This is How the Movies Die

I don’t know, I guess I’m indifferent to the cries of the moronic who want movie theaters to be multimedia factories where movies are only a third idea in the experience. I’ve always been a loyalist when it comes to movie theaters. When I go in to a movie, I want to sit down in the dark and share an experience with other movie goers. I want to absorb a film, I want to take it in, and I want to leave affected by it. The humongous screen staring down at a dark arena of movie seats has always been a familiar and beloved sight for me, because it’s where I spent a lot of my childhood.

As expressed in “My Dad & The Movies,” movies were once the main source of amusement for the poor. They were cheap, fun, convenient, and provided a thrilling experience. Truthfully I haven’t been to a movie theater since 2011. And before that 2008. The former was to see the limited “Attack the Block” in Manhattan. That was a satisfying experience. Once you forget that we were inundated with twenty minutes of non-stop advertisements for ABC’s fall line up, and commercials about food, and reality shows, watching “Attack the Block” was great.

The latter was “Cloverfield,” and it was a wonderful film that helped me ignore my trappings. I remain indifferent to the death of movie theaters because, it’s been dead for a very long time, now. No matter what you think or say, movie theaters are dead. They have been since the late nineties. Face it, and move on with your life. Hollywood doesn’t want to admit that movie theaters are going the way of video stores, and they’re clinging to these archaic notions for dear life fighting tooth and nail to convince us otherwise.

Hollywood is clinging to a corpse. Surely, I sound like I am thrilled about the experience dying, but I’m actually quite heartbroken, but also contemplative. The call from idiots for movie theaters to become playgrounds for those that lack ability to pay attention for more than thirty minutes is not a call for movie theaters to adapt or die. Movie theaters have died, and now people are simply asking for various functions just to allow them the advantage of vanity.

Yes, let’s pay twenty bucks to sit in a room filled with people so I can tweet and watch other people tweet. Because I really don’t have a social life if other people don’t see me attending to my online fans, right? Look at me: Too busy to watch the movie on screen. Aren’t I important? You want to be my friend.

But I refuse to let movie theaters adapt to the moronic ideas of the self-obsessed and self-centered, many of whom are too concerned with their gadgets to have a simple conversation, let alone watch a movie. I’ve met too many people who find it hard to talk to me without their text fingers running. It’s a shame how human courtesy has died, and now we want it to spread to movie theaters. I remember a brief time where movie going was a communal experience. You’d laugh, and cry, and scream, you’d look over at a stranger who’d be soaking in the same thoughts and it was a form of bonding.

But then when I look back I never actually have been to a movie theater. And the movie theaters I’ve attended since I was a kid are not actually theaters, anyway. In the book “Comfort & Joi,” author Joseph Dougherty comments on how modern movie theaters aren’t theaters, but white, sterile halls that are attached to humongous malls. Most movie theaters, he explains, look like airport terminals. And he was right. My local movie theater in Concourse here in the Bronx is not even a movie theater, so much as it is a basement attachment to a mini-mall.

The mall at the upper level looks like an area for people waiting for their planes to land, and you go down by escalator in to the movie theater where it somewhat resembles a classic cineplex, as well as the movie going experience. But it’s a fleeting one. The moment you look up in to the glass ceilings, you can see the mini-mall in its impersonal aesthetic. From the time the theater/mall/shopping center was built, it was never actually a place for movie going.

Early on, the big attraction was the big mall filled with god awful restaurants, and a row of stores on the outside that constantly rotated. There have been so many stores that have come and gone since the mall was built back in the late eighties that it’s wild. It’s a good location in an open crowded locale, and yet no store has lasted more than two years there. In either case, going to the Plaza was never a fun experience unless it was a movie I really wanted to go to. For many years we went there on the fact that it was close by and convenient.

But we traded convenience for the destruction of our movie going. Every single experience at the movie theater there has been filled with a bad anecdote. And over the decades it became monumentally worse. The stores inside the mall closed down and are now a graveyard, while the theater gradually became nothing but a hang out for rowdy teens. Every weekend teenagers from around the area would commune to the Plaza to basically harass shoppers, wreak havoc, and disrupt the movie for many people, whether you liked it or not. There was a time where the theater had attendants that would stand in the back while the movie began and leave when the movie was in motion, and now they don’t even offer that courtesy. It’s become a courtesy!

One of the worst movie going trips of my life was during 2004’s “The Grudge” where the first forty minutes of the movie were disrupted by a group of loud and obnoxious teens that didn’t have the decency to allow others to enjoy what they paid for. My constant question over the years became “Why pay money if you’re not going to watch the fucking movie?” In all my experiences at the plaza, it became a place for parents to wait for one another, a daycare for restless toddlers, a spot for teens to cut high school, and bands of horribly rude kids who delighted in ruining the fun for people who actually paid up to fifteen dollars for a ticket.

If I pay twenty dollars for a movie ticket, I want every single fucking second of the experience. It became such a problem I’d have to strategize every movie going experience. I stopped going during the evenings on the weekends, and started going early in the afternoons during the weekdays when everyone was either working or in school. I’d even sit outside the theater twenty minutes before it opened so that I could grab the first showing and not have my commitment to movie going tarnished.

Thinking back on it, the movie theater experience died a very long time ago. And Movie theaters have become nothing more than bastions for the low brow, and lowest common denominator. They actually will pay money just to sit in a movie and distract themselves while you try to enjoy yourself. And now some people want it to become a part of the actual movie going journey. Now vanity, self-obsession, selfishness, and lack of attention has become a “lifestyle,” a “life choice,” and these kinds of people should be allowed to change what was once a sacred and celebrated idea.

These people should not be given any chance to change movie going, they should be ignored so they can express their anger online in 140 characters or less. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert are fortunate to not be seeing this day come to fruition. Many executives at movie chains are even considering these ideas, integrating cell phones and texting in to some films. The notion of genuine movie theaters has become a rarity, as the best movie theaters in the country require traveling by plane for me.

The revival houses around the city in New York have long been shut down or retired.

It’s a shame, but then it’s about time Hollywood stop clinging to movie theaters and allow people to view every movie early on. That way they can pay for your film, and stay home with their vain excesses and obnoxious universe that revolves around them and only them. Meanwhile I’ll work on keeping my brain from becoming pudding, thank you.

“Instead of driving people like me away from the theater, why not just segregate us into environments which meet our needs. I’d love to watch Pacific Rim in a theater with a bit more light, wifi, electricity outlets and a second screen experience. Don’t tell me I’d miss major plot points while scrolling on my ipad – it’s a movie about robots vs monsters. I can follow along just fine.”

This is how the movies die. Not with a bang, but with pure unapologetic self-entitlement.