Benjamin Kepple

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BAD CINEMA WITH BEN
A Semi-Regular Feature

Today’s Film: 28 Days Later

To be fair about things, I suppose I should note right away that “28 Days Later” is an excellent film. I would guess that horror-movie fans, of which I am not one, would likely be disappointed with it due to the relative lack of gore. However, if you take 28 Days with that grain of salt, then you’ll probably be pleased with the end result: a very nice film of the world-gone-to-hell genre, and probably the best of its kind since “This Quiet Earth.”

Given this, regular readers may wonder why 28 Days thus merits inclusion in the Bad Cinema with Ben Pantheon. That’s a simple question to answer. For despite the quality of the film, my Movie-Going Experience thoroughly sucked eggs. It was so unpleasant and horrid that the English language barely has words to express the trauma it caused me.

Anyway, here’s 28 Days' plot. Animal-rights activists invade a research facility at which the British Government is doing clandestine research on primates. These primates are infected with a contagious virus that causes them to go insane with rage. So while this leads to an enjoyable scene in which one of the monkeys tears off an eco-terrorist’s face, it also means that the fast-spreading virus gets out into the mainstream. Hence, nearly everyone in Britain turns into an uncivilized, screaming, pitch-drunk Arsenal fan.

About half-way through the film, I couldn’t help but wonder if such a virus had infected the other people in the theatre.

I mean, my God! is it that hard for theoretically-intelligent people to shut the bloody hell up during the feature presentation? Is the concept of turning off one’s mobile telephone so difficult to grasp that audio-visual reminders about doing so are ineffective? Finally, what does it say about us as a society, when such uncultured imbeciles pointedly refuse to see the error of their ways?

I’m serious—this is the type of thing that makes me fear for the safety of the American polity. As a nation, of course, we have decided that people too stupid to master common-sense manners, such as respecting their fellow theatre patrons, can somehow use those same brains to figure out a coherent view about things like Medicare reform or our armaments budget. Don’t get me wrong: I like universal suffrage. It’s just that I’m just despairing for the future.

Further, as if to add insult to injury, it wasn’t as if these conversations were actually interesting. Oh, no. That might have mitigated the offense. Instead, they involved loudly explaining obvious plot points that could only be missed if the other parties were in fact blind. If it wasn’t that, it involved details of personal lives that I really, really had no need to know about.

What was amazing about last night was my frustration was not confined to the scene inside the theatre itself.

For one thing, when I arrived at the theatre and I was walking towards the box office, I passed by a purple Japanese mini-van. This mini-van was not only unlocked, its sliding door was left open. Now you should know that it rained rather hard here yesterday, and that yesterday evening there were threatening clouds in the skies above. So it amazed me that anyone could forget to shut the door to such a nicely-appointed vehicle (leather interior, nice dashboard, that type of stuff).

What also amazed me was that this mini-van had clearly been left unattended for at least an hour. Dozens, if not hundreds, of people had likely walked by. Yet no one bothered to close this door. So after I dragged it shut, I thought to myself: what kind of apathy has taken hold on people that they wouldn’t do the right thing?

I’ll admit that I did think about the issue for a minute. I mean, if I closed the door and it wasn’t shut all the way, would that somehow make me liable if the door were to fly open on the 293 and the occupants therein were sucked out onto the highway? Would I find myself caught in a classic Good Samaritan case: no good deed goes unpunished? Then, there was another thorny moral issue: should I let these people be victims of their own forgetfulness, just so they would take more caution in future?

Still, I think I did the right thing. I don’t know if it rained when I was inside the theatre, but at least I think I saved the owners of that van a bit of headache.

But that wasn’t all that bothered me.

You should also know that here in Manchester, all the movie theatres we have are owned by the same large cinema operator. As such, this means it is difficult to find a movie that would not be considered a blockbuster first-run Hollywood film. This means that while I have ample opportunity to see movies about talking fish or robot assassins, I have little opportunity to actually see independent films or even niche films out of Hollywood.

For instance, when I wanted to see “Narc” back in January, it was only playing on one screen out of about forty that we have in the city. 28 Days was also playing on just one screen in Manchester this weekend.

Now, I don’t want that to be seen as a complaint. That is merely capitalism at work, and far be it for me to criticize the unstoppable engine we call market force. But since I’m part of an underserved market when it comes to film, I have to make an extra effort to see the movies I happen to like: even if that means going to a particularly hideous theatre.

For I positively detest the theatre in which I saw 28 Days. It’s not merely that the concessions are overpriced or that the sound system is a bit dated: it’s that there is not one shred of beauty in it. The place looks like it was built in the mid-Seventies, and from an architectural standpoint, it’s just awful.

I don’t know which is more noteworthy: its awful outdoor box office or its monstrous concrete façade. Both these things were bad ideas: for the box office doesn’t mesh well with our eight months of winter, and the concrete façade is in a section of the city full of concrete facades. You can stand it in the summer or the fall, which are gorgeous here; but in winter you feel as if you’re in Pyongyang.

The combination of all these things was incredibly depressing: so much so that I was ready to swear off movie-going altogether and stay at home with a growing DVD collection. But fortunately, 28 Days was excellent: great cinematography; good acting; interesting plot.

Just think how much I could have enjoyed it had my fellow movie-goers given me the chance.

Posted by Benjamin Kepple at July 12, 2003 12:24 PM | TrackBack