I love the movies. My father and I didn't see eye to eye on a lot of things but dogs and movies were two big ones. My mother hates the movies. She feels claustrophobic in the theater, even though they're huge now, and at home she usually falls asleep mid way. So I would go to the movies with my dad growing up. I'd even see ones I hated because he wanted to (Hildago anyone?). I remember the first movie I went to.
Well actually the first movie I can remember going to was The Little Mermaid (there might have been one before it). I was 4 or 5 and my dad took me into the city for it and I was VERY excited. I still think it has the best music of all Disney films and I really related to Scuttle (ahh dinglehoppers). There was just something always so magical about it. At the same time its an odd idea, a bunch of strangers going into a dark room and sitting in silence with eachother while watching the same thing...sounds like a cult. Well if moviegoers are in a cult then call me L.Ron Hubbard because I wouldn't mind getting involved in that...movie watching, not Scientology, that shit is bananas.
Excitement, drama, comedy...where else can you go for $10 and just forget about your tiresome, monotonous, beleaguered life. You're just another unknown outline, seated in a chair of questionable cleanliness. You form habits and you notice others even in this den of anonymity have done the same. Two men usually leave a seat in between them. Fourteen-year-olds tend to sit in the back row in order to snicker and make-out. There's always that exhausted parent that brings their even more exhausted child to the movie and allows the child to cry becuase this is the only time they have been out of the house in 6-months. Some people sneak in snacks and others prefer to pick up their Junior Mints at a 500% mark up at the concession stand. My dad always liked to get a large popcorn, no butter, large Diet Coke and consume most of both during the previews. I find that I tuck into my small unbuttered treat in the same way. I delay the Diet Coke consumption as I have a baldder the size of a pea. Some people forgoe all treats because just being in the presence of their favorite film star is enough to satiate their need for escapism.
One of my favorite scenes in any movie is from Annie (and I bet you no one knew that, until now) where she and Daddy Warbucks and Grace get read for a night out (accompanied by chorus girls of course). Everything just glitters in that scene and the promise of a night out is enough to make you giddy. Like that parent with the screaming kid, sometimes you just need an out. No one fancies the local cineplex to be anything like the ones of the past...although at The Somerville Theater, you get ambience and booze. Still the movies themselves hold some gateway to another world.
Not Waterworld, but a world where people actually want to go. Images on a screen, just reflections of light and color put to sound have the ability to make you feel something. Catharsis in the form of tears or laughter in two hours is cheaper than therapy. Of course some movies are scary or full of adventure and make you feel invincible or vulnerable or any combination of evocative emotions. For some reason a good cry makes us feel better. Jumping out of your seat makes you feel safe because you know that scary bitch from The Ring isn't going to come out of your television.
I don't have the galmous life of starlets from back in the day and I thankfully don't have the life of startlets today (ah hem Lohan) but I can still get my ticket and take a break from all the worries that are all too real. Something that I'm not too worried about, my soon to be meteoric rise in the Boston social world, more to come on that and this weekend is my bday at Storyville, lets hope for a groping by at least one Pats player...or you know Celtic...I mean there is a lockout.
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