Michael. The movie was The Five Senses, an Atom Egyoanish Canadian film, well made and well-acted, complex, enjoyable. Attendance has gotten so high at Cinema Club it was hard to find a seat.

After the first feature we drove to Los Gatos for the second showing. Los Gatos is a pretty little town at the bse of the hills, with a chic, upscale main street that reminds me of Cow Hollow. We ate lunch at our usual place, The Willows. Aftewards, I went for a walk, stopping at a massive Borders bookstore and browsing in a couple of kitchen supply shops. All of those gift shops in Los Gatos and Cow Hollow look alike — bright, shiny faux-naif ceramics, fancy soaps cut into deliberately crude blocks, cookbooks that emphasize the pictures rather than the recipes… I enjoy looking at those things and, in the case of the soaps, picking them up and smelling them, but I have no desire to spend money on them.

Cinema Club was held one Sunday a month, with two showings, one in San Jose, the other in Los Gatos. The idea was to watch a film with no preconceptions — attendees were supposed to have no idea what was going to be shown, whether it was a foriegn film, (Like Wandafuru Raifu’s Afterlife) a documentary (Like Errol Morris’ Mr. Death) or an indie (Like Lance Young’s Bliss).

In reality, there were some members on the mailing list Michael would send a heads up to in order to forestall any angry walkouts. I suspect it was the reaction of some members to Mr. Death and an indie feature about necrophilia called Kissed that prompted this. One person stalked out of Mr. Death at the point where Fred Leuchter, a designer of electric chairs, describes in unadorned, unemotional detail the physical realities of executing a human being. The woman who left complained the film (which is in fact about Leuchter’s embrace of Holocaust revisionism) was obviously “anti-death penalty propaganda.” Another person angrily shouted during the Q&A that Kissed, a strangely restrained, unexploitative film based on a Barbara Gowdy short story, had been made “solely to make money!” I still have a hard time imagining whoever pitched it to the studio making the case that a film about necrophilia would bring in the big bucks.