Sharing the rush

Movie watching for me is always best when it's a shared, communal activity. Sure, watching a movie all by your lonesome is a modern, practical and sometimes necessary affair. Folks and friends always seem to be busy when you want to watch one of your favorites, be it the eighteenth screening of Citizen Kane or  a midnight showing of the Crawling Eye. No matter, because with today’s technology you could be on a desert island (hopefully with a large cache of dry cell batteries) and stream all your personal favorites on your pad or cell device with no one else around to bother you in your solitary pursuit. But thinking about it, how much fun would that be, sitting there under a palm tree, squinting into your wee little screen and missing out on all the thrills and joys of being shipwrecked? Why jack into a flick on a tiny handheld device when you could be enjoying, instead, all those grand floor to ceiling sunsets that Pacific Islanders swear by? Now that, baby, is what Technicolor is all about!

Last night I finally got around to screening Alien with my oldest. As I have related before he is now off at the university, learning all there is to know about Media Studies. He knows how to wield a hand held camera and his video editing skills are well known and highly desired in his post high school set. But, after a lifetime of watching easy going film and animation he found himself floundering in the world of what I would consider "real" film. He had his Disney, Burton, Miyazaki and Michael Bay conversations down pat but lacked the polish and depth that a knowledge of Capra and Scorcese and Kurosawa might add to his party talk and student papers. I felt it was my fatherly duty to show him the cinematic ropes, sort of like the way that other dads would show their kids to shoot a gun or dive for pearls. Like my mother before me, I felt that sharing movies, transporting my kid through the world of film, would be a ball, an eye opener and renewal in the fine art of watching and talking about flicks in the company of a fellow enthusiast.

Aliens has been on our "must see" list for quite a while now. We had it in the Halloween stack three years ago but Terminator, heavy, violent and cultish, washed away any chance of our watching anything else that was even remotely scary. But we worked up to this year, taking horror and suspense and sci-fi titles in stride. Some films still have that undesired effect of having him lose precious sleep but others, in their culturally significant way, needed to be seen, sleep be damned. So we watched the Ridley Scott classic unspool in the dark of night, late enough to get the room to that level of optimal darkness, early enough to allow for supper out and an adequately large helping of coconut cream pie afterwards.

Watching that movie together allowed for mutual jolts of haunted house thrills, allowed for both of us to squeal like little girls when spooky things jumped out of the shadows. But more than that what that time in front of the set allowed for was not only a joint appreciation of the storytelling art displayed on the screen but also for the continued telling of tales that our shared movie watching allowed for. Later on he can look back and say, hey, remember when we watched that xyz flick and I’ll be able to nod and acknowledge that moment when we did. Knowing that boy of mine and his penchant for telling tales I am assured that those hours spent on our beat leather couch perched in front of that old Panasonic of mine will not be in vain. Those moments will live on, something to be shared later on as he unspools his favorites to his kids in some faraway time and place. Somehow I know that he'll hark back and remember me, remember those hours of shared movie bliss.

Action!

Grand new time!

The venue is different, the passion the same.

Much time has passed since I last graced these pages and with that passing has come a lot of changes: new town, new theaters, new position and new additions to the collection. My son has grown up and moved on from being a mere animation grazing animal to a more well rounded cineste, so much so that last night he laughed when I wanted to screen Monster, something I had just bought and brought home fresh from the pawn shop.

Living in a larger city has its benefits. The theaters here in Boise are plentiful and lovely. We have Imax, many beautiful and technically clean first run house and plenty of dollar theaters to keep up with all those second run features. There is an art house up the street, the Flicks, that presents many of the same kinds of features that we used to screen at The Historic Orchard. The beauty of that venue is that they have a full kitchen, a wet bar and a video store attached to the premises. And they have four screens. It’s truly a lot of bang for the buck for an intermountain city.

Movie collecting here has been something else, too, with a large number of second hands around the region to feed my habit. VHS tapes go for as low as fifty cents a pop, which is fine for all those titles that never crossed over to disc or are foreign or just too hard to resist. Pawn shops have been feeding my DVD jones in a big way, with 1^st National Pawn leading the way at two dollars a feature. I tend to come home with bags of movies these days without any real reason to load up on them other than the sheer volume of cool and interesting titles out there to be had at very low prices. With the dearth of video stores out there it leaves the big box stores and places like Hastings to feed the need and the bins at the pawns. I can only hope that the home movie craze goes on and on for many years. If not, well, there are always second run movie houses and Redbox!

The Boy lives with me part time while he attends BSU. Of all the degrees in the whole wide world he chooses to pursue it’s one in Media Studies. That leaves him tending camera at the local community access station, editing films for old student pals and coming home to pour through the film cache, dreaming up double and triple bills for us to watch in our increasing short and valuable off time.

Gone are the days when I would wake and go to sleep with movies burning. I am happy to have enough time to watch a movie a day, and if I’m lucky I’ll have enough time to screen two or three a day on the weekends. But the onset of spring and the calling of summer in the distance I know that many other things will be bartering for my time. I have signed up to volunteer at a local Shakespeare fest and that’s a good thing. I know that the foothills and local bike trails will take up my time as well. Summer means sleepovers and the kid’s taste in movies is certainly much different than mine and that’s all well and good. It’s about time to catch up on all the wonderful animation and family films that I haven’t seen over the last two or three years.

Leaving Port Orchard meant leaving behind a possible career in movie exhibiting but now, instead, I am working through the classics, the cult, the highs and the lows of films with a young guy that needs my guidance, my patience, my deep pockets, to help make that film history something other than a dry slog through a text book. I feel that in giving up Futon Cinema for awhile I was able to fall back and regroup, lay in a ton of film and at the same time reset my passion. I banked the fire and it has kept me warm.

Come, sit on down, let’s screen a few more films together! 

Action!