Watchmen isn’t here yet, but Madea goes to jail is!
I’m sure there is plenty of nuance that I, the layman, don’t understand about the process of booking films at local theatres. The expense of renting the reels, the guesswork of understanding what people will want to watch, the desire to get films your kids can watch, the limitations of an island with only 3 theatres…
However, I have trouble understanding where certain distinctions are made. On Martha’s Vineyard, for example, Cloverfield was here on opening night, in sync with the whole nation, but Watchmen is not. Movies that have immense amounts of oscar buzz do not get here, often, until after the oscars have already occurred, while in the mean time Paul Blart: Mall Cop is getting a full 2 week run.
Perhaps my pea-brain is unable to comprehend the logistics of running a successful theatre, but I somehow am not convinced. Everyone I speak to on Martha’s Vineyard wants to see the oscar nominees. Everyone I know anticipates films like Synechdoche: New York and wanted to see Slumdog Millionaire a month before it arrived here. Films that are hyped on The Daily Show and Letterman are ignored completely by the theatres. People often end up traveling off-island just to see movies because they are never made available here, or they get disappointed waiting and waiting for things that never arrive.
It doesn’t help matters that the Edgartown theatres regularly advertise movies that are simply never shown. I walked in and saw a giant poster for “Choke” on the wall, which excited me, but it never arrived. I had to acquire it by other means. The film was a disappointment, but dammit, I was led to believe that I could be disappointed for 9 dollars on the big screen, not for free on my laptop. Ahem.
Right now, people are talking about another disappointment all over the internet: Watchmen. I’d love to join the conversation, I could probably already write my review “Snyder focuses all his attention on making sure that the ‘look’ of the comic is just right, and in doing so completely forsakes the story and the acting.” – Sound accurate? Well, it’s what 300 was like, so I expect the same, but the point is that I want the movie to be here, I want the chance to be disappointed for myself, before the flood of disappointed reviews is able to color my already anticipated loathing with even more antipated loathing.
Let’s build that bridge to the mainland, already.
March 21st, 2009 at 11:27 am
Update: Watchmen appeared here yesterday (March 20th) – Fine. Only 2 weeks too late to write a relevant review, or whatever I might want to see it for (basically to berate Snyder for ruining the book) … anyway, this was a harsh indictment that seems silly to me at the moment. I don’t care enough about the Watchmen movie to write something like this, so why did I? I have no idea. Oh, I must have been in a bad mood. As this blog grows and more people are viewing it, I will have to concern myself with being more socially conscious and not grumbling so much about specific things. However, it is a large gripe around this island that movies are so slow to get here. It’s not unwarranted, it just doesn’t fit the theme I’m going for: presenting myself, my art, and generally interesting things to the WORLD WIDE INTERNETS. Nobody is interested in hearing me gripe about lack of movies, except maybe to validate their own gripes. I shouldn’t be in the business of that. The end.