I wish I could go back in time and tell my younger, film score collecting self that one day I’d be arguing with Hans Zimmer personally on some evil thing called “Facebook.”
Hans had posted memes about only watching Dune in a theater. Well, sorry, we have little unvaccinated kids at home (hopefully that will change in the next few weeks) and I’m not spending three hours in a theater potentially catching COVID. (I am, of course, vaccinated, but you never know.)
I also hate masks—not ideologically, but as a matter of comfort. Plus they fog my glasses.
So I watched the first half of Dune last night on HBO Max. It’s phenomenal, no surprise. I kept thinking, “This exposition is so much better than in Lynch’s film.” Then I realized, that’s why Villeneuve split the book in two.
Obviously those awesome vistas would be better in a theater...but even before COVID, I all but stopped going to movie theaters.
I loved seeing movies in a theater as a kid. We saw practically every big 1980s movie in one of Martha’s Vineyard’s four, tiny, single-screen, old-school town theaters. I loved the popcorn, the rituals, the ambiance, the communal experience.
As an adult in Los Angeles, my favorite date night was the adorable Off Vine restaurant and a movie at Arclight Hollywood. At some point, Off Vine had a fire and when it reopened, they had to bring their cute little house up to code and the ambiance got messed up.
I met my wife in 2010 and she’s a runner, so she likes to go to bed early. We’re not “night people” at all—and when our kids (twins) were born in 2014...well, I think we’ve gone on three dates in seven years (when we had grandparents in town to watch the kids).
But it’s not anything we miss. We don’t even have a babysitter we use. We catch up on good movies when they appear on streamers or cable—that’s our life and we’re happy.
Since 2014 I would go out on my own to see something I really wanted to see (like the Star Wars sequels) or needed to see for work...but I never liked seeing a movie by myself.
Today, between parking and all those ads and the cost and the antiseptic nature of digital projection...it’s just not an experience to which I have any emotional attachment.
We’ve taken our kids to exactly one movie: Frozen II, which they loved, which we saw on Christmas Day, 2019 (a couple of months before the world shut down) in Alhambra—where there was no parking whatsoever.
Anyway, this is my blog, so I’ll ramble about things of no interest except to me. Then I’ll wonder why so few people read my blog.
I was just joking with Hans on Facebook—I would never watch a movie on my phone. But watching one on TV at home, even as spectacular as Dune, seems perfectly fine.
I’ll watch the second half of “Dune, Part I” tonight. Maybe I’ll even pause it at some point to go to the bathroom!