So what’s it like returning to the movies? It’s something
My first order of business two weeks out from my second vaccination shot was to go get a stupidly delicious double cheeseburger at Boulevard Burger and Brew here in Richmond, then go across the street to Movieland to see the Bob Odenkirk action flick, Nobody. It was a great decision, and made me realize how much I missed going to the movies (even though I wrote a piece about, you know, not going to the movies).
I’m lucky enough to have a great home theater setup, a Vankyo projector beams streaming, cable, and DVD offerings onto a big white wall, and a pair of reasonably priced Pebble speakers supplies ye olde crystal clear sound. And yet despite my best intentions, I have a hard time losing myself in whatever I’m watching. I pause movies more often than I like, take leisurely intermissions, and heck even stop them entirely. I am king of my domain and yet a prisoner to an oft-fractured movie experience. And lo what a treat it was to be subject to the movie theater experience, most notably the movie’s continuous motion. I was a few minutes late and could not rewind, or pause upon my arrival and carefully tear open my peanut M&Ms (pairing well with a Cabernet I may add). I was the only one in the theater and yet felt fittingly self-conscious enough to not murmur more than a laugh or a soft “whoa.” And my God, the sound and the picture! The brightly splayed colors and images with the perfect amount of saturation (as if they spent the year perfecting screen quality). A level of sound optimally adjusted that was loud and soft at all the right moments. And a compelling new movie I wouldn’t have seen for the price of a $20 rental, and that used all these features to pull me into its embrace and only release me when the credits stopped rolling.
It was exquisite, as tasty a cinematic experience as the juicy burger I had before the showing, dripping with that inexorable quality of a umami flavor, cooked so as still to have its rich, meaty flavor, and designed to melt in your mouth upon taste. I left the theater a satisfied man, with a feeling of contentment I hadn’t experienced for a long time, well before the last time I saw a movie in a theater back in March 2020. Perhaps just a simple craving answered after a long absence, or perhaps something more.
#nobody #movieland
