At the end of a rough week I told Maxine I wanted to see an emotionally-straightforward, spiritually-simple, world-escaping no-brainer movie. Even a comedy. In a real theater. We often go for more serious stuff, but tonight had to be different.
We looked in the paper, read reviews, and decided on Iron Man 3. It is supposed to be the first block-buster of the summer, has been garnering great reviews, and Cleveland loves the Marvel movies because our city gets destroyed every time they make one of them here. (Clevelanders enjoy getting beat up on almost as much as they enjoyed beating up on the themselves.) The last movie of Iron Man 3's genre I remember seeing was an early Bat Man flick. I was excited about our evening’s entertainment prospects.
There was more: Friday was Iron Man 3's opening night in our area. We had never before been so bold as to be among the first ordinary people to see a movie. A virtual walk down Hollywood's red carpet. A complete adventure in one evening!
I imagined we’d have to fight big crowds, beginning with standing in a long ticket line. Surely you have to face hordes of people spending millions of dollars on the opening weekend of such films, judging from the numbers you see on Monday. Since I had to go to Solon–the suburb to our south–anyway I stopped by the “Digiplex” to purchase two seats at the 8:00 showing. Now we could walk our red carpet right past long lines to find our seat, like elite/special/super/uppity-class boarding an airplane.
Not only did Iron Man 3 keep me awake, but it improved upon my stated conditions for choosing it. It's hard not feel conflicting emotions while you watch things you know and love (Air Force One, a Malibu Mansion, Miami's docks) get reduced to rubble. It's easy for emotions and spirituality to enhance one another as People's "most beautiful woman in the world" and one of the humanity's most redeemed actors work at learning to love one other. It's easy to escape, or at least to ignore for a time, the real world when you see it being blown up in a movie that doesn't take itself too seriously. And all of it in 3-D!
Iron Man 3 is a kick. I must honestly admit that even though I spent the next day learning and talking about the epidemic of violence in our country and culture. The humor and humanity of Iron Man 3 save it from itself, something I suspect few of the spate of apocalyptic Armageddon narratives of our time do. (I am no expert; all I know is what I see in what I continue to call their "previews.")
But the greater surprise of our Iron Man 3 evening was not the movie itself, but how few people shared the theater with us. Thirty, forty maybe? No crowds, no pushing and shoving, no annoying groups of pre-teens...and no red carpet entrance.
Monday I read that Iron Man 3 enjoyed the second-largest opening weekend in history nationwide. That's a mystery to me. Do they cook those numbers? Or is it us in Cleveland’s quiet and refined eastern suburbs? Don't we dare take a chance on a hot ticket before others do?
Nice review Dean. If you expect anything Avengers-like, then you might have to lower your expectations by a tad.
ReplyDeleteMy wife and I waited until the Sunday evening following the opening (but still in the opening weekend) and we were surprised to find that we were the only people in the theater. I'm wondering if all the extra income from the 3D screenings isn't what's jacking up the box office number$.
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