Poor, poor pitiful me

My assistant taught me not long ago about spoon theory. Spoon theory is a model to describe what it’s like to live with chronic pain or illness: spoons are the measure of how much energy a person has every day, and each activity takes a certain number of spoons, and people who are not ill have an infinite supply of spoons while people with a chronic illness have a limited supply and must manage their spoons each day or risk running out and not being able to do anything but rest. I don’t have a chronic illness or injury that makes my life difficult, but I can recognize that it’s actually a really great metaphor for limitations. But my assistant told me about spoons in a slightly different context: spoons can also be the intangible measure of how much emotional energy a person has to spend on a person or an activity or even a given day. It’s possible to run out of spoons and really just be unable to face a task or a person. Rest can refill the spoons of someone dealing with chronic illness, but all kinds of things can give you more emotional spoons. Sometimes just a nice chat with the right person can be what it takes to give you the spoons you need to face something.

Lately, with the theatre, I’m running out of spoons.

They get refilled quickly… and then they’re gone. I feel like I’m facing problems I don’t know the solution to.

The main issue is that we’re always broke. Now, I can joke all I want about how, well, of course we’re broke. We’re a NON-profit! HAHA! Get it? A NON-profit? Hahahahah…. But the truth is, hey, we’re a non-profit. And a nice non-profit model is that 50% of the money that comes in will be earned, and 50% will be donated. If we weren’t open to donations our prices would be higher. Even a 70/30 or 80/20 model can work if you have a successful business. But my theatre has, since we opened, basically been on a 100/0 model. Our costs have gone up and we’ve incurred new ones (oh, okay, property taxes!) and our prices have basically been the same. So while our ticket and concessions sales have exceeded our initial break-even figures, we have less in the bank each year. And there has been no significant fundraising in almost five years.

This is a scary place to be. Forget making fun improvements, like a digital ticketing system that will let you buy your tickets online and keep up with a membership program, or putting cabinets in the catering area so we can get rid of the 8-foot tables. I’m struggling just to keep the place running. The building is 87 years old and leaks pretty much everywhere. (Sometimes it leaks onto the $60,000 projector/money-maker. That’s a Tums kind of day.) Light fixtures wear out. Fans stop working. Light bulbs have to be replaced. (Did you know a bulb for a projector can cost up to $1200? It’s true.) Last summer’s dismal movies and admissions almost took us out. (And we did much better than the national average.) And the carpets need to be cleaned, and we need to do a serious paint touch-up.

And even all of that isn’t what is taking all my spoons. What’s taking them is when I hear, as I do several times every week, from people who say they love and support the theatre, that they saw the movie I’m showing already out of town.

Seriously, people seem to think they’re being encouraging when they say, “Oh, you’ll have a good weekend! That movie is so good!” It’s harder and harder for me to not yell, or cry, or walk away. I don’t go into restaurants and tell them what a great meal I had at a competing restaurant. I wouldn’t tell my hairdresser what a great cut I got from her competition. I don’t brag to the owner of my local grocery store about the great deal I found at Wal-Mart. What would make people think that I want to hear how good the movie was that they saw somewhere else?

So, the affordability of my theatre isn’t a selling point. People are happy to pay twice as much to see a movie in a place with a smaller screen and sticky floors. And the superior projection and sound might be too geeky for normal people to care about. (Have I mentioned our superior projection and sound? Because they are, and we worry about that and fuss over it and consistently check and test to make sure we’re on point.) The things we focused on the most aren’t the most important.

Maybe I’ve done too good a job. Maybe it looks effortless and people just don’t realize that every ticket we sell matters. I recognize that it’s hard to put a positive spin on, hey, we’re almost broke even though you say you love us and we’re vital to the community!

Or maybe we’re not? Maybe my idea of the importance of my theatre to this town is delusional? But there is so much evidence against that! We were named Most Valuable Patron at this year’s Chamber of Commerce awards ceremony, and while I know someone has to win it every year, this year it was us, and I think we earned it. And there are people in this building ALL THE TIME. Just this month, in the span of 13 days, in addition to the movies we showed, we will have had free showing of Jurassic Park in 3D, a legislative forum and lunch with two state legislators, a free Earth Day movie and event, a free jazz concert to raise money for a scholarship foundation, a private lunch with the wife of a college president candidate, a PFLAG meeting, a free documentary about rape culture, and two meetings of the college film class. (It is quite possible that working 70 hours a week is taking up a spoon or two.) Clearly, we’re vital to this community. So why are we broke? (Did you catch how many times I used the word “free” in there….?)

 

I went to a conference for people who run old theatres, and I came back with what felt like a million spoons and pages of ideas of programs, big and small, that we could start to get more people into the theatre. And all but one of those programs requires at least a little initial investment and have I mentioned we’re broke? All those spoons are gone. In fact, just thinking about some of those programs and what it would take to get them started feels like it might even be taking spoons away from tomorrow. Because in the end I have to spend my energy on the movies, on trying to get people in here, to get them to wait three weeks. And even the movie front is tricky right now. (Thanks for being so great to work with, Disney!) At least one of the things the conference taught me was that I’m not alone. Everyone running a small theatre like mine is thinking all of these things this morning, just like me.

Sigh. What a lot of navelgazing this is, even for a blog. I guess I’m trying to work some things out, and I’m doing it in print here, and I’m trying to rationalize not posting anything for six weeks. It’s hard for me, right now, to think of movies as art. They feel like a product to me, a product I can’t seem to sell enough of.

I tried to leave this life but this life wouldn’t let me go

It’s a commonly held belief that boys won’t watch movies or read books about girls, and that men won’t watch movies or read books about women. I say that’s crap. Boys and men, and girls and women, will watch movies and read books about characters they can identify with, or learn from, or respect.

There are movies about being a man that a lot of women have a hard time with. First Blood, for example. Or Taxi Driver. Or even The Shawshank Redemption. These are stories that resonate deeply with a lot of men but leave a lot of women cold. (Notice I’m saying “a lot” a lot. I’m not saying all.) And movies like The Piano, or The Notebook, or Bridget Jones’ Diary don’t really resonate with men. These are the extremes.

The success of Bridesmaids took everyone by surprise, but not me. I think we don’t give men enough credit. I think they’re more than happy to watch a movie about women if those women are interesting to them in any way. A woman waiting, weeping, for a man if pretty boring and I don’t think many men can watch a typical chick flick without wanting those women to just do something already. They don’t like chick flicks for the same reason I don’t: those women have no agency. Even if they are ostensibly the main characters, they are dependent on someone else to keep the plot going. Bridesmaids was about a bunch of women making their own decisions and mistakes, and being foul-mouthed and human and relatable, even to men. Guys are perfectly happy to watch female characters if they’re interesting.

The main proof of this, to me, is the audience I get for movies with characters like Katniss Everdeen and Tris Prior. It is almost 50/50 male/female, and I will get groups of guys who come in together to watch. They aren’t being dragged by their women. (That will be next week, when I have the boyfriends and husbands who are compelled by their women to come watch a Nicholas Sparks movie.)

What makes the Hunger Games and Insurgent movies different is that these heroines are interesting. They are tough and resourceful and don’t rely on anyone else. They are the spiritual daughters of the ultimate chick-that-men-love, Ripley from the Alien movies. She is a character beloved by women and respected by men and she is a woman. I mean, like, she gets to have fears and emotions. She gets to cry. She gets to be maternal. She gets to be a fully-formed character who happens to be a woman and men love her as much as women.

(True story: I wanted to name my daughter Ripley but my husband told me that was too much of a burden for a little girl.)

It seems like there are a lot of interesting female characters lately. Not as many as in the 30s and 40s (that’s a whole nother post, full of nostalgia for a time I didn’t even live through) but enough that I feel like it’s possible to get a few glimpses of women-as-actual-human. I hope this continues.

Same thing, I’m afraid

I had been working on a post about popcorn. How we make it, what kind we make, how much I end up eating it. I thought it would be nice to get away from the heaviness, plus it had been a while since I posted and for all four of you who read this, I wanted to put something new. Something lighthearted. Maybe something a little more day-to-day.

But it turns out that Fifty Shades of Grey isn’t done with me. A few people in my town have decided to protest, apparently with signs and everything. I’m confused by this for several reasons.

The easiest one is, um, this movie is already a month old. It’s already a blip in this year’s cultural rear view mirror. I’m just showing it so late because that’s when it finally worked out to get it. If they wanted to protest, they should have been in Sioux City a month ago.

But mostly I’m offended. I am offended that someone would try to impose their morality on a whole town.  I want to live in a world where those arguments about censorship have been settled and we’ve all agreed to act like civilized humans who allow each other the freedom of choice. I know now that I don’t live in that world. Maybe the majority of people in my town are trying to. Maybe even an overwhelming majority. But the fact that even a few people thought they would tell me what to show or not to show because they know best what everyone needs is something I’m still trying to fit into what I know about things.

And I’m going to be honest: I’m not thrilled that the few who are freaking out chose to aim their anger at me. Our library has been carrying these books since they came out, right there on the shelf, for free, where, ostensibly, any kid could casually walk by and pick one up and hide in the corner and read it. I say ‘ostensibly’ because it turns out the books have been checked out with a waiting list since they got them. (So much for any argument about the books not fitting in with the town’s morals.) But nobody has ever asked them library not to carry them. For free. Right there where anyone can get to them. Why in the world would anyone think they had the right to ask me not to show them, when at least at the theatre someone has to pay to get in and we made sure at the door that they’re old enough?

I never thought of myself as an activist and it certainly never occurred to me that just booking a movie would become a political act,  an act simultaneously in favor of sexual choice, free speech, and free market capitalism. And I am heartened by the fact that, as far as I can tell, there are more people offended on my behalf than making a fuss about the movie in the first place, so I guess if a particular pastor chose to pick this battle, it appears he’s losing. I don’t take a lot of satisfaction in that, because, ultimately, what’s the point? Having a group of people decide they’re going to boycott the theatre serves no one. But I feel comforted that I must have been doing something right for the last four years that people would be so quick to stand behind me.

Right now I feel more tired and uninspired than I ever have. I should feel energized by this, I guess, but it makes me feel weary. I want to get through this weekend and I want someone to talk to me about something else. But I will be paying attention to who is holding the signs this weekend.

In the end, they really are just movies

Fifty Shades of Grey opened three days ago to better reviews than some people expected and respectable box office numbers. I was actually hoping to get it on opening weekend, or on the break. A couple times a year I do get a movie on opening weekend.  It has to be a movie I’m convinced will do average or better for me, but it’s fun, every once in a while, to offer an opening movie for $4. Even though the terms are terrible opening weekend, if we sell out and they buy even average concessions, we do pretty well. I tried to open Fifty Shades on the break, but they were going to require me to show it 14 days in a row, and since we’re only open Thursday through Sunday, there was no way for me to make that work. So, instead, I showed American Sniper this weekend and made a lot of money.

Now, I think I documented my concerns about American Sniper. They turned out to be unfounded, but I did have concerns. But the thing is, I showed it anyway, and there are lots of reasons for that, reasons that are especially relevant in light of the fact that in the last hour I’ve received two messages asking me not to show Fifty Shades. [edit: three messages.]

1. The first message indicated a letter or article or something from our local priest that was printed in last Thursday’s edition of our local paper, urging people not to see it because it encourages demeaning treatment of women. Now, I’m not Catholic but I really like our local priest. He seems like a really nice guy, but my first thought was, how does he know? The movie hadn’t come out when he wrote that. Unless the Catholic church got advance copies that they’re sending out to their men in the field – which I suppose is actually not outside the realm of possibility! – he would have no way of knowing what kind of treatment is being encouraged. And the very first rule of movie critique? You cannot judge a movie you haven’t seen. (The source material does not count. Just look at the debate about the book and movie versions of The Shining to know that the movie might not have anything to do with the book.)

2. See everything I’ve already said about these books and movie(s).

3. There is no way to say what I’m about to say in a way that doesn’t sound blunt and dismissive, and usually I try to be more like my hero Ann Richards, who would tell the truth but nicely. After all, we’re all ladies here, right? But in this case, blunt is the only way: if you don’t like a movie, don’t see it.

4. As with most people who run a business, if you want your voice to have any sway with me, make sure you see something in my theatre occasionally. When I get messages from people I know for a fact do not see movies at The Majestic there is no threat of losing their business because I never had it anyway. And if someone really did want to encourage me to show movies with a positive message, the turnout for Son of God would have been better. I had been contacted by people telling me they were bringing big groups from their churches, and I wanted to make sure that we had enough shows, so I stacked that weekend full…. and then turnout was so low that even at a normal number of shows, attendance was lousy. It was a big disappointment for me and my volunteers. And turnout for movies with positive messages, movies like Selma, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, or Heaven is For Real, is not great for me. So I’m going to show the movie that broke February records no matter what it’s about, and those who, understandably, don’t want to see it, well, they don’t have to.

5. There are lots of reasons to protest a movie. People are offended by movies that don’t agree with their own values. I’ve shown some movies with some pretty gratuitous, over-the-top violence, body counts that should offend anyone who claims to care about human life, and I’ve never once had anyone ask me not to show them. But I think we can agree that unless someone is already unhinged, the violence in a movie doesn’t make the audience go out and become killers. Movies are stories. Stories that teach lessons, yes, but just stories. They inform our values, but they also reflect them. The blinding success of the books tells us that they pass the Roth test and live up to contemporary community standards. To argue otherwise, and to ask me not to show these movies when there have never been complaints about any violent movies I’ve shown, indicates to me that the degrading treatment of women is a scapegoat to justify being offended by such a blatantly sexual movie. Otherwise, I would have come to expect some kind of protest any time I showed anything not rated G. If you’re going to demand that movies be a moral guide, then demand that of all movies. Actually, no, don’t. I wouldn’t have time to answer all those complaints.

6. And finally, even if I was willing to ignore all I’ve said before, in the end, it’s not my job to be the community’s moral compass. People have been asking me for weeks when we’re going to get Fifty Shades. Women are already planning ladies night out events, and thanking me for at least trying to get it on the break. There are clearly enough women who want to see this that, even if I was offended by it, it would be stupid of me not to get it. Sometimes I do get small movies that only a few people are going to want to see, but it would be irresponsible of me to not show a movie that so many of my customers have told me they want to see. I’m personally irritated by the violence and jingoism of the Taken movies, but that didn’t stop me from showing them. My morals cannot be the deciding factor in what gets shown. I won’t go political. There are too many lies presented as truth on either side. But when it comes to fiction, anything is game. If people want to see it, I’ll show it.

Bradley Cooper is also a really good actor

I watched American Sniper last night. And I didn’t hate it nearly as much as I thought I might. In fact, things about it were very, very good.

When I was in grad school, I actually – and don’t judge me for the uselessness of this – I actually studied war movies. I’m not going to claim to be an expert or anything. I’m just saying that I’ve watched a ton of them and really given a lot of intellectual attention to them: narrative structure, political overtones, and, and this is what got me last night, characterization of soldiers, their commanders, and the civilians they leave behind.

Years ago, my one of my bffs and I went to see Saving Private Ryan and were both disgusted. (It’s possible it’s better than I remember. I hated it so much that night, it fell so short of The Thin Red Line, which came out around the same time, that I’ve never rewatched it.) Anyway, this friend was studying Vietnam war lit at the time, so we both fancied ourselves pretty knowledgeable about war stories and the thing that stands out to me about our post-movie conversation, even all these years later, is her laughing about how it had EVERY stock war character. Not just some, but all. And I remember her saying, “The CO who’s too old for this shit, the young kid who kills someone and becomes a man, the sniper who think he’s god….”

Now, I’d been focusing on WWII movies, and snipers weren’t a huge part of my narratives, so her insight really stuck with me. In the years since, I always hear her voice when I encounter that character: snotty, brash, overconfident.

But it occurred to me about 20 minutes into American Sniper …. This is HIS movie! The sniper who thinks he’s god! It’s his story from his perspective! And THAT’S a movie we really haven’t seen before.

We’ve seen plenty of movies about the aging commanding officer who has to be tough but fair to his guys, the older man they all fear and love. We’ve seen the newbie, the one who has to learn the hard truths about war,  poor kid who usually has to make his first kill to feel like a man. We’ve even seen the guy who should hate all this but doesn’t, the guy who was born to be a soldier and really loves it.

But the guy who feels like it’s his job to protect everyone? The one who has a pathological need to try to keep all the other soldiers safe? We haven’t seen his story before. And I have to admit that even as the body count began to reach Call of Duty levels I stayed engaged with the movie as it tried to calculate the toll that takes on a person.

I don’t think the movie was totally successful. In truth, I think it should have been half an hour longer. Bradley Cooper did a good job, but the script was just a little too thin. It didn’t commit 100% to any real position on the war, or snipers, or professional competition. It rested a couple times too often on a series of events about which the most that could be said was, well, and those things are things that happened. I would have liked a little more emotion in a couple of scenes, and the last act actually felt rushed and thin. It made some pretty big connections that would have been more satisfying had they been spelled out.

I think most people had a preconceived idea of what the movie was like, myself included, and I think it’s safe to say that most of us were wrong. Even though it’s fro avowed conservative Clint Eastwood it isn’t a jingioist, anti-muslim screed, but neither is it a tree-hugging anti-war movie. Some of the people who get killed in the movie needed to be killed. But the movie doesn’t take a lot of satisfaction in that. Killing them is just an unpleasant necessity. Spoiler Alert: there is no music for the closing credits. So far this weekend everyone has walked out in contemplative silence. Maybe the movie didn’t commit enough to give us something to talk about, to argue about. Or maybe the movie committed to so much it’s hard to know where to start.

And from the lobby side of things, I was worried about this weekend. I just wasn’t sure I had it in me to deal with a bunch of people with whom I am not politically aligned. No, for the most part, everyone this weekend was really nice to work with. Yeah, we had a few douchebags this weekend, but there is always a percentage of people who are going to be douchebags, and the more people you have come through, the higher that number will be even if it’s about the same percentage of people. They’re harder to be nice to, though, when we’re as busy as we have been this weekend and we’re dead-on-our-feet tired, although I think I did a good job of being polite. Because for the most part, people have been super nice. It’s always fun to have people in who have never been here before, and this movie certainly got a few guys in who, well, let’s just say I don’t think they go to many movies.

We have one show left this weekend, but we’ve sold out all the others. I always figure, if you sell out every show, you didn’t have enough shows. So I’m going to find a way to hold over American Sniper while still keeping my three shows of Whiplash. And next Sunday is the Oscars. And then I’m going to take a nap

Fifty Shades might be…. good? Part Two: Men Can Like Sex Too

The anticipation about Fifty Shades of Grey has lead to a lot of conversation, both in the theatre and in my daily life. And while there has been a lot of speculation about its quality and its reception in our ostensibly conservative little town, I’m not gonna lie: a lot of what I’ve heard is women gushing about how sexy it’s going to be, and how sexy Jamie Dornan is. “As long as I get to see him without his shirt through most of the movie, I don’t care if it’s any good!” (This is an exact quote from someone who stopped me as I was putting a box of cereal in my grocery cart.)

And you know? That’s cool. He is pretty hot. I got similar reactions when I showed Magic Mike, for obvious reasons. I heard the same thing about Zac Efron in Neighbors. I hear it about Denzel Washington. (What is it about Denzel that makes the whitest of white rural housewives adopt a southern accent when they say his name, so that the –zel ends up with two syllables that sound more like –zayel?) I hear it any time I show a movie with Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, a Hemsworth, or the Twilight guys. I get an earful about Idris Elba, or Daniel Craig, or Bradley Cooper even if I’m not showing a movie.

But you know what I don’t hear? EVER? “Jennifer Anniston dancing on that pole in We’re the Millers is so hot.” Or “I wish Megan Fox was wearing even less in the Transformers movies.” Or “Mila Kunis was so hot in Black Swan that I don’t even know what the movie was about.” Or “Jesus Christ Margot Robbie in The Wolf of Wall Street”. I don’t hear about Jennifer Lawrence, or Emma Watson, or Emma Stone, or Christina Hendricks. And, look, they’re all undeniably hot.

Because I know that men have been trained to keep that to themselves. Women don’t want to hear it. We don’t want to be compared to other women with whom we could never compete physically. We’ve all had kids and don’t have time or money to eat right or exercise and even if we did, there’s botox and implants and nose jobs to be had. Because those women? It’s their JOB to look good. They all bring a lot to the table already, but we expect them to go to unfair and dehumanizing lengths to look as good as possible. All of us normal housewives? We just can’t. Even the ones who still look amazing after the kids can’t compete with Jennifer Aniston on that pole. And so we don’t want to hear about how much you appreciate someone who can.

Except there are a few major problems with that.

The first is, if we’re so feminist and supportive of “real” women, wouldn’t we recognize that those actresses have a career obligation to look good? Shouldn’t we applaud them for actually pulling it off? Because they have the same insecurities in their heads that we have in ours, and being told “good job!” might feel really good. (And women, we all know that what a woman thinks of how we look can mean more to us than what a man thinks.) Or at the very least, could we not be so judgmental? Because I don’t know many women who, if they’re being honest, would say no to a free tuck or access to a personal chef who will keep them healthy or the best moisturizer money can buy.

Second, we need to stop being threatened by other women. Your man chose you. He didn’t hold out for Mila Kunis, because he’s smart and even he recognizes that she’s not attainable to a normal guy. He can acknowledge that she’s hot without somehow feeling like he’s entitled to some of the hotness. He loves you and thinks you’re hot too. Wrap your brain around that now and your life will be much happier.

But the main thing is… if women are allowed to express their sexuality out loud, shouldn’t men be able to as well? Why is it ok for women to objectify men if they can’t objectify women? Either we can all say something about who we find attractive or none of us can. (I vote for all!)

I know there are books worth of arguments against what I just said. How can the oppressed be the oppressor? (To which I say, it’s more complicated than that and a normal husband or boyfriend isn’t the oppressor.) I’ve heard the argument that men are thinking it even if they’re not saying it. (They don’t say it because they love us and don’t want to hurt our feelings. Well, maybe they deserve the same care for their feelings?) We’re surrounded by images of hot women, so seeing a man presented to us as a sexual object is a novelty worth remarking on. (Okay, then speak in those terms. Don’t just appropriate the objectifying language that turns us off when it comes from men’s mouths.)

But the reason this bothers me the most, the reason I think most people don’t even think to point out how unfair this is, brings us back to my issue with the knee-jerk hostility I keep encountering from people about Fifty Shades of Grey. Here it is: is it socially acceptable for women to express their sexuality because we don’t take their sexuality seriously?

It’s threatening when a man acknowledges the attractiveness of another woman. Why? Because his women feels like she can’t compete and like she MUST compete. It’s always a competition. (Remember, women want to feel CHOSEN.) Is there some action implied in a man’s compliment? If my husband says “Christina Hendricks is hot” should I immediately assume he’s going to leave me for her? Or that he’s comparing me to her all the time? Is there something predatory in the mere recognition of reality, that Christina Hendricks IS indeed ridiculously hot?

But if a woman says, “Channing Tatum is hot” it’s… cute? Is that why it’s so often followed by a giggle or a girly laugh and a blush? Women can’t even own their own sexuality, and men don’t have to be threatened by it? Do we all instinctively know that if it’s the men that do the choosing, a normal woman would never be chosen by someone like Channing Tatum and so her man can rest easy that his relationship isn’t in danger? It’s offensive enough if her man thinks that. What’s infuriating is that, apparently, a lot of women also think that.

They’re so loaded, these girlish pronouncements of who’s hot. They limit women’s sexuality while simultaneously excluding men’s. I say this: women, either everybody gets to enjoy beauty, and everybody gets to be sexual, or nobody does. I vote everybody.

Fifty Shades might be…. good? Part One: Women can like sex

I read two and a half of the Fifty Shades books. And, look, the writing was silly and the plot was sillier, but I couldn’t find it in my heart to judge the books or EL James. They were written as episodic fan fiction, so OF COURSE she would repeat herself. She needed to remind her readers what happened last time, because it might have been a while. And she has admitted that she wrote those as a kind of therapy for herself. She never thought of herself as an Author. She wrote them, they were popular, and a publisher offered her money and she took it. More power to you, girl. Seriously.

More important is WHY they were popular, both the fan fic posts and the books. And I don’t think it’s really about the BDSM. People in “the scene” have rightly pointed out that the books are not an accurate representation of BDSM or even a healthy sub/dom relationship and might actually portray an abusive relationship. I don’t think that’s even the real appeal of the stories for women. The stories are wish fulfillment on speed. The handsome, all-powerful man notices the young woman who seems unremarkable but he really sees her and loves her and is so attracted to her that he can hardly control himself, and, listen, this guy is, like, defined by his need for control. A lot of women just want to be desired, powerfully and by someone who could have his choice of women but, inexplicably, chooses her. That’s why vampire stories are so popular; women want to be taken and ravished. As a guide for men, the Fifty Shades books might be more of a suggestion than a to-do list. It’s less about the joys of the red room and more about allowing a young woman to embrace her sexuality in a way that doesn’t require her to feel guilty about it.  (Also, I don’t hear the chorus of voices crying out how abusive and manipulative Noah is in The Notebook, a movie I’ve never been able to finish because the first few minutes are so abusive and sick I have to look away every time, and I’ve finished some fucked up movies.)

So the problem is that the books tell a story with ridiculous details but that still manage to operate on some fundamental truths, which explains their rabid popularity. Maybe women have been waiting for a story that acknowledges their feelings! They’ve been told good girls don’t like sex, and so we rely on a narrative that involves having a more powerful man introduce it, a man so compelling that even a good girl will give in and discover…. That she likes it! And she has no choice to do it because he’s just so in control. She gets to have her good sex and not be a slut. Perfect!

Except the writing is terrible. I mean, it really is. And this is why the movie might be really good. It can tell the story that women want to see without all the repetitive phrases and inner goddesses! It can take the story seriously! It can … gasp… respect women’s sexuality and the process so many of them feel they have to go through to express it!

The people making this movie had two choices, and I’m sure they knew it. They could make a cheesy, tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top melodrama and let the acting and script and music try to rise to the intensity of the story. They could continue to treat women’s sexual desires as a joke and a freakshow. Or they could pull back and make something serious, something beautiful and respectful that tries to show the fantasy women actually have. And everything indicates that they chose option B.  Now that’s not to say that they’re going to be successful at it. Lots of bad movies have been made by people with the most sincere of intentions. But I give them so much credit already just for trying.

I’ve never had so many people talk to me about an upcoming movie as I have had ask me about this one. Am I going to show it? Like, just the act of showing it, for some people, is risqué and maybe even transgressive. And I am trying to not get impatient and make sure that, every time, I look them in the eye and say, “Yeah! I can’t wait to see it!” Not like a giggling schoolgirl, embarrassed by the mere hint of sex, but like an adult woman who looks forward to the possibility of a good, sexy movie.

At least Bradley Cooper is really handsome

 

I don’t want to show American Sniper. There. I said it.

Now, I’ve shown movies before I had no interest in. Heck, I’ve even shown movies I kind of had objections to. But it’s not my job to be some kind of moral police for the town. (I can’t wait to show 50 Shades of Grey.) But American Sniper is different for me, though, and once again I’m thinking about the notion of how much of an opinion one should have about a movie before one has seen it.

I don’t want to rehash the thing. If you’re unfamiliar with Chris Kyle and his book American Sniper, on which the movie is based, look it up and then come back.

I have no patience for macho posturing. When someone starts a sentence with, “If I had been there…” or “What I would have done was…” I tune out. Simmer down, Nobody cares what you would have done or said and chances are pretty good you wouldn’t have actually done or said anything. The toughest people I’ve ever known never needed to brag about it.

See? I get angry just thinking about it.

 

And now I’m going to show a movie based on the (ghostwritten) book of a confirmed liar and delusional macho posturer. And, actually, so far I’m still good. I know Bob Dylan isn’t who he pretends to be but I still like his music. I’m actually more okay than most people with the lie of self-redefinition. I’ll admit, I’m not a fan of who Chris Kyle lied to pretend to be, but it’s not the lie that bothers me. It’s not the movie based on that book, and it’s not the fact it’s directed by that Clint Eastwood, who is a less critical thinker every year. And even if I show the movie, I don’t have to watch it.

What bothers me is the knee-jerk jingoist rednecks who are bending over backward to claim that Chris Kyle was a hero and that American soldiers are beyond criticism. First off, look. A soldier isn’t a hero. Soldiers do their jobs. We can respect them for being good at it and we can be glad they’re doing it so we don’t have to. But soldiers aren’t heroes any more than firefighters or police officers or good surgeons or air traffic control specialists. They have hard jobs, they’re trained to do them, and they knew what they were getting into. And any one of them can be bad at it. They can be assholes. They can make it so other people don’t want to work with them. And they can be called out for it.

Chris Kyle was good at his job but bad at shutting up about it. Recognizing that isn’t treason and it isn’t disrespectful. It’s just being honest.

So now we have this movie. A war movie that is actually more of a war allegory, seeing as how the veracity of some of the incidents is unconfirmed. And, again, ok. If you know me you know I love a war movie so… hyperreal sniper movie? Sure. Bring it!

But I’m starting to get a taste of the people who, like, really want to see it, and I’m dreading having to keep my mouth shut. Because that macho posturing? I don’t want it at work, either.

I know I’m a loudmouth liberal in what’s becoming the reddest state in the country. And I know that lots of people who know me would shake their heads at my naiveté, or my ignorance, or just plain stupidity. And that’s cool, because it doesn’t matter what they think about my politics. The beautiful thing about my job is that it’s pretty non-political. I work hard to keep it that way! I know there is probably an argument to be made about the elitist nature of my willingness to book Birdman but it really wouldn’t run very deep. My job is about art. I’m not naïve enough to think that art isn’t political, but I have so far mostly been able to avoid the overtly political.

But now I find myself wondering…. Am I going to hear the word “raghead” in my lobby? Am I going to have people telling me what they would do or say if it were them? Am I going to have to listen to people give me their unsolicited opinion of liberals, Obama, and Democrats? (Actually, the answer to that one is already yes.) .

I’m just not looking forward to it. Just the tone some people have taken asking me if I’m going to book it is starting to feel like I’m reading the comments section on CNN and, really, why would anyone do that? There has already been a suggestion about the “riots” that would happen in town if I don’t show it. Riots? Really? What about this movie is making everyone so pugilistic? Why the bloodlust? Why does there even need to be such loaded, violent, threatening language? And that’s what scares me: this movie is giving people license to let out a little bit of the hate and anger they usually keep pretty well hidden. Why do I want to give an outlet for that?

 

But this is the dilemma: maybe it’s ok. Maybe it really is nuanced and complex and shows that being a soldier is a fuzzy moral area, and the good soldiers do things they can’t reconcile with their own sense of right and wrong and are rewarded for it. Maybe I’M the one with the knee-jerk reaction. I love my town. I’m proud that we’ve been embraced by the people who are from here, and I am struck almost daily by the kindness and generosity and big-heartedness of the people I know. That’s why we stayed! So maybe I’m the one being uncharitable? We’ll see. I’ve never been so apprehensive about showing a movie before. I hope I can come back in a couple of weeks and tell you that I was wrong and that I’m the problem.

I’m the only Dear Leader around here, thank you

I know. I just got started on this blog and then I left you without a dope beat to step to. I acknowledged in my first post that I’ve never been terribly disciplined. Our family sucked all the marrow out of Christmas break and I didn’t sit in front of a computer any more than I had to. But I still have stuff to say and now I have time to say it, so I’ll just keep going.

People asked me for weeks about The Interview. For posterity, here’s the basics of the situation. Sony began advertising for their movie The Interview, a movie in which two dumbass reporters find an unlikely fan in North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un and are tasked by the CIA to assassinate him. North Korea immediately renounced the movie and threatened retribution if the movie was released. Sony, being Sony, didn’t pull the movie, and were almost immediately hacked. Thousands of emails and tons of personal information were released to the public, as well as, apparently, their films Annie and Fury. The emails were awesome: bitter, angry, dismissive of the stars they work with. Sometimes racist. It was an instant PR nightmare. Then the group claiming responsibility for the hack, as well as claiming to be funded by North Korea, threatened to bomb any theaters that showed The Interview. After the major theater chains announced they wouldn’t show it, Sony announced on December 17it would not release The Interview at all, but by December 23 announced they would, in fact, release it to independent theaters and smaller chains. By December 24, Sony announced it would also be releasing The Interview that very day to video-on-demand services.

Before it was released, what I said to everyone was, look, it’s probably a terrible movie. People have forgotten how to say “no” to Seth Rogen and James Franco and if they’re not careful, they’re going to end up like Adam Sandler. And Sony should have known better than to ever greenlight a movie about an actual world leader. It’s not that hard to change the name by a few syllables and make him the leader of some non-existent Asian-sounding country. It’s not up to Sony to decide which world leaders we will and won’t recognize and it was a dumb move on their part. Would that excuse North Korea for going all terrorist on theaters that showed the movie? Absolutely not. But let’s not pretend that they play by any rules other than their own, if any at all. We can pretend to be civilized all we want but let’s be adult enough not to pretend to be shocked when someone else isn’t.

And, frankly, I don’t think it was North Korea at all. All of those leaked Sony emails were the work of someone who wanted to hurt them. It was personal. Because the other thing we shouldn’t pretend is that other countries get us enough to know that blowing up buildings isn’t how to hurt us the worst. No, the way to hurt us is to take away our money, and the take away the chances of making more money later. That kind of knowledge comes from the inside.

But since its release, I’m shocked at how, once again, a major studio, either through lucky coincidence or  as a result of a well-documented history of bad decision making, found a way to screw movie theaters.

I emailed my Sony rep on Tuesday December 23 saying, essentially, hey, if you guys are going to ship prints of it after all, I want one! I got a reply back from my rep’s boss saying, that won’t be a problem for next weekend. I was pretty excited. Nobody within 200 miles of me was going to show it. I was going to advertise the shit out of it and make a bunch of money and get a bunch of people in the theatre. But since my actual rep wasn’t going to be in until Monday, I couldn’t officially book it, so I didn’t announce it just yet.

And I’m glad I didn’t because the next day, when Sony announced their plans to release it VOD, I changed my mind. Why would I waste a weekend showing a movie everyone had already watched?

Simple math. Let’s say I have myself and three buddies, and we all want to see The Interview. We can go to a major chain and pay $12 each, for a total of $48, of which Sony would likely get about $32. We could see it at The Majestic and pay a total of $16, of which Sony would probably get about $11. Or we could call 4 MORE friends, pile up in the living room and watch it for $6.99, of which Sony probably got about $4. The math sucks for everyone. But it especially sucks for small theaters, those like mine with one screen. If I had committed to showing it before they announced the VOD, I would have committed myself to a weekend when nobody came and I had lost out on the chance to show something else.

Sony knew it was going to release the movie on demand before they arranged to ship it to theaters, and yet they didn’t come clean about that. I could (and someday probably will) fill a whole post about my commitment to seeing movies on the biggest screen possible and why movie theaters are an essential part of movies. For now, let’s just accept all that and ask: what will studios do when they’ve driven the venues for their product out of business? Are they so sure that people will continue to love movies the way they do now if the only way to see them is on their television? I’m not convinced such a small screen and such an insular experience will capture our hearts the way the movie theater experience does.

Now, the leaked emails certainly show a company that commits fully to its bad ideas, so maybe this is just representative of this company. And maybe they just panicked: all of this terrible press, and decisions to be made…. Maybe they just didn’t think it through. Or maybe, even in the face of public humiliation millions of dollars lost and an uphill fight to regain people’s goodwill, maybe in the face of all that they still couldn’t resist a chance to screw over the movie theaters? It’s hard to know. But I do know I cancelled my booking for Annie. My theater is small so this protest doesn’t amount to much to them, but I couldn’t bring myself to give them a single other screen right now.

Holdover holdout

There is an argument against digital film. It’s not an argument worth having now because, frankly, that ship has sailed. Even if 35mm is more real, with blacker blacks and better shadows – and I’m still not convinced it is – the fact is that the studios demanded we all switch to digital and we did.  And I for one am willing to sacrifice a bit of depth of color, which most people won’t notice, to gain what I think is the best feature of digital film: universal availability.

I think art should be shared. Especially an art like movies that are created to be seen on a big surface, ideally with other people. When movies are only available on film, and those film prints cost thousands of dollars each to produce, there are only so many copies of a movie made. If, like me, you run a theatre in the middle of nowhere with a potential audience of, say 6000 people, the odds of getting your hands on a usable print of a small title are pretty slim,

Digital film, though, changes that. For the cost of a hard drive, anyone can have any movie! In my little town, I can show Boyhood in a reasonable time and it will look great! Film prints are no longer a limited resource! There is a career’s worth of philosophy I could write about how art must be democratic but since I’m sure we’re all on the same page here, let me just say: digital film is breathing new life into art.

Which it needs, because at the same time, the major studios are apparently working as hard as they can to shut the little guys down.

Now, I get it. It’s all about the money for them. They get a percentage of the after-tax ticket sales, so if you buy a ticket for $12, and they’ve arranged to get 65% of the house, they get, after sales tax, around $7.28 per ticket from a big city chain. Tickets at my theatre are just $4 (even on opening weekend cuz we’re cool like that) which means that they’re only getting $2.44 for your ticket.  They’d like to make it difficult for me so that you’ll go to the more expensive theatre.

How are they making it difficult? Not letting us have movies. Or making us wait 7, 8, 9 weeks to get them knowing that, by then, the audience is played out. Or they agree to one set of terms on the phone (yes, you can show this for one week!) and then try to force us into different terms later (you promised to hold this movie over even if we all know it will perform poorly and no we can’t prove it but I’m sure I can alter an email to make it look like you did). (Funny how that anger sure makes it in writing when the promises didn’t.)  (Or if they know they can’t get you in writing they resort yelling at you and hanging up on you.)   Or not letting us show two different movies even though we know our audiences personally, by name, and we know that people will come to see two movies in a weekend.   And it’s gotten much worse lately.

They would much rather see me close and trust that you’re going to drive 48 miles to see it and pay more. And, in a lot of cases, you probably would.

But not in all cases. That would leave a lot of people out, both because now taking the family to a movie costs $48 for admission rather than $16, and because it takes gas and time to drive somewhere

But also because unless there is someone you trust, someone you can actually talk to about movies, you’re far less likely to take a chance on a movie like Boyhood that you might not know anything about. It is difficult to spend all that money and time on something  unless you know for sure you’re going to like. So a movie like Boyhood makes less money and the next challenging or inventive movie is just a little bit harder to get made.  And the people in the small town, who ended up loving Boyhood, would never have seen it at all. And the art never makes it to a small town.