2 Great Theater Experiences.

posted by RICK : 11:33 AM

First: it should be noted that while I still love movies, I no longer love them more than I love television. Television, for all its problems, is endlessly more fascinating than cinema (and all its problems). However, while I'd sit down for 9 hours to watch an entire season of a television series before I'd sit down for 90 minutes and watch a movie that I might not have seen before but have still "seen before," I'd without a doubt go see a movie in the theater before watching anything on a television.

A brief tangent: wasn't it kind of weird during the oscars last week when they kept jamming "the movie-going experience" down our throats? It was. And it wasn't. Sure, Hollywood wants to preserve its bottom line and its currently losing it to DVD and the internet and the new iPod, but some of the rest of us just want to make sure there's a place we can go in the summertime that is dark, air-conditioned, and not in my livingroom. Of course, it'd be nice if they were showing good movies. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Last Saturday I went to see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade at what is likely the greatest movie theater in North America, The Ziegfeld. Its a huge, deco, theater with something like 1200 seats and an enormous screen. I wasn't expecting a big crowd, but given the size of the place it was well populated. The movie itself, which I realized after 20 minutes, I had never seen in its entirety was good, but the crowd was better. They clapped when the lights went down and when the credit, "and Sean Connery as Professor Henry Jones" came on the screen. They cheered the good guys and booed the bad, and yet it never crossed over into that horrifying region called "fanboydom." It'd be like seeing a Star Wars prequel on opening night but with the crowd consisted of mostly people over the age of 25 who traded their Jango Fett costumes for dates and sport coats. It was the type of movie-going-experience completely devoid of both pretensions and cluelessness. The audience that night knew what movie they were paying for-- an homage to the Saturday-serials of our parents generation, not a ticket to the reliving of our own childhoods.

The second of the titular experiences was on Thursday night. After work, like every first Thursday of the month (there were scheduling conflicts in March, which pushed it back to the 2nd Thursday), the New York 1 movie club convened for our monthly outing. It was my pick this month and I went with Dave Chappelle's Block Party, a selection that was initially greeted by my fellow movie-club members with resentment and scorn, but in the end won not only their hearts but their minds. The actual theater experience, like Last Crusade before it, was top-notch, but in a completely different way. First of all, 3 of the 4 NY1-Movie-Club members were kinda-sorta-bombed (the show started at 11pm. At 10:30pm we went into a bar to grab a quick drink. The quick drinks happened to be 2 Irish car bombs in about 4 minutes. SWEET), and the 4th member was high-on-life (and kettle-corn). So we had that going for us. Also adding to the vibe was a group of about 14 "kids" who, when it comes to traditionally theater etiquette, were "rowdy." I wouldn't have had it any other way. Block Party, which has taken an early lead for 2006 Movie-o-the-year, is quite frankly, joyous. This is not a movie to see in the middle of the afternoon on the upper-east-side. Yelling at the screen, singing along to the performances: all perfectly acceptable to this movie-goer, if not absolutely necessary!

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