We, are simple folk, with little need for the fancy or extravagant. A grateful family of humble artists - days without drama, foods without gluten, we push ever onward finding delight in what might seem mundane or insignificant.
For instance, a certain movie trailer appeared this week for a film that will premiere (no joke) eleven and a half months from now. Yet due to careful world building, inspired casting, and a lore so deep that is goes back nearly eight decades, to us a year doesn’t seem all that long to wait.
We watched the trailer together on the living room couch, cheering at all the appropriate places. We must’ve looked hilarious.
But we love great movies. Zoe’s rule is that a movie needs to be an experience to remember, not a mere story being told.
“Good or bad, if you can remember watching the movie, it did its job.”
Used to be that we watched most films with an audience, before Blockbuster and Netflix and HD TVs, and that made the experience unique because no one else would watch this exact film with this exact group of people.
(Of course, that was before all the trailers telling us to shush and zip it or they’ll throw us out of the theatre. Honestly, the very nerve.)
It was a tradition in college each December for sophomores, juniors, and seniors to take freshmen to the annual screening of Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”, the 1946 masterpiece of hope, community and empathy.
“It’s a classic!” they all said.
“It’s the beginning of the holiday season!” they all chimed.
What it actually was: the sound of about 300 freshman crying their eyes out. All the pressure of three and a half months of college, mixed with the homesickness and a couple of pre-cinema cocktails, caused pent-up emotion to flow right out of all of us the second George Bailey came back to that bridge, at which point the upperclassmen who brought my group distributed Kleenax to us all.
I DO remember seeing THAT film.
They’re aren’t all that many left, but the Drive-In is a tradition I adore. There was only one left operating within driving distance of San Francisco, so one late 90’s summer night we piled in a pickup with friends a couple of cartons of shrimp stir fry and headed down to see “Blade”, the only-very-slightly blacksploitive vampire kung-fu action movie starring Wesley Snipes.
Somewhere during the movie’s attempt at exposition, Zoe saw a kitten walking past the truck. It stopped and mewed at her, dimly illuminated by the giant screen’s reflection. She took a tiny piece of her shrimp and tossed it over the side, then turned to us.
“There’s a little kitten over here! You guys have to see it!”
I sat up and looked over the edge. “Oh! It’s a little grey one!”
She was confused. “No, it’s striped.” She looked where I was looking. “Oh! It’s another one!” she said excitedly, and threw another piece of shrimp over the side.
Onscreen, Blade the vampire, having completed his lengthy backstory, was now creeping through dripping tunnels looking for the villain. The parking lot plunged into darkness.
Our third friend was a bit slower getting up, but finally did look. “I don’t see anything” she told us. “It all looks like rocks…but they’re…moving?”
For an absolutely perfect illustration of what happened next, you could go to 1:00:20 in Steven Spielberg’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, but I’ll just tell you - the ground around the truck began to undulate, in a seasick fashion. We found a flashlight in the glove compartment and flicked it on to find at least 30 cats surrounding the truck, milling like pigeons to a spread of birdseed.
“What should we do?!” I asked, panicking. Zoe was already trying to feed them more shrimp, throwing little pieces farther and farther from the truck like a line of breadcrumbs leading toward the Subaru hatchback in front of us. But the urban feline pride was not deterred.
“You have to stop feeding them! They’ll get bored and wander off!” our friend said, confidently.
And they did, because someone eventually spilled some popcorn a few cars away.
I’m not really sure what happened in the movie, but I do remember seeing, you know, most of it.
We’re not The South, but summer in New York always includes one day when it is so absolutely miserable that the sun’s radiation penetrates all concrete and steel to somehow still broil the skin.
In 1995 this day occurred on a July Saturday, driving Zoe and I to the cinema multiplex. We knew we could only afford one film, but due to the absolute dispassion of the disaffected teens staffing the theatre, we (and about a hundred other people) slipped unnoticed from one screen to the other all afternoon.
I believe we started with “Clueless”, then may have wandered into “Judge Dredd” before landing (pun intended) in “Waterworld”, the Kevin Costner vehicle about a post-apocalyptic world where the oceans rise to envelop the Earth, and human beings must adapt to a kind of Wet Mad Max society.
It wasn’t great. It was weird, and we like weird, but this wasn’t a good weird, and most of us were only in the theatre because it was 18 degrees cooler than outside. Some folks were sleeping.
But seated directly behind us were two women in their eighties. It became very apparent during the trailers that one of them couldn’t hear all that well and one may have left her glasses at home.
“What does that say? I can’t read it.” one asked the other, loud enough for her to hear.
“IT SAYS ‘COMING SOON!’” came the booming reply.
They were like that the entire film. It was amazing, an unintentional blessing of MST3K level performance, as they - along with the rest of us - tried to figure out what was happening. Eventually, and I don’t feel like I’m ruining this for you - consider it a kindness - the reason that Kevin Costner has survived where others have not is revealed to be the hidden gills he has somehow personally evolved.
“What’s wrong with his ears?” one asked.
“HE’S A FISH!” replied the other.
Then there was a love interest. Alone on a battered raft, adrift at sea, Mr. Costner and his female co-star tended to their wounds and then began to kiss.
“What’s going on now?” one asked.
“THEY’RE GONNA HAVE SEX! YUCK!” replied the other, and the entire theatre burst out in applause.
It must have been eighty degrees in there, but we couldn’t have had a better time. And hard as I’ve tried to forget that particular movie, I am very proud to say that I’ll always remember watching it.
