The Funny Farm
Where life is beautiful all the time and I'll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coats...
Adventures of a Basic Force For Good in Our TimeTM
The staff and infrequent contributors of the Funny Farm were taken to see Fahrenheit 9-11 last night (yes, we are a thoughtful, progressive organization that believes that, in order to make the customer happy, the company needs to make its' employees reasonably content. Plus, there's just the owner, operator, chief cook and bottle washer plus one Roulette Queen to have to worry about anyway...). We were a little concerned about a few things, what with the posts I read about some others having trouble getting tickets. So we called the theater ahead of time (about sevenish) to make sure there would be seating for some of the remaining shows (at that point there were four left : 19:50, 21:20, 22:40 and 00:10). I was told that I could show up at any time, but it would be best to get there ten minutes early - especially if I wanted to get a good seat.
What with putzing around the zone for far too long and various other sundries, we didn't manage to make it out the door until fifteen minutes before show time. And we made it into the show with ease. We could have gotten almost any seat in the house, almost!
Mind you, the stated start time was when the blipvertsadverts and trailers began, not the feature. Good thing, too - otherwise three-fourths of the crowd wouldn't have caught the beginning of the movie. Let me digress for a moment and inform the casual reader that the Funny Farm staff are not enthralled with the modern movie viewing experience. We tend to get a bit annoyed with boorish behavior in public, and have seen too much of it the last few times we went to a movie. So the fact that we didn't wait for this to come out on DVD (like we have for The Return Of The King, ferchirssakes...) and instead braved the (we thought) teeming throng to see this film on opening weekend is a milestone in and of itself. Anyways... (and, yes, this is more or less the point of this little piece of code text) the blipvertsadverts seemed incredibly targeted to the projected audience coming to see the film. I couldn't tell you many of the (seemingly interminable) film previews - the remake of The Manchurian Candidate was pretty much the only big budget megastar Next Big Money Maker Cash Cow Industry Support Vehicle in the bunch. They had a Tim Robbins movie that looked interesting as well. But the sheer volume and obvious targeted marketing of the previews made this part of the experience somewhat unsettling from our perspective.
We also recognized the little Scion vehicle (we think) in the blipvertsadverts at the beginning - The Roulette Queen accompanied us to the Great White North once upon a time and there were a couple of these little cars driving around one of the armpits of Ontario. They looked interesting, and of course like what's been around Europe for quite a while. I didn't notice any microwave dishes, funky sails, or other unusual antennae on these cars when I saw them tooling down the road on a recent beautiful Sunday, either. I just saw something similar to those Cooper Minis in size, that looked easy to handle and comfortable. And of course what a good little liberal who cares about the environment wants. Funny how they know all about that, and now have a product ready at hand to meet that need.
So, anyways,... one of the other things about all the fluff before the actual, you know, movie - was that it allowed us to notice that the Star Theater we were in was almost as good as a CineSphere experience - the screen was covering our vision zones, the sound was nice - and drowned out most of the crowd chatter quite nicely, thank you! - and there were no worries about sitting behind people and having to look around them. Let the show begin!
They announced all of the previews, but they couldn't tell me the actual feature was about to begin? Good thing I was paying attention, then. Nice Pythonish touch to wait for a long time to get to the credits, too. And an important story to tell. But a bit of the drama queen got into this movie, and the film is exploiting a lot of the emotion by building up the case in such a way as to incite those emotions. In other words, it will probably upset liberals (even more than they already have been since the Torturer in Chief stole the WhiteWash House) and anger conservatives. I can see them throwing this in everyone's face just like they did the Wellstone memorial as a partisan ploy by the Democratic Party that the Republics should be allowed to censor. And I can almost hear the vile Pigboy talk it up (cough) to our troops on Monday...
Anyways,... if you find that you can't see this movie due to there not being enough seats in the house, and you want to view it in comfort, feel free to head down to the Star Theater at Great Lakes Crossing in metro Detroit Auburn Hills , MI. Call ahead to make sure that there are tickets (and be amazed when they say "Sure! No problem... just get here ten minutes before the show!"). And tell 'em the funny Farm sent you!