Phthursday Musings: At the Movies

Toward the end of my senior year of high school, the entire senior class was piled onto two busses and taken to a movie theater in Freeport, to watch Schindler’s List.

I don’t know why this happened. It was not for any particular class, because by the time we were seniors, the only subject we were all required to take was gym. Someone else may remember the why better than I can.

Our graduating class, in the end, was 86 people, and it is hard to imagine that more than half of us would have ultimately watched Schindler’s List of our own accord. The last movie I recall having seen with classmates was The Program, a James Caan vehicle about college football, and… not… the… same… kind… of… movie.

Schindler’s List, as I imagine many of you are well aware, is a long film, and it is an intense film, and look, not everybody goes for long intense films like that.

Nevertheless we were all quietly watching the film for its duration, even if we were not all sure why we were there.

Toward the end, there is a scene where Oskar Schindler is driven away in a black automobile. It was at this time specifically when, from somewhere in the back, Chris belted out:

WHOA-OH, BLACK BETTY, BAM-BA-LAM!

I reached this juncture in relating this tale, at a complete loss for what to say about any of it, at a loss in large part because the tears started streaming from my eyes.

This past weekend we took my goofball child to see The Bad Guys, a new movie based on a series of very popular youth-oriented graphic novels. This was the first movie we’d seen in a theater since Covid hit, and - no joke - only the third movie total that he has ever seen in a theater, the other two being Angry Birds 2 and Detective Pikachu.

I liked it. He liked it. Though he made the wonderful argument that the books are better.

Here’s the thing though. In a movie theater, you are essentially required to sit and do only two things for two hours: watch a movie and eat popcorn. There are no distractions. Phones stay in pockets. Hot water heaters do not blow up. You are not surrounded by wacky things reminding you about all of the things you need to get done. No, it’s just two hours in the dark, mindlessly eating salty food, focusing directly on entertainment.

It was incredible.

Two hours without noise.

I have never been Movie Guy. I haven’t seen a superhero movie in 20 years. I’ve probably only been to the theater 10 times this century. By contrast, I regularly go to at least a concert a month. That’s just how it is.

So at some point I sort of fell out of regularly going to movies, and didn’t really miss it. And now I’m wondering. Musing, even. Have I been missing this and didn’t realize it? And is it possible that I’m missing it more than ever? Does it even make sense to think in terms that you could be missing things more than ever when you’ve been missing them all along and haven’t known?

I mean, shoot, did I lose my big chance when MoviePass was still around? Walt Hickey, is this your wrath???

I suspect part of my mental relationship with all of it is based on the way I think about the difference between the Grammys and the Oscars. The Grammys are total nonsense, bearing essentially no relation to the way I think about listening to music. The Oscars, however, are tacitly about rewarding outstanding performances. If somebody wins Album of the Year, what do I care? But if somebody wins Best Supporting Actress, ooh, I guess I should check that out. And I don’t know, that feels like… a lot of work.

But thinking about going to the movies differently, ahh, maybe that’s the key I’ve been missing all along. It’s the kind of thing a lot of people would be like, yeah, what are you talking about? Of course it’s entertainment. Of course it’s escape, of course it’s cool, why do you have to think about it so damn much? But I learned a long time ago to think about films more so than movies.

And maybe I really am missing that escape. Being at a theater was like… meditation.

I wonder though how big a deal it was for Mister Goofball. By the time I was his age I’d been to dozens of movies. Probably at the outdoor alone. He’s never been to an outdoor theater. Would he like it? Would it just be another random thing to him?

It may come as some surprise, given that I’ve never been a super huge movie guy, but I briefly held down a stint as a movie reviewer for the Argus, our college newspaper. I think I did 3 or 4 reviews. But I only specifically remember one: The Mangler.

The Mangler was based on a Stephen King short story, which means they took like 34 pages of text and turned it into 106 minutes of absolute dreck. It remains to this day the worst movie I’ve ever seen in the theater… and the only movie I’ve ever seen in a theater with no other humans in the room.

This is the description you find when you Google it:

A series of gruesome accidents leads an officer to believe that a laundry machine is possessed by a bloodthirsty demon.

Here’s what’s really horrifying: they made sequels. This was news to me until now, though, why would I known about Canadian straight-to-video productions?

I’m a little hard-pressed today to tell you exactly why it was so bad, but I think it’s because the movie was unconscionably dumb. Gosh, you think it might be the industrial laundry press? YOU THINK?

Admittedly I am not and never have been a fan of horror movies. Campy horror, maybe, if it’s pulled off well, but look, there’s enough horror in our daily lives. We’ve already got the Florida Republican Party, popcorn-flavored Jelly Bellies, and the Cincinnati Reds. If I want to escape, why would I escape to blood and gore?

So maybe I wasn’t the best candidate to review The Mangler. Not that anyone else was especially interested in doing so.

On the subject of “Black Betty”, some addendum musings:

First, I looked it up, and the car in question appears to have been a 1937 Mercedes Benz 320 Cabriolet D. Like this:

Now, uh, well, it is possible that you don’t know what any of this is actually about! Well, it’s about the 1977 recording “Black Betty” by the band Ram Jam. Look: I am not going to dive into the history of Ram Jam. Even I have limits.

Inexplicably, there is a video:

“Black Betty”, originally, is a Leadbelly song, or more likely / precisely, a traditional song that Leadbelly popularized. The Ram Jam version involves very different lyrics and delivery. It has been controversial, I guess? There’s also a version by Tom Jones? It’s all so very strange.

For reasons I will never adequately understand, Ram Jam’s version of “Black Betty” was a staple on classic rock radio circa 1993. Since pretty much everybody at Winnebago High School listened to WXRX, presumably everybody in the movie theater was familiar with the song when Chris sang a line. I leave it to you to decide which aspect of all this is the most absurd.

“Black Betty” was also slightly involved in my winning $104 from WXRX in 1993. They had this gimmick, see, rock and roll bingo. You’d get your hands on a bingo board where every square was a song, and you’d fill in the date and time you heard it. Well, I got a bingo at one point, and while I don’t remember any other song from the card, I do remember that “Black Betty” was one of them.

This is arguably the most pointless recollection I have.

And please keep in mind, I am skipping over the even more mundane history of Ram Jam. I am sparing you by telling you this story.

Anyway: At some point I submitted the completed bingo card. But, I was 17, and you had to be 18 to win, so I had to put my dad’s name on the form. So some morning the DJs announced his name and said he had 10 minutes or whatever to call in and win. I forget exactly how we finagled this, since he was at work, but it all happened, and we went in and some point and picked up a check for $104.

Incidentally, on two other later occasions I won other things from WXRX. CDs both. One time it was Pink Floyd’s Pulse, a multi disc live album, where the gimmick was that the CD case had a blinking LED light on the side. It was not a good live album. I got rid of it at some point. Hi ho.

The other time, I was allowed to just pick a CD out of a drawer. Well, it was a lot of dreck. The two best options were Donald Fagen’s Kamakiriad and why the hell would I do that? So I went with the only rational choice, the soundtrack to Last Action Hero, most prominently featuring AC/DC’s “Big Gun”, and don’t tell me for a second that you ever thought I would share this madness here:

I actually did see Last Action Hero in the theater! I think because all of the other choices were much worse. And you know, that’s okay. I think seeing almost anything in the theater is a good time. Except, of course, for The Mangler.

Here’s the thing, though. I’m looking at Fandango to see what all else is in the theaters right now. I see:

• Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Uh what

• Jurassic World Dominion. I don’t think I care, sorry Jeff Goldblum

• Memory. I can only see Liam Neeson movies with the WHS Class of ‘94 though

• Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. But I’ve only seen the first Harry Potter movie and am not especially interested no matter how many times I’ve been told I’m wrong

• The Batman. There’s nothing about all this which appeals to me

• Dog. There’s a movie just called Dog which I’ve never heard of and it stars Channing Tatum which I understand to be a famous actor but I still think it’s a name for a fancy kind of cat food and this looks like an absolute snoozer and well it’s probably the one I’d pick from the list if I had to choose

• Blacklight. Wait there are two Liam Neeson moves out??

• The Contractor. I’m sorry, the name of this movie alone is worth negative two stars

• Jackass Forever. Oh, I’m there

I think I’d rather go see a lot of anime than most of what’s out there, and I don’t think I’m very alone in that respect.

Obviously the pandemic shut down going to the movies. But I think most of us weren’t doing it anyway, for obvious reasons, we’ve all got 40 inch TVs now etc. etc.

But if we were to go out, we’d want to see what we’d want to see, right? And what do we want to see? I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you what my favorite “kind” of movie is.

This kind of quandary doesn’t bother me when it comes to music, because I’m perfectly fine listening to crazy jazz one day and old-school country the next. Movies though? I feel like I don’t think about them correctly.

Is this a streaming era issue that everyone else has? Are movies really just not as good because everything good is a TV series now? I really don’t know, because I lost track of what people were doing with actual movies so long ago.

Maybe though now is a fine time to rethink all of this. Maybe we should seek out outdoor movies wherever we can find them. Drive ups in Gibson City? Movies in the park? Why not? But, the key, I think, is that wherever they’re found, that’s it, the movie starts, and the movie is all that’s happening. If it’s not a proper escape it’s not an escape at all.

As I finish this up tonight, I have found myself distracted by so many things. I have a basketball game on. I’m trying to address the clutter in the offices. I’m looking to consolidate down all of these notes I’ve taken over the past few weeks. I have dozens of browser windows open. I’ve got a massive backlog of email, much larger than I normally allow to happen. And all this is just what’s in the office.

There’s a baseball movie, For Love of the Game, starring Kevin Costner as an aging star pitcher, with Sam Raimi directing. I’m not sure if I would call it a great movie, but I think the core conceit is wonderful, and I find myself coming back to it frequently, even though it’s been 20 years since I’ve seen the movie.

Costner’s character, Billy Chapel, seeks to begin each pitch by saying to himself: Clear the mechanism. In the process of doing so, the sound cuts out. Chapel is entirely focused on the task of throwing exactly the pitch he wants to throw. But at some point, it stops working. He can’t shut the noise out. He’s got to rely on something other than the power of pure focus.

It’s easy to imagine people thinking the whole Clear the mechanism thing is ridiculous, but I think Costner and Raimi nailed this.

It’s much harder today than it used to be for me to do precisely that: Clear the mechanism. To laser focus on something. I can do it, I can hit a groove, but it’s harder, it’s also more tiring than it once was.

What occurs to me tonight though is that perhaps part of the problem is that clearing the mechanism toward some other end is what’s really so difficult. But, maybe, clearing the mechanism just to be clear is different. When people have recommended meditation to me, I imagine this is what they have meant. Any time I’ve tried “meditation” though it’s been an overwhelming failure. Strenuous exercise can work, sort of. Sometimes I can get there through writing.

Maybe, though, there was an unexpected meta-message waiting to get through to me from a Kevin Costner movie.

Clear the mechanism: at the movies!