In my last post from a week ago, I raised the specter of that being the last post I would ever write, since there was a chance we would become roadkill after hitting some roadkill on our drive from Uluru to Darwin last Sunday morning. As you can see, that did not occur. We did, however, see more roving cattle, as well as a pack of about seven wild camels, which was delightful. (Let me not get into the long history of why there are camels in Australia. It's not the only fauna that thrives here without being native to this land. Damn humans.)
The long delay between posts, not being due to my death, was due to the hard crashing return to reality, as well as the de rigueur post-travel head cold, which slowed my movements for parts of three days. (Though I did work through it.)
However, today I am writing about another long delay, or rather hiatus, which has just come to an end last night.
My viewing of Alex Garland's Civil War last night marked the end of 35 straight days without seeing a movie in the movie theater.
When I mentioned this to my wife, she was quick to contradict me. She pointed out that I had just seen the 2022 Australian film Sweet As in the "theater" last Saturday. In a different version of events, I was intending to write about this viewing on this blog, in fact. But with returns to reality and head colds, I'll just move on.
I don't count that viewing. It was a free viewing in a cinema that was part of the hotel complex where we stayed. There's only one screen and they only show Australian films. Yes, it was a "big screen," in that it was larger than my living room television, but it does not count for the consideration of my current drought.
So yes, when I saw Love Lies Bleeding on March 14th, I had no way of knowing I was going on a month's long vacation from my second home. (The Sun Theatre in Yarraville, that would be.)
So now you will know why I haven't seen Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Abigail, Back to Black, Late Night With the Devil, Monkey Man or Challengers, though that last one did just come out yesterday. My neglect of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (shitty title) was intentional and totally free from regret.
I'm not going to comb my records to compare this drought to other droughts. That's too tedious for a post I am barely squeezing out at the end of the day on a Friday to finally get something new up on my blog for the first time in a week. Besides, I'm sure I went longer than this in the time around my wedding. I was shocked recently to see some of the gaps that occurred in the beginning of 2008. For example, I only saw seven movies, full stop, in the month I got married (April 2008).
But yeah, it's definitely been one of the very longest droughts of my adult life, though it does make sense. Even before we left to go on vacation for ten days, we had relatives in town for about five days before that. That whole two-week period was never going to be possible for going to the movies, and the two-week period before that was characterized by excitement over the beginning of the baseball season and a dearth of new movies that were really grabbing me.
In some version of events -- there is that hypothetical "some version of events" again -- the family and I would have gone to see Ghostbusters in a layover day in Darwin between legs of our adventure, but if you read my last post, you know we had to change our travel plans to avoid a 4:30 drive through the desert at night without phone service, which probably would have been closer to six with the extra care we needed to take when driving. We may try to see it this weekend, though I haven't heard anyone talking about it so it's probably bad.
Anyway, now I'm back in action and I may try to see Challengers this weekend as well.
If you want to know my thoughts on Civil War, well, I've done you the service of spelling them out in review form, which you can find here. Suffice it to say that it has jumped straight up near the top of my in-progress 2024 rankings.
** Note following publishing: Duh, when theaters were closed during COVID, that was much longer than this. But, I had no control over that.
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