Take me back to a time when seeing a movie meant going out and seeing a movie…

I’m going to stop saying that current life frequently influences these entries as it will just be assumed going forward. I’m finally resigned to the fact that this process will likely evolve from being entirely The Diary I Never Wrote into The Diary I Never Wrote and The One I’m Currently Writing. It kind of has to right? I mean I can’t write another Diary I Never Wrote down the road because I’ll be dead.

With all that being said, this week’s entry was particularly challenging for some reason, and I think it had a lot to do with just making sense of it, that is the meaning of why it stuck. In retrospect, which happens to be the case with almost all of these, I think I found it not fantastical, when maybe, in fact, it is outstandingly fantastical as it comes to life from the world of movies. This is a topic that is not foreign to my ramblings and is a strong thread throughout these entries and throughout my life. My passion is in film, well really, I think, storytelling, but I fashion myself, loosely, as an actor, writer, comedian, artist, producer, and lover of quality artistic product, first and foremost, film. As noted, this week’s entry and leading firework memory was induced by current life experiences and as a result to it having been both challenging to give birth to this entry and the slight dichotomy of old unwritten entry vs. new unwritten entry it has led me to produce another “To Be Continued…”. I’ve also decided to present the two parts in reverse, well, actually, in order I guess as this is the memory that was invoked and next week’s entry, which if on time is actually only a few days away, will capture the current that led to the past. For fuck’s sake, I’m starting to bore and confuse myself, let’s get into it, eh.

Unfortunately, as much as I would like this to be a movie review BLAWWWWG and associated post (lord knows I love movies), it’s not, however this week I was taken back to a firework memory in which I’m sitting in a theater watching, or what I should really say is experiencing, a movie. It was a simpler time in which it would not be unusual to be watching a brand new blockbuster film at the theatre (by the way, how in the hell do you officially spell this word? Is it theatre, or theater? Do they have different meanings? Wtf?), because where the fuck else would you watch it. At home on your tube television? Hell no. I recall sitting at the far end of a row of seats in a theatre, at the far end because the theatre was packed to the gills as they used to be and also because you may, or may not, remember that large movie theaters frequently only had one or two aisles along the entirety of the theater and then seats jammed in wall to wall, or aisle to aisle as it were, in between. I think that was called revenue maximization, and people wanted to see movies in the theater, because again, where the fuck else would you watch them.

In this instance it’s probably 1986 and I’m sitting there at the movie with my oldest brother and his girlfriend, as I recall, and I’m literally sitting at the edge of my seat for the entire movie. Literally on the edge of my seat, meaning my ass did not touch the back half of the seat cushion the entire film. As it seems somewhat weird that I was going to a movie with my oldest brother and his girlfriend, I vaguely recall that maybe my brother was “watching” me or something along those lines but was also very cool about having me along to see the movie. Let me clarify, I know I’m there with my oldest brother, but I don’t remember him or his girlfriend being in the theatre. Seems like while that is a piece of this in this instance it’s not the most important piece. I also kind of remember it being in the middle of the day as well, which seems kind of strange to me for some reason given that the movie that I was watching was Aliens. I hope the buildup was worth the pay off, and if it wasn’t, then you haven’t seen the movie.

The film was both terrifying and tensely brilliant at the same time. The scene which I recall most vividly that encapsulates the firework moment (screw you on any spoiler fronts on this, the movie is 35 years old go watch the damn thing if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s fantastic) is when Ripley and team (RIP Bill Paxton by the way, as your portrayal of Hudson in this film is an all-time classic, just amazing shit) are using the Alien tracker thingy and the Aliens are closing in on them and should be inside the room according to that thingy but they aren’t. Hicks then looks up in the ceiling with a flashlight and see that there are a Justin “The Biebs” Bieber posse size number of Aliens scuttling toward them through the “rafters”.

The team starts shooting like crazy and Aliens begin dropping through the ceiling panels all over the place like Bender from The Breakfast Club. That shit was intense, just a beautiful build of suspense!

On top of these memory worthy items this was also an R rated film and I was a bit of a wuss, so to some extent it was a bit of an evolution for me I think. Here’s this film I should be terrified of and I recall just being in awe of it, sitting in a theater going through this crazy thrilling adventure. Also, my brother was there but other than it being kind of cool that he took me to this I don’t recall any other interactions or extraordinary moments between the two of us, it was the movie and the intensity that remains, but I do also appreciate that he was there “shepherding” me forward, even if unconsciously. When I look at it now and consider I was in sixth grade at the time and the movie was R rated with a lot of gore, intensity and swearing it only makes sense that I was there with my oldest brother. He was probably like, ah, screw it, he’s probably fine.

All of this exploration into the fact that I should’ve been terrified and scarred from seeing this movie but don’t recall being so led me to another memory of being at a drive in, also a way to “experience” a movie, watching Creepshow and peeking through my fingers at the screen during a scene I wasn’t supposed to watch. I remember my cousin checking to make sure I wasn’t watching and laughing as he saw that I was in fact, despite being insanely terrified, peeking through my fingers.

Now, Creepshow came out in 1982 so why anyone would let a second or even third grader go to Creepshow is beside me, other than the explanation being that I was the sixth kid and at this point it’s kind of like, ah, what the hell. That or it was the second of a double showing which followed Bambi. However, my other cousin, who is like a year older than me was also there and I recall him saying he was fine watching it, which makes sense because he was always kind of a bad ass.

Needless to say, and I don’t think I’m fully capturing it here, Aliens made an impact and it was the impact that you could go to a movie and be on an absolute thrill ride from beginning to end. I’m not going to say it set the stage for my Love of film and storytelling but I think it unconsciously definitely made an impact. I talk about the fact that I’m interested in creating things that stir emotions, well this definitely did that. It stirred emotions, and when I say emotions I don’t mean you have to be weeping or angry or scared, in particular, but just the ability to take the reader/listener/viewer/observer out of the reality they are currently in and make them deeply feel. Shit, I hadn’t even seen Alien, here I am watching a “sequel”, which I say in quotes because I believe this was a powerful stand-alone film, to a movie I had never seen and I couldn’t look away. It was a thrill ride and I was on it while sitting in a massive auditorium with a crap load of people I didn’t know. Crazy that some 35 years later I would find myself in a totally different and totally similar experience that would bring me back here, but this time there wouldn’t be massive amounts of gun fire and flames and explosions and hilarious crass banter, instead the experience would emerge from living for a year plus in an unimaginable real world into a fantasy world that is more of A Quiet Place…Part II…

To Be Continued (dun, dun, da)…