Sci-fi summer
This is one of those summers when I’m excited about going to the movies. While there are blockbusters every summer, and every Christmas, the lineup this year seems like the perfect (to me) mix of all my favorite themes – science fiction, superheroes, Steven Spielberg, with a dose of Harry Potter and J.J. Abrams.
Yes, D & D boys, I am the girl you always wanted to marry. (But don’t ask me to play D & D with you. That crosses the line into too dorky.)
Some of my happiest, most lost-in-the-cinema moments from childhood and adolescence included a lot of non-reality-based escapism. Of course, in my day, there was no Harry Potter and J.J. Abrams.
My younger brother and I grew up in a small city within walking distance to two movie theaters. The theaters had 99-cent specials on weekend matinees (can you imagine?!). When we were old enough, our mom let us walk on our own to the theater to see movies. We were enthusiastic about any and all movies that came to our neighborhood. We were beside ourselves before the opening weekends to “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and all of the “Star Wars” movies. (Of course, “The World According to Garp” was just as thrilling, though it was devoid of aliens and magic swords.) And long after the movies had premiered in our town, before multiplexes on the outskirts of town had taken all of the viewers and confused us with choices, my brother and I return to the theaters to see the movies. We would trudge back across the walking bridge, over the river that separated us from the pure, perfect joy of a dark theater, popcorn, and soda, to see the movies again and again. To our mom, 99 cents times two, almost every weekend, was divine, cheap entertainment. She loved movies too, although her choices tended to be more classic films and grownup dramas. (She was the one who brought us to the R-rated “Garp.”) We were all starved for perfect celluloid stories.
One of my strangest childhood moments was seeing “E.T.” with my brother. I realized as soon as we sat in the front row of the theater that we were seated very near to someone I was in awe of. He was a student at the university, an actor who I had seen play “Othello” and other Shakespearean roles. As my brother and I watched the movie, it was hard to forget that someone I idolized was seated just a few seats away. When the end came, and E.T. was saying goodbye to the children who had become his friends, the young actor’s face was wet with tears. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t have the words to express why I was in shock. But I think it was something like this: Wasn’t this someone whose job it was to spin un-reality for me, the hungry audience member? Was he just as affected as I was by this pretend story? Did that mean that he was just like me — so starved for a story that was better than his daily life that it moved him to tears?
Luckily for me, I eventually found my own (ex) actor to go to the movies with. (And yes, he did play D & D.) We’ve already lost ourselves in the X-Men prequel movie. And even though “Super 8,” “Green Lantern,” and the last Harry Potter movie can’t possibly be as fantastic as we would have thought when we were 12 years old, we’ll be there, probably in the third or fourth row, since our middle-aged eyes can’t take front and center anymore.
