mortal kombat ii: fun, weird, easy.

My feet started hurting around 3:30, and since the Devil Wears Prada 2 didn’t start until 4:30, I cancelled my reservation and quickly purchased a ticket for Mortal Kombat II.

It started at 3:47, but really somewhere closer to 4:15, with all of the trailers. I have an A-List membership through AMC stubs, meaning, if I purchase online, I can see up to 4 free movies a week. 

That’s a lot of movies, and it’s really worth the 29.99 per month for someone who goes to the movies all of the time.

Most of the time I don’t enjoy myself.

Most of the time I’m going so I have somewhere I can sit in the dark, escape other people, and enjoy the free air conditioning. The people working there look like they want to kill themselves, and as someone who used to work exclusively in customer service and did want to kill themselves, I understand their pain, and their hostility only adds to the moviegoing experience. 

The guy that runs AMC used to be the head of cruise lines, and I can expect him speaking gruffly and casually to someone underneath him, that “people don’t want art, they want to be entertained. They want the best value their money can get.”

He imagines waterslides and lounge chairs, and a lot of symmetry. I hardly remember what going to the movies used to be like. I’m not too upset about the chairs though. I do remember not enjoying the chairs when I was little, and some of the more pretentious independent theatres in and near West Hollywood are still old-school style, and you can still fall in between the chairs, just like I did as a kid. 

Nothing looked good at the concession stand, and I only barely heard the cashier say he’d be right there to help me when I was ready, but I could hear the hatred and fatigue in his voice. Usually I pack something with me, but I forgot this time, so I went upstairs empty handed.

Sometimes the air conditioning goes out at these theatres, and there’s never any signage, they just leave the doors wide open throughout the entire thing. A couple of times I’d gone in and sat in swampy hot recycled air before leaving to go get a refund. The doors were open upstairs, but the AC seemed to be working fine, which was good, as this was a  fairly packed house. I found a loose protein bar in my bag and quickly found my seat.

 A couple had been sitting in it, and they politely moved to the row ahead of them while I asked. The girlfriend had been reclining with a blanket, and when I sat down the seat was already warm. I pre-opened my protein bar so it wouldn’t crinkle during the show, and half-watched a slew of violent upcoming trailers that everyone groaned at when an impaling was involved.

Nicole Kidman’s face came on the screen, that horribly annoying dance break interlude broke through and then AMC thanked the shareholders after asking us all to silence our phones.

A few people kept texting in the darkness. One depressed summer, I made a habit of going to the same movie at different theatres, long after its release date, so I could get more AC and more solitude. I always ended up sitting in a back row, and enjoyed reading over people’s shoulders as they texted back. Some people would record parts of the film. So much had already gone on on-screen that I dissociated and by the time I came back into my body, I’d forgotten I’d be watching new material. I got so used to being unimpressed or disappointed at what I’ve seen that I was actually surprised when I found myself enjoying the film.

People were behaving in it as though they were in a video game. In this case, the over-the-top graphics, extensive color saturation, cheesy and camp dialogue, and simplistic plot actually fit the genre of the film. I wasn’t watching anything dumbed down, that had been dumbed down by accident.

This was purposefully dumbed down, which made it intelligent.

Every scene fit, every scene of someone getting sliced canonically made sense, and the clean resolution made me optimistic about life.

Good job.

My feet stopped hurting, I sipped my water. Nobody heard me chew on the protein bar, as there was always a big “OH” at the really bloody parts. There was one guy who sat in the middle who had an obnoxious laugh, and I’m beginning to believe that this is not a real person. That this guy is not a real person who exists and has feelings and emotions and lives outside  in the real world. That this is someone whom the studio hires for the promotion of a film. They make sure he purchases a ticket in the center, dead center, and they also hire two other guys to sit on either side of him. His laugh is unlike anything in nature. It’s a bully’s laugh. He always has a hat on, and a tshirt, and whistles at women who are projected onto the screen and not actually in front of him in the flesh. He was there yesterday and he’s at every blockbuster, making sure you hear every joke and every stab and every flirtatious giggle, so you too can get your money’s worth. 

I played Mortal Kombat as a kid, not successfully, but I still played. The killing used to scare me a little bit, and I didn’t understand all of that heady existential metaphysical crap that they explored in the film, but this viewing  was nostalgic for me nonetheless. We’ve been seeing so much ultra-realism, everything is too real, everything is authentic, everything is defined, we’re all sharing too much.

The fight scenes in every movie have to be so real that you believe the actor is actually that good at fighting, and maybe they are. Then we have to read about how they wore themselves to death training for a year to be that good, and then you see it over and over again.

People doing martial arts and looking good in movies, the same scene over and over again.

Not everything has to be real, some things are allowed be dumb and fun in the correct context. Watching this was like watching me play fight  with action figures and, it was 100% appropriate in the context of a videogame movie.  It felt good to escape our garbage reality in favor of beautiful and stylized garbage, just as it felt good to escape my childhood in favor of video game violence as a 10 years old.

It did not make me feel like I was on drugs, so it loses a few points there, as I tend to rate how good a film is by how much of an altered state I’m in by the time I leave the theatre.

A few of us, trained from years of absorbing Marvel movies, stayed throughout the end credits. Nothing there, but a guy next to me did spend the entire length of the 16 minute credit sequence to take a phone call and speak at full volume. He gave his full review during the conversation, he liked it too. The guy, the one that’s  paid for by the studios, stood up throughout the credit sequence, gesticulating wildly and joking with his friends. So he was real.  I left  the theatre sober, but happy, which are two very rare things for me, and when I went to the bathroom, after, I faintly heard  the guy’s his trademark laughter outside. He was waiting for his friends. 

I have to respect perspective, for this is some young person’s Bloodsport, this is some kid’s important Kumite. And in all of my cynical musings, I have to leave room for somebody else to be inspired.

After all, I saw it for free.