Review: Star Trek Into Darkness

 I realize I'm coming late to this party. After all, this was an early summer blockbuster (it was released in the spring, actually) and I'm only just watching it now in mid-September. What can I say? It's been a busy summer.

Anyway, as you have probably figured out by now, I'm a bit of a sci fi geek from way back. Space ships, ray guns, jet packs, aliens, UFOs, etc. I love it all. Growing up, people were either Star Wars fans or Star Trek fans, and there wasn't much middle ground. I was always squarely in the Star Wars camp but was fine with the other brand if that's all there was. I watched my share of the original Trek episodes as reruns when I was middle school and saw all the Trek movies in the theater until they transitioned from the original cast to the Next Generation bunch.

My gripe with Star Trek was that it was always too high minded. I appreciate that it tried to address Big Ideas like racism and individualism versus collectivism and all of that stuff. But holy crap, when you compare Spock and Kirk agonizing over the relative morality of influencing a new civilization versus Han Solo blasting Greedo's alien guts all over the wall of the cantina, there isn't much question of which is cooler, you know? Star Trek was interesting whereas Star Wars was just awesome. Light sabers and X-wings versus the Prime Directive and Starfleet? No competition.

All of this is to say that when J.J. Abrams directed the 2009 Star Trek reboot, I thought it was the best thing to happen to the franchise in decades. Abrams specializes is genre spectacle with a very human edge of sentiment. He managed to make Sydney Bristow a hardcore superspy in Alias while simultaneously making us care about her daddy issues. His take on Mission: Impossible was one of the strongest of that franchise because of the emotional component he successfully mustered between Tom Cruise and his on-screen wife played by Michelle Monaghan. Lost, one of his co-creations, was as much about the relationships between Sawyer, Jack, and Kate as it was about time travel and conspiracies.

So Abrams was able to work in the brainy, emotional world of Star Trek while still making it rock, you know? The action sequences were exciting, the effects were terrific, and the aliens were scary. More importantly, audiences cared about the people and the relationships in the midst of the action and effects. I bought into Spock's troubled backstory and conflicted relationships with his parents, and at the same time, I loved watching young Jim Kirk launch his step-dad's vintage Mustang off a cliff while being chased by a cop on a hover bike.

(This turning out to be a very long post considering it's a movie review and I haven't even talked about the movie I'm reviewing yet.)

So my hopes were high when I heard about the sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness. Abrams was back along with the cast from the first film, and the villain was going to be played by Benedict Cumberbatch, a favorite of mine from the BBC tv series Sherlock. The trailers, the posters, all the hype made it look like a sure thing.

Sadly, it doesn't live up. The film is a step down from the first one, and the problem is easy to identify. It's a question of earning the payoff. In order for an audience to care about what happens to characters, they have to care about the characters themselves. What happens to them matters because we find them believable people who are worthy of some level of empathy. Events in and of themselves don't mean much if we don't care about the people they're happening to. Earthquake? Scary. Earthquake happening to a small family we've learned about for a few chapters? Horrifying.

This is a problem my Intro to Creative Writing students often struggle with. They give their readers flimsy, cliched characters for a few scenes and then expect them to care when something tragic happens to them.

So Star Trek Into Darkness is a weaker film because it doesn't spend enough time making the characters real or relevant to the audience. It makes the mistake of trying to echo Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, the best of all the original movies. The final scenes of Into Darkness are an alternative version of the final scenes of Kahn. The problem is that in Kahn, the characters had been established for close to thirty years. Their relationships mattered. When Spock died trying to save everyone, we cared because we cared about him. When Kirk almost dies at the end of Darkness and Spock gets all weepy, who cares? We haven't seen these two do anything other than bicker like sitcom buddies. There's no investment for us  Death, near death, massive tragedy, etc. doesn't matter if we don't care who they are happening to.

So when Star Trek Into Darkness was over, my overall thought was, "Meh." Good looking but empty. Like a Kardashian, you know?

Trilogies seem to be pretty standard these days, and this one made enough money to justify a third film. Maybe when that comes around, Abrams will have recaptured his mojo or passed the franchise off to someone who's still got it. (Abrams' next project is directing the new Star Wars film due in 2015. My brain kind of collapsed in on itself when I heard he was taking that gig after this one. My thoughts about Hollywood's total lack of imagination is a post for another day.)

Anyway, the film isn't bad, it just isn't particularly good. It falls short of what was best about the first one, and just sort of leaves the viewer cold in the end. For 190 million dollars and with Abrams at the helm, I expected a little more.

"What'd You Think?"

Movies were one thing my dad and I could agree on. We both thought that an evening at the movies was one well spent. This was significant because, for as much as my mom loved the arts (plays, music, art galleries), she really didn't like going to the movies. I can only think of two or three times in my life that she ever went to the theater or drive-in with us. I'd ask her about it and her only reason was just that she didn't enjoy the experience of going to the movies. So my dad and I were movie buddies. He had someone to go with and I had someone to pay for everything.

The first movie I remember that was a kind of a father/son thing was Rambo: First Blood II. Crazy, right? I was eleven, my brother Jason with thirteen, and ol' Dennis took the two of us to see Sylvester Stallone as John Rambo shoot, stab, incinerate, and explode a wide variety of Vietnamese people. Dad had been in the military and liked books, movies, and tv shows about soldiers and war. He wanted to see it, but even if Mom did go to movies, she sure as heck wouldn't pay to see an evil Vietnamese officer slicing a bloody leech off Rambo's body with a knife. Leech-slicing and Stallone's naked, tortured body just weren't her cup of tea. Anyway, the three of us saw it together, and Jason and I thought it was the coolest thing ever that Dad took us to a movie that we were clearly too young to see. (For the record, as a military man, Dad laughed through a lot of First Blood II. I particularly remember him laughing when Rambo fires a bazooka from inside a helicopter filled with P.O.W.s and no one inside the chopper dies.)

Anyway, Dad and I would go to the movies together now and then. Sometimes one or some of my brothers would be there, and sometimes it would just be Dennis and me. Generally, we'd see manly sorts of movies - action flicks, bio pics, and stuff like that. Whatever we'd go see, it always ended the same. The credits would roll, we'd walk out the back door of the theater, we'd make it halfway to the car, and Dad would say, "So what'd you think?" We'd spend the drive home discussing the relative merits of Schwarzenegger in The Running Man or Tommy Lee Jones in U.S. Marshals.

The last movie I remember seeing in the theater with Dad was Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, a stark portrait of ambition, greed, and the acidic effects of loving power more than people. It's about a man who makes a fortune and amasses power as he builds an oil drilling empire in California, and Dad was fascinated by the depictions of early oil drilling technology. I still find it funny that, of everything in this dark,  emotionally complex movie, Dad was most interested in how they drilled for oil at the turn of the century. It's not a warm, happy film by any stretch of the imagination. It ends with the main character alone and friendless in his giant mansion after he clubs his adversary to death with a bowling pin. Cheerful? I think not. Nevertheless, I have a lot of affection for the film because it was the last time that, halfway across the parking lot, Dad looked over and said, "So what'd you think?"

My dad passed away a couple of years ago, and I miss him a lot. One reason why I love movies is because they are opportunities to get together with people you love. Even when I was a teenager and didn't have much to say to say to my parents, Dad and I could always agree on a movie.      

Pacific Rim

It's a delicate coming of age story that celebrates the beauty and mystery of young love.

Not really.

It's actually a sleek, technically accomplished, big budget tribute to Godzilla movies. It features geeky awesomeness like a 25 story tall robot using an oil supertanker like a baseball bat to club an equally giant monster from beneath the sea.

Needless to say, it's not a romantic comedy, kids.

 

Nope, it's a big, loud movie with plenty of 'splosions, rousing speeches, cool monsters, and the guy getting the girl in the end. There isn't anything terribly original about the movie, but that's sort of the point. It's meant to be an homage to everything from Godzilla to Voltron to Henry V to  Armageddon - it's like a fanboy's dreamland. So rather than making something new, the director and co-writer, Guillermo Del Toro, took a whole bunch of old stuff and redid it in a huge, fun, sometimes winking fashion.

I never enjoy it when a movie hands me a cliche and expects me to just say, "Gosh, thanks. I've never seen an innocent man who's accused of a crime he didn't commit. I've never seen a tough, streetwise woman who secretly has a heart of gold. I've never listened to a big, rally-the-troops speech just before going into battle. I've never seen a nerd long for the blonde cheerleader." Stuff like that is a little insulting because it means the creators of that show think that you are either very dumb, very forgetful, or just have low standards for what you expect out of your stories.

On the other hand, I almost always enjoy it when someone takes a cliche and uses it knowingly with some cleverness or with a twist of originality. While certainly not earth-shattering, Pacific Rim manages to take on some of the cliches of a big budget sci fi pic and use them in a way that is, at least, entertaining rather than insulting.

I think what I appreciated about the movie most is simply that it was fun. It doesn't take itself too seriously, and it seems to be created by someone with an eye for the visceral pleasure of movies rather than an eye for just making money. It's pretty rare to get quality and fun all in the same package, so I try to enjoy it whenever it comes along.Yes, movies have the capacity to teach and edify and all of that. And I love it when they do. But I love it just as much when a movie is all about the color, sound, motion, production design, performance, and story. And 'splosions. And giant robots.

Hmmmm. I wonder if there are any Pacific Rim actions figures...

The Worst

Let's see --

Taking a sweet, innocent date to see The Island of Dr. Moreau. We had only been out on a couple of dates, mostly stuff she enjoyed, and I wanted to take her to a movie. The problem was that there was nothing good playing. There were a few movies I knew she wouldn't like and a few I knew I wouldn't like - but then there was the mystery choice: The Island of Dr. Moreau. I hadn't heard or read or seen anything about it. This is unusual because my movie radar is always up. I always watch movie trailers when they come on TV, I always read the entertainment section of the paper, and I just always have my ear to the ground when movies are involved. So for me to not know anything about a movie at all was strange. I figured it could either mean disaster or a pleasant surprise.

What I did know is that it had Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer. To me, I thought this was probably a sign of quality. Brando, of course, even though he was in his giant-old-man-weirdo phase, was still one of Hollywood's great actors, and Kilmer was still a semi-leading man. (This was 1996). So I figure, hey, how bad can it be?

Sadly, the answer, my friends, is bad. It can be very, very bad.

Brando was clearly just there for a paycheck. His performance was phoned in and essentially empty. Almost nothing about his character made any sense, and the director was clearly just happy to have a big name in the film. I'm confident Brando dictated his wardrobe of giant, loose fitting mumus just because they would be comfortable to wear. What I didn't know at the time is that Brando was infamously lazy and would do his best to not work if he could at all avoid it. He did some movies purely for the money, and in some cases, negotiated contracts that said he would only be on set for a certain number of days and then he would stall and try not to work while those days ticked away so he could paid without actually doing anything. I didn't know at the time that Brando's name on a movie did not necessarily guarantee anything.

Kilmer had a tiny cameo that he probably spent two days filming. The real leading man was David Thewlis, the guy who played Lupin in the Harry Potter movies. So, not exactly a real leading man type, you know?

The story is based on a novel by H.G. Wells and is about a guy who becomes shipwrecked on an island populated by half-man half-animal people who were created by, of course, the brilliant but crazy Dr. Moreau. So the acting is nothing special, the script is pretty terrible, and the special effects are lame.

But an overall lameness was at least palatable. It was the gigantic animal-person orgy scene toward the end of the film that took the movie from just sort of stupid to the top of my bad-movie-experience list. My date was horrified, I was embarrassed, and we both left feeling like we needed to take a shower.

I didn't go on too many more dates with that girl. We weren't that compatible to begin with, but I think Dr. Moreau and the animal people helped put the nail in the coffin of that relationship even faster than normal. So let this be a lesson to you: bad movies can kill relationships. Choose wisely.

Runners Up for Bad Movie Going Experiences:

Falling asleep in the campus movie theater at Idaho State University while watching slow moving, independent films (Ulee's Gold, Copland, Kundun.) I'm all for slow, meditative movies, but holy crap, those movies were boring.

Sitting in a theater in Pocatello, Idaho with my wife, and it was so hot in the room that a guy down in the front row stood up, tore off his shirt, and yelled, "It's so f-ing hot in here!!"

Trying to watch Bram Stoker's Dracula on a date. To this day, it remains the only movie I've ever walked out on. My date was offended by some of the racier elements in it. After she broke up with me and shattered my heart into a billion little pieces, I rented it and watched it all the way through as my way of telling the universe I no longer cared about her.

Seeing any movie at the Roxy in Ottawa, Illinois.

Movie Heist

Blogger Eric D. Snider once wrote about going to the movies and watching a crime take place. A lame, gross, petty crime -- but a crime nevertheless. He saw a group of teenage boys sneakily root through a trashcan outside one of the theaters, dig out three large drink cups, rinse out the cups in the bathroom, and then take them up to the concession stand for free refills - as though these were large drinks they had paid for and already emptied while waiting for the movie to start.

When I read his story, I was simultaneously grossed out and fascinated.

Grossed out because, uh, those cups were garbage. Garbage. Plus, who knows who drank out of it the first time before it even went in the trash? Some crusty guy with no teeth and only smelly gum-holes could have been licking the inside of that cup trying to get the last drops of his Sprite while watching Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 for the third time. I don't think rinsing it out with tepid water in the theater bathroom would take care of that kind of skeeve, you know?

But I was also fascinated. I mean, who does that? Who thinks that way? Movie theater prices are obscene, and there's no debate about that. I'm pretty sure that when evil oil company executives retire from poisoning the world and dumping chemicals into oceans, they shift careers and take over movie theater chains. They have the same morals and make the same profit margins. Popcorn costs literally next to nothing to make. Same with soda. They charge three bucks for eighty cents worth of candy and think because they put it in a bulky cardboard box that we won't notice. The profit margin on a six dollar bucket of popcorn is astronomical.

Because theater concession prices are practically criminal and because I feel like they're taking advantage of a captive audience, I've never had a problem with bringing in my own candy, soda, popcorn, and occasionally sandwiches. (In winter, you can easily tuck a footlong sub into your coat and not be detected.) But bringing in your own stuff is very different than scavenging cups out of the trash and bilking the theater out of pop, you know? Not giving the theater unfair amounts of money is not the same as just flat-out stealing from them in my mind.

So I think poorly of these random teenagers I've never met. I judge them - that's right, judge them.

But wait! As I busily judge these little weasels, I am suddenly reminded of myself in junior high. A couple of my friends, Rusty and James, had a whole scheme to sneak into the movies and they wanted me in on their plan. There were two theaters in Rexburg, Idaho when I was growing up there - the Westwood, a cavernous single-screen on Main Street, and the Holiday, a low-slung, triplex just a block off Main. Both of them had two exit doors at the back of each theater that opened up onto empty parking lots, and the plan was for one of us to pay to get in and then sneak to the back exit, pop it open, and let the other two in.

Now, I was a good kid in junior high and high school - afraid to get in trouble, not interested in making waves, and seriously scared of my dad's white hot wrath. I stalled, tried to blow it off, tried to hedge - but eventually caved. I agreed to sneak them into a late show of Beetlejuice at the Westwood. 

My justification, the only thing that allowed me to do it, I think, was that I was the one who actually paid to get in. I figured as long as I was paying my own admission, I was close enough to blameless. (I conveniently overlooked the fact that I was instrumental in helping two other people not pay.) James and Rusty each gave me two bucks - that was my cut, I guess -- and I used it for admission. Timing was crucial. If I went too early, it would look suspicious to the theater workers. If I went too late, there would be other people there who would see what I was doing and report it to the Man.

I remember my heart pounding and cold nerve sweat under my arms. I was terrified I was going to get caught and that it would be the end for me. The theater manager, a pompous little man with a pencil 'stache, knew my dad and knew who I was. If he caught me, it was a sure bet my parents would hear about it. In the Westwood, there was a short, dark hallway between the theater and the actual exit door and it would shrouded by a curtain. I slipped behind the curtain, tapped quietly on the door, got the signal tap in return, and pushed open the door. Rusty and James hustled in, and we rushed back out to the theater before anyone else came in.

I don't remember if I was plagued by guilt or how long I felt bad, but I'm pretty sure I never helped anyone sneak in to the movie again. Once was enough for me. I managed to grow up and not be a felon. James and Rusty both grew up to be good guys, each of them married with a bunch of kids. Rusty got a degree in psychology and then took over his dad's cabinetry business. James is a computer engineer and spends his weekends fishing rather than sneaking into theaters.

So maybe there's hope for the three little weasels Eric Snider saw. Maybe drinking trash soda isn't the end of the line for them as human beings. More likely than not, twenty years from now, they'll be grown men with lives and responsibilities, and they'll laugh about the days back when they were willing to drink garbage pop in order to sucker the theater out of free refills.

Palaces

I know I wrote that a bad night at the movies is better than a good night doing almost anything else, and I meant that. Just watching a movie is an enjoyable enough experience that it often doesn't matter to me where I'm doing it. Movie-going is like pizza or ice cream -- even when it's bad, it's still pretty good. I've watched movies in hot, crowded theaters, on airplanes next to snoring fellow passengers, at my desk at work, in classrooms, on portable DVD players, on smart phones, on laptops, projected in city parks, and, of course, at home on the couch.

Still, can't we all agree that some experiences are better than others? Yes, Little Caesar's five buck special fills your belly and more or less resembles pizza, but isn't it a far cry from, say, Buddy's Pizza in Detroit where the crust and sauce are made fresh literally by hand every day? Isn't Italian gelato a whole other world compared to the generic half gallon of ice cream from the depths of the grocery store freezer?

So it is with movie theaters, I think. Yes, a movie is a movie wherever you see it - but how much better is it if you see it in a good theater? When movies first really began to take off as a form of entertainment and became a staple of American life, exhibitors had tons of money to sink into their facilities. Because these were literally the only places on earth where your average joe could see a picture, theater owners built elaborate, beautiful buildings that were essentially temples of film. They're commonly referred to these days as movie palaces.

Check these out and consider how they compare to the last theater you went to:

Some were done in Art Deco, others were Art Nouveau, and some had some kind of ethnic theme like Grauman's Chinese theater in Hollywood. But attending a movie at a place like this made film going an event, not an afterthought.

Many of the original palaces have decayed or been torn down. Some have been saved and refurbished. One of my personal favorite old theaters is the Egyptian Theater in Boise, Idaho. Once on the verge of ruin, it's been restored to its former glory and then some, and now it is a jewel of the downtown area. Back in 2000, my wife and I saw a small, independent film called God's Army that is now a major part of my PhD dissertation, so I have a lot of affection for that place.

What's interesting to me now is that some of the big theater chains are trying to replicate the palace vibe in their giant multiplexes. In bigger markets, chains want to move away from mall theaters and instead create giant meccas of movie going. AMC, Loews, and Carmike all have big, glossy theaters in bigger cities. Stadium seating, surround sound, high def projection, gourmet snack bars, etc.  While they are kind of cliched in how they try to replicate old fashioned theaters, I still appreciate that they try to make movie going a special event.

There are a few theaters around here that just sort of make me angry in how shabby and cruddy they are. I've vowed to never pay money to see a movie a the Roxy in Ottawa ever again. The whole place appears to be rotting, the sound system seems to have been stolen out of a '73 Chevy Nova, the screens are the size of postage stamps, and the popcorn tastes like it's been around since the Clinton administration. I'd rather see a movie in a bad theater than not at all, but the utter disregard at the Roxy just makes me mad. And since there are other options, there's no reason for me to give another cent there. 

Speaking of other options, I've lived in this area for almost five years now and I have yet to see a movie at either the Majestic in Streator or the Apollo in Princeton. Maybe that will be part of this blog project this summer - to visit those two and maybe the drive-in up near Sandwich. If so, I'll be sure to take pictures and keep you posted.

Starting With Episode Four

The original Star Wars movie was released in 1977 when I was three years old. This was long before the days of VHS, DVD, Blu Ray, YouTube, or even pay-per-view, and so rather than hustling a movie out of theaters in a matter of weeks, films would stay pretty much as long as they were making money. Since people couldn't really watch movies at home and because TV went off the air at eleven or so, people went out to the theater a  lot more often. Star Wars episode IV: A New Hope showed continuously in some theaters for over a year. Got that? After it was released in May of 1977, you could take a date to see it for high school graduation, catch a late show after fireworks on the Fourth of July, dress up as a Storm Trooper to see it for Halloween, catch it again at Christmas, and then take your prom date to see it in the spring. Crazy, right?

In addition to these epic runs in theaters, there was also a time when a successful movie would get re-released in theaters after it had been gone for a while. These days, a movie generally only gets a theatrical re-release if it has been converted to 3D or if it's a significant anniversary or both. (Titanic's 3D ten year anniversary, anyone?) So Star Wars came out again in 1979, 1980, 1981, and 1982. (It came out again in 1997 but that's another story, another blog post.)

All of this is to say, I'm not exactly sure when my first movie-going experience was. The only thing I have to help me nail it down is that I know my family was living in Burley, Idaho when my mom and dad took my brother, Jason, and I to see Star Wars. We moved from Burley when I was almost five - so that means I probably saw the 1979 re-release version.

Anyway, even though I was only four or five, there are a couple of things I still remember with great clarity. We saw it in a single-screen theater in a little town called Rupert, which is about ten miles from Burley. Jason and I sat together with Dad on one side and Mom on the other. All Star Wars movies start the same way: yellow words explaining the set-up of the movie crawling from the bottom of the screen to the top and then disappearing into space. I think I remember my mom whispering the words to me because, you know, I was four. After the words disappear, there's just a moment of silence and a field of stars.

Then comes the moment that I (and most other nerds) remember with perfect clarity: blazing across that field of stars comes a small, white space ship, its thrusters glaring against the darkness of space. In the next second, a giant, triangular ship a thousand times bigger than the first one plows across the screen, shooting streaks of red lasers at the tiny, obviously outmatched first ship.

I was four or five and had no idea what a "rebel alliance" or a "galactic empire" were, but I didn't care. For the next two hours, I was utterly transported - by Darth Vader and his obsidian-black samurai helmet, by Greedo and the other sketchy characters in the Cantina, by the weird asymmetry of the Millennium Falcon, the menace of the Death Star, and by the light sabers, oh the light sabers. Swords made out of lasers? Are you kidding me? Even at four, I knew that was a hot cup of steaming awesome.

I suppose we had popcorn and soda, those eternal standbys of American movie-going. I was probably tired and exhilarated when the movie was over. I'm not really sure about details like that - I mean, it was thirty five years ago. But what I do absolutely remember about my first time at the movies is that I wanted to go again and as often as possible.

I think it was a combination of feeling transported (literally to a different world in this case) and the sense of being together with my family that made that evening in south central Idaho all those years ago so memorable. Movies, I think, are both individual and communal. We go because of how we relate to them in our own unique, solitary ways but also for how we can share the experience with the other people sitting there in the dark with us. I loved meeting Luke Skywalker (what a name!), but I especially loved meeting him with my mom on one side of me and my brother and dad on the other. I have never minded going to movies by myself, but I have always preferred going with people I love. The movie is good, but how much better is it if you can experience it twice by talking it over with your buddy or spouse once it's over?

A Bad Night At the Movies...

It was 1998, and my girlfriend had just broken up with me. I was 23, going to college at Idaho State University, and living in my brother's basement until I could find a cheap apartment. In other words, my life sucked. I spent my days half-paying attention to my Latin professor and writing long, rambling papers for an Intro to American Lit class. I spent my evenings playing with my little nephew and feeling ridiculously sorry for myself because my ex-girlfriend was already engaged to some other guy. It was a sad, pathetic existence.

Just a few blocks from my brother's house was a discount, second-run movie theater called the Reel. You know the type of place I'm talking about - a small, slightly run-down theater in an older part of town that shows movies that came to big theaters six months before. The big summer blockbusters turn up at the Reel around September. Anyway, you pay two or three bucks for a ticket, two bucks for popcorn and a soda, and you get to watch a movie in the theater that you could probably get on DVD.

During that first year in Pocatello, I practically lived at the Reel.

Every chance I got, I'd scrape together five bucks and either drive or bike to the theater. Armed with a cardboard box of popcorn and a waxy, sweating cup of Pepsi, I'd sit in the janky bucket seats and let the movies make me happy for a couple of hours. When I look at a list of movies released in 1997 and 1998, I'm surprised at how many of them I watched or re-watched at the Reel. Titanic, Gattaca, The Fifth Element, Liar Liar, Men In Black, Air Force One, The Saint, In and Out, My Best Friend's Wedding, The Truman Show, Armageddon, There's Something About Mary, Lost in Space, and plenty of others. (What strikes me about this list is how many of these movies are now on cable every Saturday and Sunday afternoon. It's like that period of my life has entered reruns or something.)

Anyway, my brother and sister-in-law still mock me over the night I went to see Spiceworld. If you don't know what that is, good for you. It came out in early 1998 and was the big screen debut of The Spice Girls, a cruddy, manufactured pop band from England. They were kind of the female One Direction of their day. Someone had the bright idea to let them be a movie - a wacky, zany, terrible movie that probably isn't worth the film stock they shot it on. But I went. It was February in Idaho and I went to see it, fully aware of the fact that it was probably going to suck canal water.

To this day, my brother and his wife bring it up and say, "Why? Why would you pay money, any money at all, to see something that you knew was going to be a big piece of garbage?" At the time, I think I just wanted out of the house and a movie was better than nothing. Looking back now, however, I realize the answer to why I went has a lot to do with why I'm choosing to write about movies for this blog: for me, a bad night at the movies is better than a good day at work, you know?

I have a lot of emotional attachment to the act of going to the movies. From really early on, going to the theater was a huge treat for me. If Dad was willing to spring for movie tickets, it was a big deal. I loved going to the theater, waiting in line for tickets, the sound of the popcorn machine, examining the posters for all the coming attractions, waiting for the lights to dim, the previews, everything. For me, it is a transportive experience. It's like a mood-enhancing drug that doesn't cost much and doesn't leave a hangover. Going to the theater makes me happy, even if the movie isn't much good.

Movies can take you out of the smallness and banality of your own life. They can shift your focus off your own story and onto another. They can show you great and terrible things. They can lift you when you feel as flat as the gum on the floor of the Reel. They can thrill, provoke, soothe, and teach. While I don't believe it is necessarily their goal or point, movies can occasionally make you want to be a better person. That's powerful stuff.

All that and giant vats of popcorn and diet Pepsi? Sounds like a good way to spend the evening to me.

So movies and movie going will be my subject for this blog because they matter to me. They have been a part of my life for literally as long as I can remember. I'm writing about them to try and articulate a little about what they mean to be now and why they've meant so much to me over the last forty years.