11 thoughts about the movies


1.
PEOPLE OFTEN SAY, "Why would I want to see a depressing movie? When I go
to the movies, I want to be entertained. " But when I see a depressing
movie about heroin addicts or rejected fat people or a woman who is
being cheated on while dying of some rare disease in a hospital, that's
when I leave feeling happy and grateful for my life. However, when I see
a movie where some beautiful actress with a flat stomach meets a rich
man with a flat stomach and they constantly achieve mutual orgasm in his
5,000 square-foot loft, that's when I get depressed.

2.
OFTEN, WHEN SOMEONE says something funny, my immediate reaction is:
"What's that from again?" It's like if I can't place the line from a
popular movie, it wouldn't necessarily occur to me that it was simply an
original thought.

3.
WHILE I LOVE watching all the previews at the movies, they also make me
very anxious. I can feel myself frantically making a mental list of all
the ones I have to see and when. It gets to the point where I am
actually relieved when a preview looks really bad, so at least that's
one less movie I have to remember to see.

4.
I always want to see what happens after the movie's technically "over."
I want an update on the couple that fell in love in Dolby Surround
Sound, to see how they're doing post-euphoria. Have they begun fighting
over small increments of time? ("You said you'd be home at 7:15. It's
7:20") Or like in "Ransom," after they get their son back in the end, I
wanted to see what their family life was like. When they're sitting
around the breakfast table, do they reminisce, "Can you believe you were
chained up to a bed for a week?"

5.
MUSICALS have always made me uncomfortable and wince-y. The way two
people will be having a nice chat and then suddenly, inexplicably, one
of them bursts into song and the other one has to join in. I actually
feel embarrassed for the actors, because you know that they too would be
much more comfortable just speaking at a moment like that.

6.
NOTHING MAKES me feel more alienated, more uninvited, more removed from
the impenetrable clique-of-cool, than hearing a celebrity on Letterman
refer to Robert DeNiro as Bobby.

7.
MY PARENTS WERE at the movies and about midway through the film, the
fire alarm went off. They were all instructed to vacate the theater for
about 10 minutes, and when they were allowed back in, everyone went back
to their exact same seats.

8.
SIMPLY BASED on a poster that contains a few glib words like, "She found
love, then lost herself...," next to a gorgeous, retouched photograph of
two actors I happen to like, I'll go, "Wow. That movie looks really
good." Intellectually, I know how contrived and strategic and misleading
and Hollywood-ized the poster really is, but still, I fall for it every
time.

9.
When a good friend told me she actually walked out of one of my all-time
favorite movies,* our entire friendship flashed before me: could all my
perceptions about her be wrong? Maybe she isn't the cool, intelligent
person I thought she was. In that one irrational moment, every positive
trait she possessed was canceled out by the fact that she didn't like
this movie, that she wasn't exactly like me.

10.
You know how you'll be watching a movie where the main characters are in
a public place, usually a restaurant, and so there are all these other
people--extras--sitting around their tables talking. What do the extras
talk about? Does the director tell them to engage in "real"
conversation, or just do fake mumbly stuff? I try to watch their mouths
closely, but it's hard to tell. Anyway, either way, don't they feel
really awkward and self-conscious?


11.
IF MY FRIEND PAT doesn't like a movie, he has to immediately go see
another one because he can't stand the thought of having the last movie
he saw be that bad one. He says, "What if I get hit by a truck? I'll be
lying there dying thinking, 'I can't believe that was the last movie
I'll ever see.'"