Luke wrote:If you are worried about what joe blow thinks about you you will lead a miserable life.
If you don't care what everyone thinks about you, why do you consistently use Racketboy as your personal life blog to garner opinions? Not that anyone minds you doing so, but your remark quoted above seems rather hypocritical in contrast to your forum behavior.
Anyway, I didn't mean seeing a movie by yourself equates to being a miserable lonely wretch. It's just I intrinsically equate going out to see a film as a social experience. I enjoy seeing my friends/family's reactions to the film, and then going out for dinner afterwards and discussing what we just saw. I -have- seen a movie or two by myself in the past, and I did not enjoy the experience nearly as much as I do with friends of family in tow.
On the flip side, I have zero problems sitting at home in my recliner watching movies on the big flat screen with a humongous bowl of popcorn in my lap
all by myself. I actually prefer to do this when I'm watching a film that is "artsy" or more introspective than your typical dumbed down action flick or shallow dick'n'fart comedy. It allows me to become much more absorbed into movies I actually care about.
Speaking of which, I had exactly that experience from 11pm-1am last night with this:
Bobby Deerfield (1977)
So in this film Al Pacino is a formula one race car driver. He witnesses two of his fellow racers get into a horrific racing accident that leaves one of them dead and the other paralyzed. This causes his character, Bobby Deerfield, to go into a state of existential shock. He refuses to accept the accident was a result of human error (it was) and keeps looking for mechanical or nature failure instead. He is deeply afraid of death coming to him in a way that he has no control over.
When he goes to visit his paralyzed compatriot at a specialist hospital in the beautiful mountainous countryside of Germany, he incidentally meets a unique woman also staying there. Her wild European outlook on life distinctly contrasts with his own more conservative less contemplative American one. Eventually they end up in a strange but rewarding relationship which causes Bobby to cheat on his girlfriend back home. He ends up leaving his racing career a bit stalled out as he spends as much time as possible with this new woman.
However, the woman has cancer. And Bobby does his best to ignore this fact and live a fantasy life traipsing all about Europe with her, living a fastly fading dream. Of course the inevitable eventually occurs, and she dies. Bobby however, does not emerge a broken man. Because he has learned from his time with this woman, that life is about living, not the fear of dying. And the way in which you spend your time, is more important than how much of it you are able to have in total. He looks back upon the accident that set his life on this crazy course, and realizes it was neither fate nor chance, it merely was.
To be honest I went into this film hoping to see Al Pacino as a crazy race car driver with high stakes adrenalin infused races in tow. What I got was nothing like that. This was a dark and introspective film, extremely slow paced and absolutely the anti-thesis to high stakes anything. Well, other than high stakes acceptance of our own moral essence.
But
Bobby Deerfield did surprise me in one aspect. It showed me that Al Pacino was absolutely capable of auteur acting. And it made feel a tinge of sadness to know he left that behind once the world saw him as a the perfect mafia crime guy. A role in which he became permanently typecast after the indomitable
Scarface. Maybe Mr. Pacino chose finance over freedom in those after years, but with
Bobby Deerfield he had already proven he is as good an actor as anyone. Everything after this for him were simply victory laps.
. There have been times when I've gone with a group and multiple people are facebooking the whole movie which is not only distracting but can lead to some very awkward arguments amongst the audience on occasion.
