A month without going to the movies

Thought that roadside kangaroo did me in, now didn't you?

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. 

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.

Squeezing one in

I have been loaded down with television lately.

September and early October are always the hardest. Not only are there the returning shows that my wife and I love, but this is also the time for sampling the new fare, to see which spaghetti sticks to the wall, and which falls to the floor in a wet heap. So far, nothing's fallen to the floor, and we've picked up (I think) four new shows. (We also deleted one new show off the DVR without watching it, which now seems like a good move.)

But we've made it extra difficult on ourselves this fall. We also decided to drop Cinemax and add Showtime in its place, especially since we're no longer getting the original discount on Cinemax, which has nothing to offer but movies. In addition to (a smaller selection of) movies, Showtime offers us Dexter and Californication, both of which we've been watching about a full season behind. We decided to catch up this fall, and had already seen most of the third season of Dexter. But we hadn't seen any of season 2 of Californication. So we had to square away about four Dexter episodes, then jammed through ten Californications in 72 hours before they yanked it from OnDemand. We'll have to finish that one up on DVD.

Oh, and did I mention that it's the baseball playoffs? Both the team I root for (the Red Sox) and the team I root against (the Yankees) are in -- though if the Sox lose one more they're out -- so I've had that taking up a good chunk of my boob tube time this week as well.

The sum total of all this is that I hadn't seen a movie since last Sunday afternoon. Six days would not be a long drought for most people, but for me, it felt like an eternity. We were going to watch something last night, but the disappointing Sox-Angels game ran until almost 10, at which point it was deemed too late to start a movie. We ended up watching another two hours of shows on the DVR anyway, but short-form programming can be better for the attention span at this time of night.

So when I inexplicably woke up at 7:30 this morning, I got up and watched a movie.

A movie before 8 a.m. would be unheard of for most people, but for me, it's not that uncommon. Most weekend mornings, I wake up an average of 1-2 hours earlier than my wife, so sometimes I use that as my time to control the TV without guilt, to squeeze in a quick and dirty movie before the day gets started. (Not a dirty movie per se, but you know what I mean.) I was going to watch this week's Survivor, but I was just hankering for a movie -- any movie. As it turned out, my wife was sleeping especially deeply this morning, so I got in most of Survivor as well before she woke up.

"Any movie" turned out to be No Reservations, the 2007 romantic drama with touches of comedy starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart. Of the OnDemand choices, it was the best combination of a short running time and a general desire on my part to see it. As it turned out, No Reservations was as paint-by-the-numbers as they get, and a major disappointment. Closed off, selfish, uptight chef (Zeta-Jones) must take on new responsibilities when her sister dies and leaves her custody of her niece (Abigail Breslin). Hot-shot, unorthodox new chef at work (Eckhart) clashes with closed-off, selfish, uptight chef before they unsurprisingly fall for each other. Conflicts ensue, ultimately a new family unit is born. Blah blah blah, who cares.

But the quality of the film is not really the point. The point is, sometimes it feels nourishing just to be watching a film, just to be adding to my collection. A starving man needs sustenance, and this morning, No Reservations was mine. Appropriate, as the movie was all about food.

I found out afterward that it's actually unreviewed on my site, so I'll probably be able to get paid for having sat through it.

Having my appetite satiated, and getting paid for it? Works for me.

Droughts

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you may have noticed that the "Most Recently Seen" section on the right-hand side of this page has not changed in ten days.

The one below it has changed -- I finally watched Bottle Rocket again on Sunday (after posting about it January 27th) -- but "Most Recently Seen" refers only to movies I'm seeing for the first time. Technically, "Most Recently Seen" should be whatever I saw most recently, regardless of whether I'd seen it before. But "Most Recently Revisited" covers repeat viewings, while "Most Recently Seen," for want of an equally succinct way of saying it more accurately, covers everything new.

That's right. I'm in the midst of a rare drought.

How rare? The last time I went ten days without seeing a new movie was April 25 to May 5, 2006. (Yes, I do keep track of stuff like this, but you should know that about me by now). That means that neither my trip to Australia in 2007, nor my wedding and honeymoon in 2008, featured a ten-day period in which I saw no new movies.

It's no coincidence that the circumstances of The Great Drought of 2006 and The Great Drought of 2009 have something in common: In both cases, I moved. The timing is a little different, though.

When I saw Wolf Creek on April 25, 2006, it was actually the first movie my wife (then-girlfriend) and I watched in our new apartment. I had never lived with a woman before, and I remember, as I was watching, not being wigged out by the sadistic freak terrorizing backpackers in the Australian outback, though he was good for a fright or two. Rather, I sat there wondering what I'd done, committing to this unprecedented level of intimacy. It must have scared the movie-watching right out of me, because it was ten days later when I finally watched a second Australian film, The Proposition, which was written by my wife's favorite musician, Nick Cave. Then again, organizing the apartment probably had something to do with the layoff.

This time, the drought started more than a week before we spent the first night in our new place this past Sunday. (I might have ended the eight-day drought then, since we had to wait until Monday for our cable to get hooked up, except that the whimsical Bottle Rocket seemed like a better choice to convalesce from our moving injuries than Control, which concerns the band Joy Division and its suicidal lead singer). I'd like to say I spent that week leading up to the move packing and doing other productive things, but I'm too much of a procrastinator, as my continued trips over to the old place for more carloads of crap will attest. Rather, I tried to clear as much stuff off the DVR as I possibly could, irrationally concerned that our saved shows might get wiped out when our service was relocated. And since we usually hover over 80 percent full (remember what I said about procrastinating), that involved a lot of work.

Since our new place is still chaos, this drought might theoretically have lasted until this weekend, when I hope to convince my wife we're in good enough shape around the apartment to take in a screening of Watchmen. Except tomorrow night I'm scheduled to go see Departures, which won the Oscar for best foreign film last weekend, at a critics' screening held in Santa Monica. Barring any unforeseen changes in plans, the drought should end at 11 days.

I don't like going this long without seeing a new movie, and having this blog only contributes to the sense of antsiness. As I check the blog each day to see if any of you have answered my poll question, or to update what reviews I've just written, I am still faced with "Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009, P.J. Hogan)," a constant reminder of the worst of the four movies I've seen this year.

But more importantly, it means I'm falling behind. Okay, not in any realistic sense. I'm as "caught up" on movies as anyone I know, and it's only my own ridiculously high standards I'm fighting. I mean, if I'm trying to see every film that was ever made -- in other words, if I'm trying to complete an impossible task -- a ten-day break isn't going to make it any more impossible.

More than anything, though, I just like watching movies. And the fewer I watch, the more grouchy I get. Me need feed movie now.

I'm going to update this page the moment I get home tomorrow night.