Kingpin (February 24th at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[KINGPIN screens Thursday February 24th at 6:30 p.m. at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.

The Cleveland Cinematheque, in a change of pace, is showing KINGPIN, a mainstream Hollywood PG-13 comedy crowd pleaser, as a tie-in to the opening in University Circle of the Corner Alley, a novelty restaurant chain that combines fine food with bowling.

It also sends the message to students at the various colleges and arts institutes around University Circle that, once they graduate into this economy, they'll be lucky if they can even get a minimum-wage job, part-time (so no benefits) as a food-server or a pin-setter. Oh, wait, machines do all the pin-setting now. Well, there's still food service. Have a nice time paying your titanic student loan debt with that.

Come to think of it, the Cinematheque actually did show TITANIC once, true story. Unlike that blockbuster, however, KINGPIN released a year earlier in 1996, scored a gutterball with ticket-buyers, for some reason. Thus It has has
deservedly gone on to `cult' status.