BEFORE: I suddenly realize that I might have, very accidentally, programmed the perfect set of Labor Day weekend films - FOR ME, that is. I work part-time at a movie theater that's owned by a NYC college, and yesterday's film had Indiana Jones teaching at a different NYC college, and today's film is set mostly in a movie theater. That would be weird if I weren't totally used to my own version of subconscious programming - there are no coincidences, after all, there are only the connections to my life and the calendar that I've witnessed, over and over again. We'll see what tomorrow's film brings, and whether there's any connection to Labor Day.
(Yes, I realize Labor Day is very easy to program for, as long as any character in the film has some kind of job, well, that counts, doesn't it? Sure, one year I programmed a film TITLED "Labor Day", but that can really only happen once - the rest of the time, I'm relying on the linking method to bring appropriate films to the top of the screening list at the appropriate times. My past Labor Day weekend films over the years have included "Genius", "Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her", "The Old Man & The Gun", "Horrible Bosses 2", "The Paper", "To Sir, with Love", "9 to 5" and "How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying". Hey, I find the connections where I can...)
Toby Jones carries over from "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny".
THE PLOT: A drama about the power of human connection during turbulent times, set in a movie theater in an English coastal town in the early 1980's.
AFTER: Yeah, this one kind of had me right from the jump - it opens with someone unlocking a movie theater and turning on the lights, getting things ready to open, which is something I do maybe three or four times a week now. So this felt very familiar, and then getting into all the different people who work there, their different positions, the relationships between them, yeah, this was right up my alley, despite being set in the U.K. in the 1980's. But I did work in movie theaters myself during the mid 80's, one in Massachusetts the summer before my senior year at NYU, and then one in New York during the summer of 1986, just after graduation. I figured it was a great job to have, mostly nights and weekends, while looking for a full-time gig. But three months after getting the job, two directors I'd worked for as a P.A. happened to come to that theater, and I tore their tickets, but they remembered me and suggested that I come work for them. So I left the movie theater job and didn't come back to it until 2021, about 35 years later.
I always sort of wondered how far I could have gotten if I'd stuck with that job, and now I'm wondering why I didn't keep BOTH jobs, I could have worked for the film production company during the day and also the movie theater on nights & weekends. I could have been a theater manager by now - but I guess I couldn't have worked on long music video shoots, then, or taken a second job at a different production company. Now I'm a part-time theater manager, just one block away from the NYC theater I started at as an usher, but that theater shut down in January of this year, after changing hands about 4 or 5 times. It's a great 9-screen theater, and I'm sure it will re-open again under new management, but nobody knows when, since it was a victim of the pandemic. So it's all a bit weird, but I still feel that my career kind of came full circle, and I sort of ended up now back where I once didn't want to be, but going back to the old job was sure better than sitting at home doing nothing, at least until I got tired of sweeping up theaters and emptying trash cans. The move from usher up to house manager two years ago was a smart one, I think. There are some very long shifts, especially during film festival weeks, but I'll take them.
Another crazy coincidence - "Empire of Light" had its festival premiere on September 3, 2022 at the Telluride Film Festival, exactly one year ago. Again, not planned, it just came to the top of my list on the anniversary of its first public screening. The film got only one Oscar nomination, for Best Cinematography, but also got one Golden Globe nomination, for Olivia Colman as Best Actress, also 3 BAFTA nominations, if you care about those.
The lead character is Hilary, a mid-manager at the Empire Cinema on the north coast of Kent County in the southeastern part of England. She's struggling with depression and/or bipolar disorder, and she's involved in some kind of affair with her boss, the theater manager. Her life changes when she meets Stephen a new employee who is a younger black man, and they bond when she shows him the two closed theaters on the upper floors of the building. Also on New Year's Eve they watch the fireworks together from the roof and share a kiss. Well, they sort of fall into a relationship together, and it's nice and fun but also complicated in some ways. There's the age difference, the racial difference, and then there's Hilary's involvement with their boss, and her mental issues. On top of this, it was a strange time in British history, after the punk movement and during the early days of Thatcher's administration, where racist skinheads were prevalent and sometimes prone to rioting. Also Stephen is working at the theater while he's considering applying to college to study architecture.
Nevertheless, they start a relationship, trips to the beach and sharing stories from their pasts. Things get more complicated when Hilary sort of goes off the rails during a special premiere of "Chariots of Fire", and after delivering her own remarks about racism, she blurts out the existence of her affair with her boss to her boss's wife. Normally this would just get someone fired, but the theater manager admits his affairs, and... well, we don't really know what happens between him and his wife, because the film sort of neglects to tell us. Did they get divorced? Did they work things out? Did he quit his job at the Empire Theater? I honestly don't know, because we never see him again after that. He's treated like a fringe character, but still, it would be nice to know. The film instead follows the other staff at the theater, like Stephen, who have to deal with Hilary's sudden absence, first at home and then at some kind of mental hospital.
Stephen learns some tricks of the trade from the theater's projectionist, like how to watch for those "bubbles" on the screen that tell the projectionist when to start the next reel on the other projector. Yes, this was once done BY HAND, if a film was in four reels, the projectionist had to time things JUST right to switch off one projector and switch ON the other one - if they didn't do it exactly right, the audience could miss several seconds of dialogue, or see a blank screen for a few seconds, both of which spoil the illusion of continuity that film relies on. Film ain't nothing but a bunch of still images, BTW, and a quick of our optic nerves allows us to perceive the illusion of motion without seeing the change from one image to the next - assuming that the pictures run by at the proper speed, which is 24 fps. So all movies are an illusion, in every sense of the word, but primarily at the base level of being a large set of still pictures appearing to move.
By extension, isn't everything therefore some kind of an illusion? The relationship between two people can end at any time, if one should get a better offer, or need to move away to attend school. Was the relationship even real at all, then? The projectionist mentions that he has a son who he's no longer in contact with - what about that relationship, is it real or just another illusion? Everything we do, everything we create is just like a sand castle at the beach, it exists for a while until the wind or the tide dispose of it, or somebody else tramples on it, or we decide to tear it down and build something else. Wow, that's deep, huh? And I got that just from how a movie projector works...
What does this movie get exactly right about working in a movie theater? That the staff makes up one big, happy (?) crazy dysfunctional family, that's for sure. And the staff is organized in a pyramid-like configuration, there's one theater manager, below him are a couple of middle managers, and then there are crew chiefs and training managers, then a whole lot of grunts selling tickets and concessions and sweeping up after the show. And moving up the pyramid takes a WHOLE lot of time, in fact if you don't have ten or twelve years to invest in that job you're probably better off looking for greener pastures elsewhere, or at least having another gig or a side hustle.
Also, you might get into it thinking you're going to see ALL the movies for free, and isn't that a great perk? But the fact of the matter is, you're probably going to be so busy working at the theater that you WON'T see every movie that plays there. After a long shift you're probably just going to want to go home, eat dinner and get some sleep, especially if you have to open up the next morning and do it all again. Oh, sure, you could come in to the theater on your day off and watch a movie then, only on your day off, do you REALLY want to go to the place where you work? Of course not, you'd rather sleep in and then do something else, like go to the beach or catch up on some reading or do some errands, maybe get to that doctor's appointment or see the dentist, I mean, it's been a while, hasn't it?
I can confirm this is how it goes - in the summer of 2021, I was working at an AMC and I could see any movie I wanted, just not during one of my shifts. I think I took advantage of this just ONCE in three months, to see "Black Widow". Every other film that came out that summer, I caught up with on streaming if it was really something I wanted to see. I've been working at a different theatre since September 2021, and I think I came in on my day off to see "Jurassic World: Dominion", and that's about it. I work so many shifts, who has time to ALSO see the movies that play during the shifts I'm not there? Some of this year's movies that I did NOT see when they played at the theater are: "Turning Red", "Glass Onion", "No Time to DIe", "See How They Run", "Licorice Pizza", "Belfast", "The Wonder", "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever", "Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio", "Say Hey, Willie Mays!", "McEnroe", "Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over", "Attica", "Cyrano", "Top Gun: Maverick", "Shazam! Fury of the Gods", "Where the Crawdads Sing", "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania", "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves", "Guardians of the Galaxy 3" and "Nope". But I still got to see them all anyway, because they all went to streaming or cable, eventually. That's about 20 films I WANTED to see, but didn't, at the theater where I work for every one that I did.
So I can totally believe that Hilary has never seen a movie AT the theater where she works. It doesn't sound possible, but it is. But it also seems like maybe she's never seen a movie at all, which is damn near impossible, aka more than unlikely. So let's just say that maybe since she works at a movie theater in 1981, maybe she hasn't seen a movie on the big screen in about 20 years, maybe more. I could believe that - but when she finally does take the time to watch a movie there, with the projectionist's permission, what does she watch? "Being There" and "Stir Crazy" - one film about a simple-minded middle-aged gardener and another film with "crazy" in the title - I suppose this is meant to reflect her mental state, symbolically...
One other strange coincidence before I go - this film features a bunch of skinheads protesting who then pass by the theater, break down the doors and start beating people up. Earlier this year, I was working at the theater during a telecast of the SAG Awards for the NY members of that union - and the event got protested by a bunch of angry anti-vaxxers who were upset with SAG for not hiring back the actors who could not (or would not) get the COVID vaccine. Thankfully their protest did not erupt into violence - all they did was write chalk messages on the sidewalk outside the theater - but it COULD have, if not for the actions taken by me and the other managers and our intrepid security guards. It's a whole story, which I probably already wrote about in detail on this blog, I'm just reminded about it because of the events portrayed in the film. Totally believable, at least to me.
Also starring Olivia Colman (last heard in "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish"), Micheal Ward (last seen in "The Old Guard"), Colin Firth (last seen in "Conspiracy"), Tom Brooke (last seen in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties"), Tanya Moodie (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker"), Hannah Onslow (also carrying over from "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"), Crystal Clarke (last seen in "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain"), Monica Dolan (last seen in "Cyrano"), Sara Stewart (last seen in "Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story"), Ron Cook (last seen in "Secrets & Lies"), Justin Edwards (last heard in "The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales"), Roman Hayeck-Green, Brian Fletcher, Dougie Boyall, William Chubb, Spike Leighton (last seen in "1917"), Jacob Avery, Jamie Whitelaw, Dylan Blore, Adrian McLoughlin (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), D.J. Bailey (last seen in "Beauty and the Beast" (2017)), Mark Field, Ashleigh Reynolds (last seen in "Rebecca" (2020)), George Whitehead, Sam Boskovic, Eliza Glock, George Greenland,
with archive footage of Richard Pryor (last seen in "Sammy Davis Jr: I've Gotta Be Me"), Gene Wilder (last seen in "Tom & Jerry"), Peter Sellers (last seen in "An Accidental Studio")
RATING: 6 out of 10 skipping stones
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