A Return to the Big Screen
A few days ago I found myself getting caught up with two newly released movies and how to go about seeing them. In the past year, most of us have not been to the movies outside of our living rooms. That has probably not been a big deal to some who only went to movies infrequently anyway, but to someone like me who considers going to the movies to be in my top five activities, it has been a very big deal. I have been an aficionado of the movies for a long time and even once got into some hot water with a blog that reported on my movie critiques. In 2007 I got tagged in a New York Times article which suggested that based on my blog posts I was going to the movies when I should have been fixing the problems of the oncoming financial tsunami that was hitting my investment management business and on the verge of crushing the rest of financial world. I was portrayed as Nero, fiddling while Rome burned. The harshest part of that was that it was Evan Almighty and Mr. Brooks, two pretty weak films that got me tagged.
Since the start of the COVID pandemic last year, we have simply stayed away from movie theaters. It hasn’t been as hard as I thought and I do have an 83” flat screen that does a pretty good job of imitating a home theater of significance. I got to the point where I was prepared to declare the movie theater business dead as a door nail as the world finally moved on to streaming completely and left the movie theater as the vestigial ice house of the modern era. You still wanted and needed movies, you just didn’t need to go to a movie theater to scratch that itch. In fact, i have seen a number of new releases on Apple TV and other cable news outlets including Netflix and Amazon Prime. I’ve seen two Tom Hanks releases (Greyhound and News of the World) and felt that the distributors probably did quite well by pocketing all of the proceeds from their online streaming distribution rather than sharing it with the physical movie theaters. Perhaps the biggest hole in the market was the snack bar concession sales that have disappeared, but I feel I have done my part by buying a popcorn machine to fill the gap.
I have been wondering if we would see things start to change back to favor movie theaters now that COVID is slowly declining and vaccinations are taking hold. It is probably way too early to make any important predictions based on meaningful data, but here is one bit of news that did not escape my attention. I have seen ads and trailers for two movies recently that have caught my interest. One is called Land and is the directorial debut of Robin Wright Penn, and the other is called Nomadland and stars Frances McDormand. I have found that hulu is making Nomadland available via streaming as of tonight, but Land is taking a decidedly more hard-to-get approach. I have not found that it is available now or at any announced planned time on any platform for streaming. It undoubtedly will be at some time, but anyone like me that has a hankering to see it before it finds its way onto the internet needs to go to a movie theater to see it. This does not strike me as a completely rational or economic decision. It may not even be a strong artistic decision if the intent of art is to be seen broadly. It releases today, just like Nomadland, but to see it I had to figure out like the old days, where it was playing and when. When I went to look it up the first thing that jumped out at me was that it was playing at a Drive-In Theater called the Santee Drive-In, which declares that it has Ben a continuously operating family-owned drive-in for 63 years..
This intrigued me. Who doesn’t find drive-ins intriguing in this day and age? Drive-ins were a thing of the fifties and were dying by the mid-60’s. I can honestly say that the last time I went to a drive-in theater was about seventeen years ago when my son Thomas was in camp theater camp in Hew Hampshire. I remember it very distinctly because it was a hot weekend in a part of the world that prided itself on not needing air conditioning. The inn I was staying at taught me about how long it took for my sweaty head to soak one side of a pillow as I kept seeking some way to get some rest on a sweltering night. That was the weekend that I decided that a fun thing to do with my son would be to take him to a drive-in theater, which seemed more in-place in southern New Hampshire than it did back in the real world. Well, that same hot stinking night air grabbed away the fun of the evening by making it too hot to sit in the car watching the movie. We weren’t allowed to keep the engine running for air quality reasons, so we got out and sat on the hood of the car with our backs leaned up against the windshield and our pillows soaking through under out heads. It was not a positive experience. So much so that I don’t even remember what we went to see at the drive-in.
Well, we haven’t been out on the town for quite a while now, so I asked Kim if she wanted to o to the drive-in to see Land. She agreed and I invited both my sister and my brother-in-law. Strangely enough, pets are not allowed, which seems odd since they would stay in the car. But COVID has had its impact on the drive-in as well and they have announced that only every car parking spot is to be occupied. That seems more than a little strange since I’ve never thought of car-to-car infection of the virus. Since the days of the window speaker are long gone in favor of hearing the movie over the dedicated FM channel, so its not like we would even need to keep our windows open.
So, our planned outing was met with lukewarm response from brother-in-law Jeff and Lisa, and then my other brother-in-law Bennett came down with post-vaccination chills, so it was just Kim, sister Kathy and me for a fun night at the drive-in. We arrived early, which from the look of the lot was not really required. There were perhaps 20% of the drive-in’s capacity parked here and there across the lot. We came in the middle of a showing of ET. I parked and immediately realized that modern cars do not lend themselves well to keeping the radio on but the lights off. I decided I would rent an FM receiver at the snack bar. It was dinner time anyway, so Kim and I went off to the building in the middle of the lot. The snack bar was as basic as they come. We ordered up the usual movie staples of popcorn, candy and sodas, but we also chose the pizza offering. When we saw the mini 5” rounds we expected the worst. Strangely enough, the pizza was excellent and everything from the popcorn to the Good n’ Plenty was just like the good old days. It turns out the FM radio was a free rental, so we settled in for an evening at the movies.
We were reminded how emotive Spielberg made ET, and after a brief musical interlude, we settled in for a viewing of Land. We ended up thinking the movie, which moved slowly with almost no dialogue and chronicling the 2+ year travails of a depressive woman trying to survive in the wilderness, ended with a strong theme of how we must all soldier on in life and take most of our grace from helping others. As for the return to the BIG screen, I would say that the visual part of the film was weak to poor with a fuzzy and dark screen mostly of the time. The audio through an old plastic FM transistor radio (the same type we used in 1963 to listen to the latest Beatles release, was equally weak to poor. We concluded that there was a reason why so few were in attendance at the Santee Drive-in on a Friday night. My home theater is about 10X better in audio and visual quality. The biggest reason for us to go back is probably the 5” pizza rounds, which doesn’t bode well for the future of the big screen in the new economy.