Turan slaps LACMA over film

Cari Beauchamp took her deep personal umbrage at Native Intelligence the other night, and now you can add the LAT's Kenneth Turan to the list of Hollywood and film aficionados upset that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is stopping its weekend film program.

Museums in Southern California seem to be losing their collective minds...

I know, I know, the official word from LACMA Director Michael Govan is that the film program is not dead but on some half-baked hiatus while he puts his best minds to work "reconsidering the nature, scale and scope" of what the museum is doing.

You'll excuse me, but the logic of needing to stop the program in order to rethink it sounds suspiciously like the apocryphal Vietnam War rationale that "we had to burn the village to save it." That the museum seems to lack the ability to consider the situation's pros and cons while things are up and running doesn't give me a lot of confidence in its ultimate decision.

If I am being a little tough on the museum, Turan writes in today's paper, "it's because their reasons for doing what they've just done seem especially specious. LACMA's thinking may seem just fine in the abstract but it doesn't hold up under any kind of examination."

My email: Readers have written to observe that the LACMA film program has not been as good since creator Ron Haver died. And this from David Marcus: "The Bing Theater is one of the few theaters that provides adequate leg room between rows to sit comfortably."