Why we don’t go to movies
We last attended a movie about 3-4 years ago. Several years ago we attended a movie and paid about $15 - $20 for the two of us. I laughingly said to the ticket seller, “When we were dating we could attend a double feature movie with coming attractions, a newsreel, cartoon and short subject all for $1 total.
She looked at me like a condescending teenager who was just asked about the holes in her jeans and said, “Did you have to turn the reel with a handle and hold a flashlight behind the film to see the image? We have electricity now.” I reached through the hole in the window and tweaked her nose and broke her nerd glasses. I don’t have to take that kind of verbal abuse from people younger than the shoes I’m wearing.
No one remembered to tell me when I began attending movies that they were not real; they are fictional; they are made up; they are a fantasy; they are figments of someone’s imagination. I am slow but I finally determined those truths several years ago, well in 2010.
Many years ago our youngest daughter said, “There is a formula that is used to get people to attend movies. They have loud explosions with huge fireballs, nudity, profanity and vulgarity, defiance of authority, car chases and a hero, either a policeman or government official, who knows there is corruption, he resigns and solves the problem then walks off into the sunset.”
She nailed it; put the hide on the wall.
How many more mindless movies can be made about a manly man who must rescue his wife or wife and daughter from a kidnapper? I am so tired of that plot. Louis L’Amour prolific writer of western lore said there are only seven or eight plots and the writer must judiciously manipulate them to tell a story.
The sound systems only operate in two modes: the sound is so loud the fillings in my teeth jiggle free and I have to keep my jaws clenched to keep them in place. Or the obverse the people talk so inaudibly I can’t hear the dialogue.
There is always a car chase with the Wally WrongDoers trying to escape and the Dudley DoRights trying to apprehend them. Inevitably the cars ram through an area where several vegetable stands are set up and they smash through them sending veggies flying to kingdom come or down an alley with 782 garbage cans flying or through a loading dock sending 1,290 cardboard boxes into orbit. And then a truck always backs out of an alley and the DoRights have to stop and watch the WrongDoers get away.
Predictably there are always several huge explosions with atomic bomb sized fireballs rising as the heroes and heroines sprint toward the camera and jump just in time to survive. A city the size of Philadelphia is destroyed in the blast but no DoRight is ever injured. During the chase scene, everyone has a Tommy Gun or Uzi and everyone shoots at least 4,391 bullets at each other and even though they are only a few feet apart no one is killed or wounded.
Please, can there be at least a semblance of reality; a flirtation with the real world?! I’ll watch old movies on TCM.
[Larry Vandeventer. Go to my two websites – Larryvandeventer.com and wjrambler1956.com – and purchase my books. I grew up North of Calvertville and graduated from Worthington High School and Indiana State. Contact me at Goosecrick@aol.com or 812-796-0784]
- -- Posted by johnsongreg135 on Fri, Jul 5, 2019, at 3:39 PM
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