Some newcomers to the Old Pueblo, including at least one reporter I know, are mystified by all the attention devoted to today's grand opening of a stretch of roadway that goes under some train tracks and into downtown.
It's an underpass, they say, eyebrows crinkling together. Do you guys throw a massive party for every little construction project that comes to an end?
Well, no, but we have other quirks, like taking a break when it rains, so we can stand en masse and watch.
You can read elsewhere in these pages about the perfectly justified hoopla surrounding the the Fourth Avenue Underpass.
But can we take a moment and recall the underpass that was built in 1916 and demolished two years ago to make way for today's bright, shiny replacement?
My friends and I dubbed it the Tina Lee underpass in honor of the name scrawled all over it during our college days. But no matter what you called it, the underpass looms large around here. It even appears briefly in an Oscar-winning film.
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The urine-scented underpass is the scene of a car wreck in "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," the 1970s movie that also features, in a more prominent role, downtown's Chicago Music Store.
The Loft Cinema is screening the locally filmed Martin Scorsese drama at 1 p.m. Sunday. It's the nonprofit theater's way of celebrating Tucson's 234th birthday, which is today.
The movie, for which Ellen Burstyn won her only Academy Award, does not hold up particularly well. I watched the slow-moving drama again a couple of months ago, and it pales in comparison to "GoodFellas" and just about every other Scorsese picture known to man.
The final scene, though, is a heart-grabber. It features a long shot of Alice and her son walking on East Speedway near Wilmot Road, the Monterey Village sign in the distance.
"Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" was released in 1974, and it's very much a product of its time, for better and worse.
So, too, is "Soul Power," a documentary opening Friday at the Loft that centers on a three-day R&B concert held that same year in Kinshasha, Zaire.
The film focuses on a concert tied to the Rumble in the Jungle, the 1974 title fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.
The fight, so thrillingly chronicled in the 1996 Oscar-winning documentary "When We Were Kings," was postponed for several weeks, but the concert went on.
The Godfather of Soul couldn't rightly be expected to re-make his concert schedule at the last minute just because Foreman got hurt during training.
James Brown was the headliner on a bill that also included Bill Withers, Celia Cruz, B.B. King and other stars from the United States and Africa.
"Soul Power" was put together largely from "When We Were King" outtakes, and it's easy to see why most of the footage was ignored until now. Ali is hilarious and politically astute in his few brief scenes, but the movie mostly treads water until the climactic concert scenes starring Soul Brother No. 1.
It's 15 minutes of '70s awesomeness that rocks very hard.
Fall/winter classics at the Fox
The Fox has announced a cool slate of films for the coming months. Here's the September lineup. Showtime is 7:30 p.m.
Sept. 5: "All About Eve"
Sept. 12: "Key Largo"
Sept. 26: "Rebel Without a Cause"
For the rest of the schedule, go to foxtucsontheatre.org
