I know. I know. I’m rambling about movies again.
Last weekend, though, was a day that balanced movies and my work as your newspaper editor.
Ahead of Labor Day weekend, advertising mentioned a National Theaters Day at the movies. And since the Bijou’s been waiting diligently for the necessary repairs to their projector or a new projector, it has been since “Lightyear” opening night that I’d been in a movie theatre. To say I was itching for a reason to go to movie theatres is an understatement.
It isn’t that there haven’t been movies I wanted to see. I’m still upset I didn’t make time to see “Marcel the Shell With Shoes On” when it was at FilmScene in Iowa City, the only theatre it played at in our area.
But Saturday offered an opportunity to see multiple movies at once. I started stacking movies to see Saturday morning, since that was going to be my one fully official day off most work for the holiday weekend.
Friday morning, I had balanced a schedule of getting to four movies in what would have been a seat numbing marathon at the Galaxy cineplex in Cedar Rapids. There were a few minutes of overlap between the end of one movie and the start of another, but I figured that would be just the trailers and I was in the theatre where the movies were screening and had reserved seats for each. It wouldn’t be like I was driving from Mount Vernon and being 20 minutes until show times start…
Then Friday afternoon I got a call that an event with a number of politicians was happening in Sutliff Saturday afternoon that would have looked odd not to have a local reporter covering.
So, that meant two afternoon movies had to be thrown from the roster. I’m sure I’ll eventually see “Bullet Train” and “Top Gun: Maverick.”
Of course, being in Sutliff at roughly 7 p.m. when the event was wrapping up, put me closer to Iowa City and its theatres, and there was an 8:20 p.m. showing of another movie I wanted to see. When you’ve already got five miles towards Iowa City, it’s easy to argue “what’s one more $3 movie ticket today?”
During that day, the only food I had was two large buckets of movie theatre popcorn, two large sodas and two boxes of Raisinets. Drive throughs in both Cedar Rapids and Iowa City had a more than 15-minute wait, and I had tight time tables to make it from the Galaxy cineplex to Sutliff and then from the campaign event to Iowa City.
My final weekend tally saw me seeing “Breaking” with John Boyega, George Miller’s latest “3,000 Years of Longing” and the A24 horror comedy “Bodies Bodies Bodies.” Of that trio, the Boyega drama was the one I’d heartily recommend.
At the beginning of September, I’ve marked more than 770 movies overall watched, more than 700 of them first time watches for me.
I may have a problem.