Thus ends my life's longest theater drought

The last time I went to the movies, things were heading Downhill. My return to the cinema was met with Resistance, but then ultimately, I got to have the Hearts and Bones of the theatrical moviegoing experience I had been missing.

Or here's another way I could have started:

Okay, smart guy, I know what you're going to say. "What, you really never had a drought this long without going to a movie theater, even when you were a baby?"

Yes, sure, when I was a baby. But I think it's possible that ever since Star Wars was my first movie back in 1977, when I was not yet four years old, I may never have gone this long without going to the movies -- be it a new release, a Disney re-release, or even Star Wars again.

How long, exactly?

That would be 104 days.

Yes indeed, I saw the Force Majeure Hollywood remake Downhill back on March 10th, and did not see my next movie in the theater, the Australian film Hearts and Bones, until last night, June 22nd.

It needn't have been quite that long, as the theaters didn't close in Australia for nearly two weeks after I saw Downhill. But there was nothing I really wanted to see at that time -- I hemmed and hawed on Bloodshot, as I wrote about here -- and then the doors were closed and locked at most theaters.

For the next three months.

Finally, as restrictions have started to loosen, a couple of the arthouse theaters announced they would open their doors again on June 22nd, the first day the government permitted it, a couple weeks ahead of their multiplex counterparts.

You better bet that I was there on opening night.

The stuff that's playing now is a weird mixture of movies that had not quite finished their theatrical run when COVID hit (like The Invisible Man), movies being brought back out just to excite people who missed them the first time (like Parasite), and movies that had a VOD release during the lockdown.

That last category includes the movie I ended up seeing, Hearts and Bones, as well as the movie I was supposed to see, Resistance. Resistance is the story of Marcel Marceau before his miming days, when he was a resistance fighter in World War II, and he's played by Jessie Eisenberg. I had the offer of a free screener of this movie in order to review it, but I set it aside as my big "return-to-the-theater" movie.

But now I'll need that free screener, as Resistance was sold out when I got there. And while that might seem like a really encouraging sign for the health of theater-going as an experience with ongoing relevance in our society, "sold out" in this case means that the maximum 20 tickets per screening room were sold. I had considered booking online -- my critics card is not being accepted in the short run anyway, and Cinema Lido in Hawthorn is doing $10 tickets all week -- but I ultimately did not.

So Hearts and Bones it was. It's a story of a war photographer (Hugo Weaving) whose work is about to be exhibited as a sort of career retrospective, until a South Sudanese Sydneysider (that being the name for people who live in Sydney) asks him to spare the world the pain of revisiting the traumas of a massacre in his village. I liked it.

Because my intention in this post is not really to write about either of those movies, the one I saw and the one I didn't, I'll just tell you what it was like to finally return to a movie theater.

For one, their ticket kiosk at street level was not open. As that hermetically sealed space actually has a built-in protection against the spread of disease, that may have been an unrelated operational decision. I bought my tickets from the candy bar, as it is called here in Australia, after squirting hand sanitizer on my hands at the entrance. A similar hand sanitation station greeted us at the ticket taker's spot.

I had thought there might be seats blocked off, ensuring that social distancing was preserved. But blocking off particular seats might prevent full groups from sitting together, and that ended up being the mandate -- leave 1.5 meters distance between yourself and another group, though you can sit consecutively with members of your own group. I guess the theory is, if you decided to come to the movies with them, you probably either shared a car or a domestic space anyway.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention -- or rather, did forget, and am now updating the post several hours later -- that I had to give my name and phone number, in case they need to call me to tell me I have gotten coronavirus from their seats. But that's been standard practice most of the public places I've gone recently.

People seemed happy to be back. I mean, I didn't specifically hear anyone say "It's so good to be back at the movies!", but there was enough of a general buzz that this can be inferred.

Still, I had to wonder what kind of model this could be for a theater going forward. Not a profitable one, to be sure. Selling a maximum of twenty $10 tickets per theater per viewing block limits how much money you can legitimately make, especially since there seemed to be as many as seven or eight staff working. I made sure to buy some candy, just to help that little extra bit.

I don't suppose the theaters are in it for the money, at least not right now. They'd have to be doing it out of the goodness of providing this service to the people ... and perhaps building in some customer loyalty for the future, when times are better.

If that future ever gets here. As we have started opening things up lately here in Victoria, we have also created the conditions for a second wave. There are something like 20 new cases of coronavirus per day being announced in this state, and some people are worried that could bring us right back into lockdown -- perhaps even a more severe version of the lockdown than the one we had previously.

This has all happened in the last week, and the suddenness of it has probably prevented the government from scuttling the reopening of movie theaters. Still, I'm glad I went last night, because if momentum toward another lockdown gains steam this week, I could be looking at another 100 days away from movie theaters.