Melissa McCarthy movies in far-flung cinematic venues

There must be something about hiking out to an outer suburb of Melbourne, going to the local pub for a pint and watching a Melissa McCarthy movie, because I've done it twice now.

I was wondering why I was getting a sense of deja vu on my trip to the Melbourne outerlying territory of Hawthorn to go to Lido Cinemas for the first time, and it was because it reminded me of a similar trip in 2015 out to Classic Cinemas in Elsternwick.

Both trips involved beer and Melissa McCarthy.

In 2015 I was taking in the cinema for research purposes, as they had a job opening in their -- marketing department? I think that was it -- and I wanted to apply for it. I figured if I'd never even been there I would be a poor applicant indeed, and I guess I was anyway because I never even got a rejection from them.

Anyway, the movie that was playing that night was Spy, one of my favorite comedies of that year and the movie that turned me around on McCarthy. I should say, I chose it from a number of films playing, in part, I would guess, because I had indeed stopped at a pub to drink a beer while there, and something like Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief didn't seem likely to provide me as many yuks (or not intentional ones, anyway). Don't ask me why I can remember three years later that this movie was also playing there that night. (Along with a half-dozen others I don't remember.)

The beer? The train got me out there with a good 90 minutes before the movie, so dinner and that beer seemed like a good way to pass the time. I almost never drink before a movie because, you know, sleep. But that wasn't a problem with Spy.

Similar circumstances arose on Thursday night. This time I arrived by car, and the purpose of my trip to Hawthorn was to buy a book for my son's birthday. It wasn't just any book, because otherwise I would have just bought it at a local book store. Rather, it was a book that I'd loved from my childhood that was more or less out of print -- the wonderful viking adventure Erik the Viking, written by Monty Python alum Terry Jones. Despite his history (and the book's misguided cinematic adaptation), it's not a comedy. Somehow, there was a copy of this on the shelves at the Readings in Hawthorn, the website told me, and after a short hunt I actually found it, even though the guy who helped me expressed surprise it was even there, given how long they'd had it in stock. Score.

The bookshop closed at 8, and I got there by about 7:30, leaving me plenty of time to kill before the movie. I'd eaten dinner at home, so that wasn't necessary this time around.

Hello, pub.

I'd planned to drink two beers, figuring that the running time of the movie would be enough to ensure my sobriety on the way home, but I'd selected a pint that ran a whopping $14 (Melbourne is pricy) so I didn't choose a second. It got me plenty buzzed anyway.

Which wasn't much of a help on The Happytime Murders, McCarthy's new movie that had come out that very same day.

I wanted to laugh. Really I did. The beer was cheering me on. The beer wanted me to just kick back and enjoy this movie.

No can do.

It's really bad. Nay, it's awful. This movie needed to watch Deadpool 2 or something if it wanted to figure out how to be crass and have heart simultaneously. But who knows, maybe it didn't want to have any heart, and if not, they certainly succeeded.

I do want to tell you about Lido Cinemas, though. It's either brand new or recently refurbished in the past couple years, and I can't even tell you how damn classy the place is. It's got a great black and white tile aesthetic, plus a good place to sit and eat or have a drink beforehand (making me kind of wish I'd saved my drink for here). But the thing I really want to tell you about, or in fact show you, is the wonderful way they do the movie titles on the marquee, both inside and outside the theater.

This picture will give you some idea what they look like:

But not what they sound like. And that is, the same as the sounds those old destination signs in old train stations made as the switched themselves from one destination to another. The marquees at Lido are constantly unspooling the titles and gobbling them up again through a de-population and re-population of the dot letters you see above, and they make that little shuffling sound that you would expect to go with that kind of action. I don't think I'm describing it very well but I imagine you get some idea what I'm talking about.

Maybe McCarthy will get back in the win column when some new theater opens in 2021 and this occasion arises for me again.

I Spy with my little eye ...

New Year's last year entailed viewings of I, Frankenstein and I Origins, which both ended up being among the worst movies I saw in 2014.

Ending 2015 with I Spy was much better.

Okay, not actually I Spy -- that was a 2002 movie starring Eddie Murphy and Owen Wilson. It was just Spy, Paul Feig's Melissa McCarthy vehicle which I'd already seen and knew I loved. My wife hadn't yet seen it, though, which made it the perfect way to close out a New Year's Eve in which we didn't even land at the airport until after 6 p.m., and didn't have our kids in bed until more than two hours later. At that point, some laughter was really needed.

(And now you know why I haven't posted any of my typical year-end thought pieces: We were in Tasmania visiting my mother-in-law from the 26th onward, and I'd left my new computer back home. Oh yeah -- did I mention that my hard drive did actually die, which I forecasted in this post?)

Why was laughter so direly needed? Well, we returned home to discover that our power was off. It wasn't a power outage, mind you. It was just our power.

We can't say it was entirely a surprise. Our power had gone out earlier in the week of Christmas, and we'd needed an electrician to come out and set things straight. He blamed a slug in a wall outlet, which seems a bit farfetched, but we were willing to accept any explanation at that point. Really, it's just that our electricity in this house is faulty, a fact you can blame either on it being an old house or on the person who did the renovations cutting corners for budgetary reasons. Anyway, we're only renting this place so there isn't a lot we can do about it.

The problem with the power going out when you're out of town for six days is that you have no idea how long it's been out, and how tainted the food in your refrigerator is. Do you lose only the frozen foods and dairy products, or also your various sauces and other things that can last a little longer without a direct application of cold? By touching various things and finding them still mildly chilled -- on a day that approached 100 degrees in Melbourne, mind you -- we determined that it had probably only been that day that the safety had tripped. (And fortunately, the power did come back on just by resetting it, and has remained on for the 12 hours since then. Can you imagine having to summon an electrician on December 31st at 8 o'clock at night?) But we did have to dump a bunch of stuff, and I had to beat feet out to the grocery store to purchase some much-needed necessaries before a potential early New Year's Eve closure. Which was just as well, because I had to pick up Spy anyway -- and it meant I didn't have to corral two over-excited kids for their bedtime.

And even though chaos reigned in the first 90 minutes we were home, the kids gave us a New Year's miracle by both going to sleep without any trouble, and by about 9:15 we were settling in to Spy -- whose nearly two-hour running time would take us up to the stroke of midnight quite nicely, factoring in breaks, without anyone worrying about succumbing to pre-2016 exhaustion. 

And yes, we laughed quite a bit -- me for the second time, her for the first.

"I spy with my little eye" was actually relevant to our trip, as that was the game we played as we traveled the east coast of Tasmania with my wife's mother for the past week. Unbelievably, it was a game both my kids could play, even though the younger one just turns two today. It sounded more like "Ispymy" when he said it, but he delivered a setup and answer, just as the game would dictate -- though he didn't quite get that he was supposed to make us guess what he was spying. He just wanted to tell us what he spied. Which for a two-year-old is still quite good.

We had quite a nice time on the trip, staying in two different beach towns, going on a glass bottom boat, seeing an echidna crossing the road, spotting two different huntsman spiders within the space of about six hours (both inside the place were staying), going swimming at the beach on two different days (well, I swam at least, as the water was too cold for everyone else), eating lots of good food and admiring lots of natural wonders. It was a low-key time (in which I managed to watch only two movies!), but it was probably just what the doctor ordered after a very busy December.

Thoughts on the year just ended? Well, none right now, I guess. But don't worry. There will be plenty of that in the coming weeks, with my 2015 rankings a mere two weeks away now. 

Time to get back to reality ... and watching as many more 2015 releases as I can stand before then. 

Not knowing

I did something extremely rare Thursday night: I went to a movie theater without knowing what movie I was going to see.

Usually my trips to the theater are dictated by a particular title, sometimes with a backup in mind should the one I want to see sell out, or if I get a flat tire on the way to the theater. (See: The United States, when I had a car.) But Thursday night, I was going for an entirely different reason. I was going to acquaint myself with the theater.

You see, I'm applying for a job as a part-time marketing assistant at Classic Cinema in Elsternwick, a century-old arthouse cinema that these days is forced, by financial necessity, also to screen the likes of Mad Max: Fury Road, Tomorrowland and the movie I ended up seeing, Paul Feig's Spy. If a marketing assistant job sounds like a rather lowly position for a 41-year-old, it's intended as an entry point to returning to writing about movies in a full-time, professional capacity. (Er, part-time.) As my wife make "the big bucks" (compared to what I make nowadays, anyway), I can afford to do something like this, if they'll hire me. My earning potential is somewhat capped, anyway, by the fact that I'm working only three days a week, so now is the time in my life to try something like this.

The application is due on Monday, and I've been procrastinating big time on writing the cover letter. I actually wrote it this week and was prepared to send it off, but my wife asked to look at it to make constructive criticism. I knew my heart wasn't in the version I'd written -- I was doing it just to finally get it done -- so her recommendation to customize it more to this particular theater was a welcome one.

And then it hit me: I could never write a convincing application to work for a theater where I'd never even seen a single movie.

The reason I haven't been to Classic Cinema is that it's pretty far from my house. It takes the better part of an hour to get there, which is certainly a consideration when applying for a job. But I'll cross that bridge when/if I come to it. For now, I just needed to get to the Classic, to help with my cover letter mojo.

If I went straight from work, the choices of movies to see, that I had any interest in seeing, were Tomorrowland, Partisan and Spy. If I came home first and made a separate excursion out later, the choices expanded to include A Royal Night Out. But my wife insisted that I go straight from work -- absolving me of nighttime child duties, bless her -- so I was left with the first three.

And I had an odd kind of thrill riding the train out there, not knowing which one it would be.

One of the questions was whether I'd be ready for Tomorrowland and Spy, which started within five minutes of each other at 6:40 and 6:45. But getting to Elsternwick an hour early removed that as a concern. (And the theater is right outside the train station, so there was not even any poking around and asking for directions.) I leisurely had a drink in a pub and explored a little, at which point my pad thai dinner did actually endanger me for making the start of Tomorrowland. But I finished with five minutes to spare and less than five minutes to walk, so Tomorrowland remained a possibility. But the word has mostly been bad on this one, so I decided against it. That left Spy or Partisan, and the beer I'd consumed (combined with staying up until all hours the night before watching Blue Velvet) told me that I didn't want to twiddle my thumbs for another 30 minutes while waiting for a foreign language movie to start. (Only later did I learn that Partisan is actually in English.)

So, Spy it was.

And one of the ways "not knowing" applies to Spy is that I wasn't actually sure, until earlier in the day, what it was about.

As it turns out, it's a pretty prominent film, so I blame my ignorance on a) no longer living in the trailer-happy U.S., and b) trying not to watch trailers in general.

When I saw it on Classic's roster of films, I looked it up on wikipedia. Reading that it was the latest Melissa McCarthy vehicle directed by Paul Feig (there have been three now, with a fourth one coming), I was inclined to rule it out. But reading further into the wikipedia entry, I discovered that it currently boasted universal acclaim on Metacritic and that "the surprise comedic performance of Jason Statham" had been singled out for praise. Suddenly, this seemed like a strong contender -- even though I have not been a fan of McCarthy, pretty much ever.

Glad this is the one I chose. A bag of gummy worms was there to ensure I didn't fall asleep, but I didn't need it. The relentless spate of action and laughs -- not just comedy, but actual laughs -- took care of that plenty well for me.

Yep, I've finally found a genuinely enjoyable use of Melissa McCarthy's talents.

I have to say that this has been eating at me a bit. I feel like I come by my distaste for McCarthy's cringe-worthy shtick legitimately, but I have always been worried that others would think I don't like her because I don't want to sleep with her. But you can't give comedians points out of mere political correctness. Either they make you laugh or they don't.

Finally, McCarthy really made me laugh, and I couldn't be happier.

The whole ensemble is really good, with Rose Byrne, Allison Janney, Jude Law, Peter Serafinowicz and delightful newcomer (to me, anyway) Miranda Hart there to lend help. And let's not forget the aforementioned Mr. Statham, who takes the piss out of his typical screen persona with a lot of good humor and genuine comic timing.

It's basically a cavalcade of great physical action-comedy, delightfully complicated yet perfectly observed insults and out-and-out raw vulgarity. And it made me laugh a ton.

Sometimes, not knowing what you're in for is just the ticket to a great night at the movies.

And maybe, just maybe, I can now write a credible enough application to work in the marketing department of a hundred-year-old movie theater.