tickets for a 6:00pm showing of “into the wild”, the sean penn movie about the guy who starved to death in the wilderness of alaska. that shorthand version of the story, of course, does it no justice whatsoever.
i vaguely recall reading a long piece about this guy, maybe in the new yorker, and being absolutely fascinated by him. it’s the old ditch-your-possessions-and-escape-the-world story, taken to an extreme. and sean penn is an artist i respect, even if i think his politics are themselves a bit extreme at times. anyway, reading about the movie made me want to see the movie.
and that happens less and less, lately. there was a time, not so long ago, that i went to the movies several time a week. now, not so much. maybe once a month, probably even less. i watch a lot of movies at home, via netflix, but rarely go to a theater.
i don’t have the standard complaint about noisy awful obnoxious audiences. for the most part, new york movie audiences are well behaved. i go at odd times, and i (for the most part) don’t go to movies that attract large crowds of teenagers. but even when i do, i find that those teenagers are noisy and rowdy in context of the movie. you can hoot and holler all you want if it’s appropriate, and that’s fine with me.
maybe i’m being provincial with this next comment, and i’m the first to admit that my sample size is small to be making it. but the bad experiences i’ve had in movies recently have been outside the city. kirk and i saw that last awful m. night shyamalan movie “the lady in the water” somewhere in new jersey about a year ago. the theater was so full of kids running around talking to each other, talking on the phone, running laps around the theater, etc., that we went and got our money back about 20 minutes into the movie. it was clear that they had been dropped off by the parents on the way to dinner or whatever — no supervision whatsoever and the theater management could have cared less. it was impossible to hear the dialogue in the movie over the din — that’s how bad it was.
but i’ve not had similar experiences in the city. yet, anyway.
hopefully all will go well tonight, and i expect it will. and hopefully, “into the wild” is as good as i think it will be.