What movie is worth dying for?*
After half a year of no movies shown in indoor theaters around here, the AMC Dartmouth theater is slated to re-open on August 27. I’ll be interested to see how much business the “Mall theater,” as we always used to call it, will do on its tentative opening weekend. Not interested enough to go see for myself, but curious nonetheless.
AMC assures us they’ll abide by “Safe & Clean™ policies and procedures, designed with you in mind” (whom else would they be designed for?). Take a look at those policies and procedures on the AMC website, and you’ll see what has been called “hygiene theater.”
By dazzling us with lots of jibber-jabber about “electrostatic disinfectant sprayers” and “HEPA filter vacuums,” AMC hopes we forget that sitting in a large box with dozens of strangers, inhaling everyone else’s droplets borne by laughter, talking, coughing, or just plain breathing, is just about the last place we should be right now.
I love movies. And I’d love to be able to say “Welcome back, AMC! Hey, everyone, let’s go to the movies!” But I have to agree with Spike Lee, who noted that he wouldn’t be seeing any movies in theaters until a COVID-19 vaccine is ready.
People have been getting their public-movie fix by going to drive-ins. In state, the closest one is in Mendon, a little more than an hour away. (A bit closer is the Rustic in North Smithfield, RI.) We used to have a drive-in here, of course. You view the corpse every time you go down Route 6. It closed in September 1982 (fun fact: its final double feature was An American Werewolf in London and Halloween 2).
Another drive-in cannot be built where the old one was, for various reasons. We also used to have an indoor movie-house, but the Bijou shuttered in 2004. Cinema 140 gave up the ghost in 2000; the theater that helped kill it, Flagship, went toes-up sixteen years later. For movies, AMC remains the only game in — or near — town.
We should remember AMC is a corporation that was already hemorrhaging money before the plague, and has come close to circling the drain during it. They want you back. The blandishments will be sweet and urgent — $5 concessions, $5 premium memberships, etc. AMC hopes saving a few bucks will make you forget the tens of thousands of dollars you might be billed by a hospital for weeks in their ICU.
And what movies is AMC counting on to lure you into sick-boxes to risk death or lifelong health issues? Well, there’s a Russell Crowe road-rage thriller called Unhinged. There’s a “tenth anniversary” run of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, possibly to make up for Nolan’s new Tenet not being ready for a big-splash opening yet (though AMC may offer “early access” to it next week, per their website). There’s a Marvel movie, The New Mutants, that’s been warming a shelf for years (it finished filming in 2017). There’s the teen romance Words on Bathroom Walls. And there’s The Personal History of David Copperfield, an honest-to-Pete adaptation of Dickens. On Friday and Saturday, AMC Dartmouth will show the original Rocky; on Sunday they’ll have Airplane! (which really shows how lax a PG rating used to be; parents beware!).
That’s it. That’s what AMC hopes you’ll think is worth risking your life. I don’t mean to pick on AMC — I’d be roasting Regal if they were the dominant exhibitor in the area. I realize AMC Dartmouth is staffed and operated by real people with real bills to pay and real mouths to feed. I imagine, too, a lot of them aren’t looking forward to facing the public again — the customers who are always right even when they’re stupid, the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, the open mouths wolfing down popcorn and Twizzlers and coughing and burping and murdering.
I respect the AMC workers with boots on the ground, not the fatcats up in corporate who never have to have contact with anyone they don’t want to.
Still, having empathy for the ticket-takers and candy-box sweepers who will now number among the “essential workers” doesn’t mean we have to oblige AMC, which has gone six whole months without our money and badly needs it again. I love movies, but if this event has proven anything it’s that there are options.
*The answer: no movie.
•••
Support local journalism, donate to the Neighb News with PayPal.
Click here to download the entire 8/27/20 issue: 08-27-20 CarCrash
