You may know from recent posts that I've had droughts of 104 days and 122 days between seeing movies in the cinema this year. But those were arthouse cinemas (and a tiny local cinema in the coastal down of Lakes Entrance). They were not the big multiplexes, where movies that are intended to make hundreds of millions, even billions, get their three or four dedicated screens per location. These multiplexes did not even open during our brief window of COVID freedom back in late June and early July.
So how long had it been since I'd been to one of those?
That would be The Invisible Man back on March 1st. That's 256 days ago.
Hoyts has been closed that whole time. Until Thursday morning.
In fact, at first, my friend John and I thought they had forgotten to reopen.
I took the morning off from work and met him at the Hoyts at the Victoria Gardens in Hawthorn for a 10 a.m. showing of -- at long last -- Tenet. I knew this one would be long and hard to follow, so I figured, going to the 10 a.m. show gave me a better chance than going to the 9:30 p.m. show.
At first it looked like there would be no show. At 9:40, there was still a metal gate around the candy bar. There were still signs on the electronic ticket kiosks stating they were not in operation. The latest posted sign that they were closed for COVID was still propped up and greeting us.
Now, logic dictated that this was only going to be temporary, as I'd actually purchased our tickets online beforehand. There was no chance of a mistake. But the theater should be bustling with activity 20 minutes prior to the day's first showing. This one decidedly wasn't.
After a moment or two, though, I saw a figure moving in the darkened candy bar. And slowly, surely, the theater that had spent almost all of those 256 days shuttered, it started coming to life.
The lights began coming on. A second employee appeared, and then a third. The third staked himself out in the spot to take our tickets as we passed through the entrance. The COVID signs were removed, the candy bar queue was cordoned off using the familiar posts and straps to guide the flow of traffic.
Layers of dust, rust and cobwebs -- metaphorical if not actual -- were beginning to fall away.
There were hiccups. John had to ask them to start making the popcorn to be sure they'd have the time to make it before the feature started. The soda machine was not working, which the guy explained was due to "the pandemic we've just experienced" -- as if we needed any explanation, or a reminder of the thing that has dominated our year. You'd think staff eager to start earning a paycheck again would have been here at the start of the week to check on things like that, but nope.
But the popcorn did get made in time, and this was, without a doubt, the hottest movie theater popcorn I'd ever eaten.
There was one other funny hiccup that needn't have necessarily followed from eight months of inactivity. From experience, I knew that a movie starting at 10 a.m. meant that we had until about 10:26 to meander over to our seats and get settled before the movie itself would begin. The pre-show wouldn't even be proper movie trailers until about 10:17. Yet somehow, when we passed through the theater doors at 10:04 a.m., the movie had already started. It appeared to be only a minute or two in to the opening set piece, but it shouldn't have been there until 22 minutes from now.
John suggested going back out to tell them to restart it, because we were the only other ones in the theater. (So much for worrying about buying our tickets ahead of time.) I started out to do so, but was passed by another patron entering the theater, who might himself have some opinion on that particular idea. If I had to walk all the way back out to tell someone to start it again, and they had to figure out whether they could or not, I stood to miss the next ten minutes of the movie if it turned out they couldn't. Instead I just reversed course and sat back down with my extremely warm popcorn.
I don't think anything that happened in the first 60 seconds of Tenet would have helped me understand it any better. Oh, I mostly got it, eventually, but from moment-to-moment, it can be a very difficult film to follow. There's a good chance that its rules don't make any sense, and even if they do, that it doesn't adhere to them with any stringency. Sometimes, I just said "Okay, here is a big set piece -- why it's happening, or what the stakes are, will just have to be secondary to the spectacle."
In the end, I think I liked it more than I didn't like it, or so says my three-star rating on Letterboxd.
Now that I've finally caught this year's white whale that had eluded me to date, I have to see how many other multiplex-style movies Hollywood sees fit to release over the rest of this year. I'm hoping at least to have Wonder Woman 1984 at Christmas, if the current plan holds.
And in the short run, I will be sure to get to my seat plenty early.
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