I realize I’ve been hating on movie theaters a lot in my last 2 posts, and I’m pretty tied of it.  In all honestly I love going to the movies and you should all support your local movie theaters… BUT let me finish this off with one last big final FUCK YOU to the movie industry… and that’s with this nifty little trick.

I’m not sure how many of you have herd of this before, but I strongly recommend using it… especially at Regal Cinema, or any other movie theater that costs and arm and a leg. Basically, if you’re going to the movies with 2 or more friends, just have 2 friends buy tickets, while you wait in the lobby.  Then have one of your friends return to the lobby from the theater with both stubs in hand.  Bam, you get in free… or more realistically, split the cost with your pals.  Better yet, get there early and do this trick with like 10 friends! that way, your seeing a movie for a fraction of the cost!

Hey, after ripping off the movie theater that bad, maybe you can justify buying a large popcorn after all   =P

Why?  I can happily sit down in front of the TV and watch movies or sports games or ANYTHING for hours without feeling the need to stuff my face!! Why do we feel the need to eat to see a movie? I can’t even begin to answer that… but since I can remember, there has been a strange marriage between eating and watching a movie.  Speaking of which… here is the most unholy union of them all… movies and popcorn.  popcorn and movies. They go together like peanut butter and jelly don’t they? Here’s my theory… the smell.  oh yes nothing quite compares to the smell of buttery salty popcorn… it fills the whole lobby! Now that salty deliciousness is going to make you pretty thirsty isn’t it? better get a drink too right? AHA! they already got you.

Now lets get to prices… they are criminal.  A beer at Yankee stadium is around $6, which is outrageous… a large popcorn at Regal Cinema is $8.  You do the math.  and they trick you… oh Jesus do they ever trick you.  A small popcorn is $7 which is the most ridicules thing of all, since the small popcorn is such a tiny bag… whats the point? now for just 50 cents more you can have the medium! The medium is a big bag of popcorn. a really big bag. a single person, on average  will not finish a medium bag of popcorn, and if you do, you will be damn full… like sickly full.  BUT WAIT! you can get a TUB, nay an entire BUCKET of greasy buttery fatty popcorn for just 50 cents more!  this is insanity.  no one in their right minds would attempt such a feat… you would surely die of a heart attack 35% of the way through your barrel of popcorn… but it’s the price that gets you! the same principal applies for drinks. By the time your done buying your medium bag of popcorn and (if your feeling crazy) a large soda, you’ve already tripled the price you already paid for your ticket!

I don’t even mess around with buying candy… if anything I bring my own in… and some water bottles if I’m really trying to save cash…

Bottom line, there is only really one small way around this tyranny… and that is to go with a friend.  you and your buddy split a large popcorn and large soda and bam… that’s the best deal your gonna get. all the popcorn and soda you can handle for about $8 each… still bullshit I know…

My advice… break the chains the concession stand has on us fat ass Americans… go to a movie and enjoy it WITHOUT buying anything to eat or drink, that’s the only way to win… or at least sneak in your own snacks.

You know what one of my favorite things ever to do is? Do you? It’s going to the movies! And that’s what I’ve been doing a whole lot of lately… I felt the need to check out The Men Who Stare At Goats, and, believe it or not, to go see Saw VI.  So you can expect a review of both films pretty soon… but before I even talk a bit about ether of those films, well… I got a lot to say about something very near and dear to me. Being in a movie theater so often has inspired me to write a little something else first… Going to the movies.

Oh the very architecture of a movie theater gets me excited… I remember being a little kid of 5 or 6 and going to the movies with my parents… (and pretty soon, without them) and just getting excited when I saw the building.  There were so many stairs leading up to that big 30 door entry way… I always remembered feeling like Rocky when I was done running up those. And the lobby was just one big ass room with every desire a little 6 year old boy named Johnny Harkins Jr could dream of.  Eye catching movie posters everywhere… the absolutely intoxicating fragrance of buttery popcorn… and the electronic bloops and bleeps that made up the score to some of my favorite arcade games of all time!  Yes, the run down piece of garbage Commack Cineplex was heaven on earth as far as my young mind was concerned; and I guess that’s where my love of movies started… my love of the movie theater.

And still today I love going to the movie theater… as you read not to long ago, it’s still one of my favorite things to do… but yikes… as American Treasure Bob Dylan said, “The time’s, they are a’ changin’.”  Lets get this out of the way first… going to the movies is a (comparatively) very very expensive activity.  There are plenty of other fun things to do for less or for free… plus with the internet and so many cable movie channels, it’s easier now more than ever to see a movie for free.  Now sure there’s a couple of crappy little movie theaters that still do like $2 Tuesday or something, and if you live near one of these I implore you to patronize it… but most high end movies theaters charge around $10 for a ticket. This is bullshit. You’s think that with the advent of easy free movie access on line combined with that little recession were in would LOWER movie prices… but they’re HIGHER than ever, and the movie industry is taking in millions and millions more every year.  This baffles me.  I say baffles because while as crazy as it seems to spend so much on a ticket when it would actually be less of a hassle to just sneak in the damn theater… I still do it.  Yep, I’m probably in a movie theater around 50 times a year… more if I can help it. I guess that $10 really isn’t going toward “seeing” the movie… but more that movie “experience” and in my opinion… you can’t put a price tag on that feeling.

Now speaking of price… there is one other reason going to the movies is such an expensive activity… and that’s the price of movie theater food.

Holy shit. The price of movie theater food is criminal.

Check back for part 2 of my thoughts and feelings on movie theaters and how much I hate the evil genius bastard who came up with the price of popcorn.

Before i can speak on how i feel about Paranormal Activity, i feel i must first talk about this very young new genre I’ve dubbed the “camera’s perspective” movie.  The first movie of note to pull this off has to be the now infamous, Blair Witch Project in 1999.  I don’t want to get too deep in this movie, but over all, good horror flick, and very revolutionary for the time.  Whats most amazing about the film in my opinion is the fact that the budget was reportedly as low as $500,000 and it went on to gross nearly $250,000,000 world wide!  What the movie lacked in big name actors or special effects it made up for in eerie atmosphere and suspense.  It was however, criticized for the shaky camera work, making the film sometimes hard to make out and understand, as it was filmed on a hand-held camera while running through the woods, but it makes sense for the movie, so its a forgivable sin. It wouldn’t be 9 years till the next big commercial success of a camera’s perspective movie. That next movie was 2008′s “Cloverfield” which was anything but subtle and haunting. Instead, going for the polar opposite; Cloverfield focused instead on BIG ACTION and and BIG name director on board, J.J. Abrams.  Long story short, another good movie, but i don’t wanna get too deep into it.  Once again however, Cloverfield was panned for being hard to see or follow sometimes due to the camera work, and while it was supposed to look exactly how it looked, it somehow didn’t fit the movie as well as it did in Blair Witch… The production values of Cloverfield were almost too good for the audience to believe someone was running around with a camera and just accidentally perfectly captured some alien attack in all it’s C.G.I. glory.  I think were at in interesting time in the history of entertainment… We as American consumers have been so desensitized to violence and horror from a plethora of sources including movies, music, and video games, to name a few; Therefore, we only get that shudder of fear, that true uneasy feeling in our stomachs from “news footage”, things we trust as real.  I’ve seen a guy’s head explode from a bullet probably a million times via Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, games of Mortal Kombat, or anything with Stephen Segal involved, and am today, relatively unfazed by that in a movie.  But the perfect example of that not translating into real life, was back when all that footage of P.O.W. executions surfaced up in Iraq. There was raw footage of it all over the internet and I couldn’t bring myself to watch any of it… It was too real! I could feel my heart drop as i saw what was about to happen… because i knew it was real… This wasn’t Jean Claude VanDam, this was a REAL person who’s life REALLY ended… the simplicity of it was what was most grave… You could show the most horrifically graphic murder scene in a Saw movie, and it would be infinitely less affecting than the aforementioned scenario… which comes back to our original point…

This new genre of film, the “Camera’s perspective”, i get it.  We’re so used to seeing violence and special effects on this huge screen with beautiful editing and camera work… and that takes us out of the experience… It is so much more unsettling to see something on a shaky camera than in perfect zoom, because we equate shaky camera work with the news (the real scary stuff) and beautiful camera work with the movies (the fake scary stuff).  So these horror movies with the “camera’s perspective” draw us in on a whole subconscious level… Paranormal Activity isn’t any more “realistic” than any recent horror movie, but because of the way it’s filmed, we’re already believing that “it could happen” before the film even starts!

Wow… after all that, i realized i don’t even have too much to say on Paranormal Activity =P   Here’s my take on it…

The Exorcist is one of the scariest movies ever made… and Paranormal Activity is kind of like the exorcist filmed from a first person perspective…While that’s a gross oversimplification, i really don’t remember much more about the movie at this point.  It was however a perfect marriage of  The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield in that, it relied on suspense and atmosphere more than big budget thrills, but still had some pretty impressive special effects that left me scratching my head over how they were done. (wow, i could do a whole separate blog on my thoughts of C.G.I. vs old school special effects)  And thank God they did away with the shaky camera problems that plagued both it’s predecessors by making the premises of the film that they bought an expensive camera to document their Paranormal Activity… it’s pretty brilliant actually.  Yep, all the shots are nice and lined up… yet they still find clever uses of the limited camera work, scaring you with things that are perhaps slightly out of the field of view of the camera… all top notch stuff.  Overall, if you want a scary, but more impressively, different horror film, check out Paranormal activity; I give it 4 out of 5.

I think it’s interesting that this style of movie making is all but dying out.  I’m already feeling the hype machine about this new movie coming out called “the fourth kind” and it’s in a similar “documentary” style touting “it was based on actual events” just like Paranormal Activity.  Also i’d like to point out this really funny new TV show called Secret Girlfriend.  It has one of the most cursed slots in television history, 10:30 and 12:30 on Wednesdays on Comedy Central… No one has ever been a follow up to South Park and made it more than one season and to be honest… i think this show might be the one to do it!  Its a pretty uninteresting premise… you have your typical crazy xgf, typical goofy dumbass best friends, and a typical hot perfect girl as the love interest… but ok, here is where the show gets intriguing… YOUR THE MAIN CHARACTER!  thats right, the entire show is from a first person point of view… you ARE the camera… and honestly… that alone makes it worth watching.  It’s a really new and idea i’ve never seen done before, and leads me to all sorts of thoughts… imagine an entire feature length movie where YOU are the star… and it’s in 3-D! the possibilities are endless.

Wow… this blog is really long… and i think it sucks  =P  but hopefully you all like it as i have at least 4 more coming “quickly” in it’s wake!