hidingundertrees:
HAPPY NOW, JERKS?!
I only have an hour or so before work, so don’t expect much right away. Also, this is the weirdest place to put a title? That old man is teabagging it!
If I understand correctly, Andrew from hidingundertrees is planning to watch Die Hard for the first time, which is certainly a momentous occasion for any film lover.
I wish him well. Yippie-kai-yay, etc.
And I wanted to add a brief story of the first time I saw Die Hard in the movie theater in July of 1988. I’d stayed at college over the summer because I had a better job there than I would have had at home. I didn’t have high hopes for the movie because Willis was unknown in this kind of film, having only gained popularity from Moonlighting. I didn’t know John McTiernan and certainly didn’t know Alan Rickman. So: low expectations.
I was surprised, however, that the theater was mostly full, and grabbed an aisle seat for myself. A guy came in when the lights were about to go down and asked to climb over me to one of the last vacant seats. It was easier for him to climb over me than the other dozen or so in the rest of the row, so no big deal.
The movie unspooled and thrilled me for every single one of its 132 minutes. It remains to this day one of my all-time favorites not just as an action film par excellence: but of a character study, marital drama and deconstruction of a number of 80s action-hero film tropes.
But that’s beyond my point, which is this:
When the lights came up, I sighed contentedly and looked around, amazed to see that the guy who’d climbed over me was gone.
It’s absolutely unlikely that he climbed over the other dozen people in the row during the course of the movie; to do so would have been silly and illogical.
No, I was next to him, on the aisle. He had to have climbed over me. It’s just that I genuinely had no memory whatsoever of him doing so, and I was shocked in a truly unprecedented way that he wasn’t there.
This was one of those moments where I felt like I’d learned an important lesson about the immersive power of cinema.
