I’ve lost count of the number of movies I’ve seen in the theaters;
The theater-going experience doesn’t really change much,
So they all sorta run together as motifs, beyond a certain few instances:
Feeling the sting of the credit card as you pull it out of your wallet
As ticket prices have annually gotten more costly,
Consuming greasy popcorn nearly all the time, snuck-in candy even more often,
And the unspoken wrestling for the armrest,
Slow, almost imperceptible inches forward,
And neither willing to concede for the next two hours.
The first memory of the movies I have is from crying
Watching James and the Giant Peach or The Iron Giant.
The first R-rated movie that I remember seeing in theaters
Was either Django Unchained or Seth McFarlane’s Ted;
2012 was a big year to enjoy unlikely duos on film:
The freed slave and German dentist in Antebellum America;
The pothead Boston man-child and his foul-mouthed teddy bear.
One of the exceptions that marked the movie outing different
Was when I saw The Dark Knight in the summer of 2008,
Whose hype matched its title as the blockbuster of the year,
And a scene that often sticks out to me is the opening bank robbery:
No superhero origin story, but just straight into the action
With the burst of armed robbers,
Whose weapons sound like thunder in IMAX.
The unfurling orchestra of not just unholy men robbing a bank,
But of a reign of terror that will soon descend upon Gotham.
And it ends with the pitch-shifted voice of the fiend of our story,
Advising an injured bank manager, but truly the audience,
As the camera zooms in on his painted face, to embrace being stranger.
I couldn’t stop talking about The Dark Knight for months afterward,
And I guess I can’t stop writing about it either.
