The Latest |
The Past |
About Me |
The Vault |
Links |
Home! |
So what's your most powerful "movie moment"? You know, the single time in your moviegoing life when you and the audience around you connected so perfectly to a film that you can't imagine actually being in the theater, but suspect that you were instead participating in the action of the movie itself. For me, there have been a few true moments of movie magic, where not only did the world fall away from around me as I watched the film, but I realized that it was gone, and didn't give a shit.
But the top, all-time, kick-my-ass-godDAMN movie magic moment of my life has to be Return of the Jedi, 1983. My dad took me (at age seven) on the weekend it opened, and as you might expect we waited for at least an hour outside the theater in line. I quickly befriended a young boy standing in line behind me, and we swapped action figure tips and discussed exactly what it might be like if a Gammorean Guard were hurled at the theater wall at a high speed and exploded into bits onto the crowd. (This is what is important to seven-year-old Star Wars fans.) Soon enough, we entered the theater, and it was sold out. Every single seat was filled.
I don't remember many other details of the screening, but I do remember the movie magic moment. It was during the climactic final battle, and R2D2 had been called to the shield generator building by Leia, who needed him to break the code on the door and get into the building. On the way, an Imperial stormtrooper blasted R2, and he fell to the ground with a painful whine. At that moment, the crowd let out a huge gasp of horror, reacting to the possible injury or death of a 3-foot robot in a movie. The audience was so absorbed into the story and involved with the characters that they reacted as they would if they heard a friend or relative had been hurt or killed. They were startled, surprised, and worried, all for what is (allegedly) a fictional character in a movie.
I wasn't thinking "movie magic" as I saw Jedi that day; I was slightly more concerned with watching Luke kick Vader's ass. But for over a decade now, that single second has been burned into my memory as one of the greatest pop culture experiences of my life. Maybe it's because it was the first time I was part of a pop culture audience, reacting to the same phenomenon as part of a group as I would later with my favorite movies, TV shows, and bands. Or maybe it's because on some deep subconscious level, I first started to understand on that day the tremendous power of film. But I like to think that it has remained in my memory because it is the only time before or since that I have been part of an audience that cared about a movie deeply enough to react to it as though it were REAL. It was total absorption and involvement in a story and characters. It's rare in movies period, but even rarer in today's movies. Looking back on that moment, I have to think that we could use a few more totally absorbing entertainments right now, and a big heaping shitload of "movie magic."