(I originally finished this post at two in the morning. Then, my shitty Internet connection and WordPress teamed up to eat half of it. It’s an incredibly demoralizing feeling to arrange a few hundred words in a way that you like and then be forced to do it again, but it IS Friday, so I did my best to crank out the second half again from memory. If this post sucks more than usual, that’s why. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to sleep my ass off.)
Tonight, my Mom was going to a movie called “Ink” and wanted to know if I wanted in. I didn’t know anything about it other than a few people I knew had said it was pretty cool and that some guys from Denver made it. I checked out a couple of previews and it looked kind of interesting, so I tagged along.
According to "Ink", this is what an Incubus looks like. Actually, that's pretty cool.
The movie started out showing various people going to bed. As this happened, another group of people started appearing out of thin air. They touched the sleeping people, and when they did, the sleeping people started dreaming. One woman dreamed about being proposed to and seeing her father again. A little kid dreamed that he was hitting a homerun in a baseball stadium, getting kissed by a girl at a carnival and then playing electric guitar for a cheering crowd.
It reminded me of something.
Two summers ago, I went to see Back To The Future at Red Rocks. For those of you who don’t know, Red Rocks Amphitheater is this really cool venue in Colorado. I went to my first concert there, which was Rage Against the Machine, The Stanford Prison Experiment and Girls vs. Boys. Despite all of the bands having awesome names, Rage Against the Machine was the only one that wasn’t memorably bad. You’d think with a name like “Stanford Prison Experiment” you could kick a little ass, but I guess not. Oh well. Good times.
Anyway, during the summer, they have events where local bands play, and then when it gets dark they show a movie. Back To The Future is awesome, and a band that my friends really like was playing, so we hopped in a car and prepared for a delightful evening.
In between the band playing and the start of the movie, they had a little interlude where a small crew of guys with cameras came out and spoke to the crowd. They explained to us that they were filming a scene for a movie and they needed the audience to help out. In the scene, a little kid is having a dream that he’s a rock star, so to film the scene, he was going to pretend to wail on an electric guitar, and we were all going to jump around and freak out like it was a Slayer concert. It seemed like a fruity premise, but I’m always up for making an ass of myself, so he wailed on his guitar, we all jumped around and screamed, they filmed it and then I completely forgot about it. I mean, come on – I had to find out if Marty was going to be able to get his parents back together and make it back to 1985 in time to save Doc from the Libyans (Spoiler alert: He totally does!)
A nice picture of Red Rocks, even though it's probably some shitty jam band playing hippy music.
Which brings me back to tonight, when I realized that I was watching a movie filmed in Denver with a little boy in it who was dreaming that he was playing electric guitar for a cheering crowd.
At first, I just kind of noticed that the venue looked a lot like Red Rocks. Then, I remembered that night two summers ago and the film crew’s description of why we had to jump around for five minutes. The description seemed to fit what I was seeing on screen, but the camera was focused on the kid playing guitar and the audience was blurry, so I couldn’t be sure that the scene I was watching was the one I was thinking of.
At least, not until I heard the sound of every female’s nipples in the movie theater getting hard simultaneously (Don’t know what that sounds like? Imagine the sound of a bunch of slide whistles in bras being played all at once. It’s just like that). I had my doubts before, but once that happened, I knew that there was only one explanation – I was one of those blurs cheering for that kid.
It’s very strange to go to a movie without knowing anything about it, and then, a few minutes in, realize that you’re in one of the scenes, even if it’s for two seconds and you’re just an out-of-focus smudge.
But enough about me.
Two second cameos from gorgeous smudges aside, it was a pretty enjoyable movie. I’ve spent some time trying to figure out just how much I liked it, and I’m not completely sure. Before I give my opinion, I think the following facts need to be considered:
1) I felt like there was a smattering of hoaky and/or cloying dialogue, some goofy characters and a couple of scenes that seemed a little bit drawn out.
She's so three thousand and eight, you so two thousand and late.
2) It is currently four thirty in the morning, and I tend to think a little bit crazy when it’s this late. This is the time of night when I start to make grandiose and profoundly retarded statements like “Say what you will, but the bottom line is that Shot at Love with Tila Tequila is the greatest television show of this or any era!!!” or “Boom Boom WOW!!! The first album that the Black Eyed Peas made after bringing Fergie into the band was the greatest hour of music in recorded human history…that is, until it was dethroned by their newest album, The E.N.D.” Because of this, I’m a little bit weary of giving any verdicts right now.
Those two things being said,
3) I drank about a gallon of coffee thirty minutes before I went to the movie, and despite the fact that I came far closer than I ever have post-puberty to wetting my pants, I refused to go to the bathroom until the credits rolled because I didn’t want to miss anything.
4) Although there were parts of the movie that I found a little bit silly, I could tell that if I had seen this movie in my late teens or early twenties I would’ve considered it a completely flawless masterpiece. I would have left the theater with an erection that would have more than likely required medical attention at some point.
I’m not quite sure what to make of that collection of facts, but I think it leans towards a positive review.
Like I said, there were some parts seemed a little bit goofy, and when I write things this late at night I’m frequently embarrassed (even more than usual) when I see them the next day, but 23 year old me would’ve been struck with priapism after seeing this movie, and even though I didn’t think it was perfect at 29, I liked it enough that I was willing to risk bladder failure to make sure that I saw every second of it. When I take those two facts into account, I think that it’s clear that I liked this movie and I have to recommend it. You should see it if you get a chance. I think you’ll enjoy it.
Just be sure that you wear really durable clothing if you do – There are going to be a few seconds in that movie where your nipples are going to be hard enough to cut glass.
Boom Boom POW!!!