Spur of the Moment

Friday was another stressful day, and I had a weekend of work ahead of me. I was ready to get started on it, but my coworkers and friends convinced me to at least take Friday evening to have some fun. So I ended up planning on seeing a movie with Laura and Dan. They wanted to see Sweeney Todd at 7:15, but they were down in Highlands Ranch at a restaurant with 45 minutes to eat and come up to the Colorado Center where the movie. We said we'd try to make that, but it didn't seem so plausible to me, so before I was getting ready to leave, I checked to see if there were any better showtimes for Sweeney Todd or another movie. There were only three theaters showing the movie, and the next nearest showtime for it was 9:45. I looked around for other movies that might be good or a better location. The only one that caught my eye was Cloverfield, which was playing at 7:30 at the Continental off of Hampden, which was much closer to them. So I called them up to see if they could make the 7:15 or if they wanted to see Cloverfield playing at 7:30.

Welllll, somewhere in there was a bit of miscommunication. They didn't realize that I was suggesting seeing a completely different, very different movie than Tim Burton's grim little musical. You would think we'd discover this before going into the theater, but a perfect storm of confusion was brewing. I got to the theater before them and just before 7:30 I called to see where they were at. They were trying to find parking in the normally capacious lot that had been quartered in size by construction, and it was snowing. Did I mention it was snowing? It was furiously dumping snow. People were quickly buying tickets for Cloverfield, and it was 7:30, so I offered to buy the tickets for them. As they came in, I popped the tickets into their hands and we went to the theater. The movie started without a title and for a monster movie it was going a long time without anything sinister happening, so Dan leaned over and said that he thought we were in the wrong movie. I shook my head, because I knew from the previews that the monster would be showing up shortly. Dan was thinking that Tim Burton must have a very odd take on Sweeney Todd for this to be the movie, but since there was no title for the movie, he had no definitive proof.

Once the movie was over, we had our WTF?! moment, and we discovered the confusion. The movie generated a little of that too. Dan and Laura were still intent on seeing Sweeney Todd, so we decided to head on up through the thick snow to the Colorado Center to see the 10:20 showing of Sweeney Todd. Spur of the moment, I figured I'd go with the flow, so up I-25 we went and Laura got our tickets. I divvied them up for everyone and we headed across the street to a Perkins. We had 45 minutes to kill before the show started, so we figured we'd grab some dessert and bide our time. Unfortunately, it took the waitress 30 minutes just to come take our order. By that time we'd asked a different waitress for our check for the coffee and cocoa we'd gotten when we sat down. So we got out of there pie-less and disgruntled and walked through the snow back to the theater. That's when I found that I had lost my ticket, probably back in the Perkins. I emptied every pocket, but it was not there. I was ready to just go buy another ticket, but the taker was cool and used the receipt for 3 tickets to allow me in.

I don't know if you're familiar with the story of Sweeney Todd, but it is a rather dark and disturbing one, to which Tim Burton added gurgling, arterial fountains of syrupy blood. The ending is just depressing, with the one bright point being occluded by the editing. Pretty much the message is even darker than that of No Country For Old Men, because in addition to its message that horrible violence can come upon you any time unexpectedly, Sweeney Todd says that all people deserve it, and you'll probably end up hurting or killing or being killed by someone you love or who loves you. Cheery.

Cloverfield wasn't much cheerier. If you could take the motion sickness-inducing camera work (The guy's an amateur. We get it, but could you please just hold the camera straight or get people's faces in the frame when you're not running?), you would find the message to be, uhm, that a monster may kill you for inexplicable reasons, but it is worth bringing your friends and family to gruesome deaths in order to tell a girl you love her. Very distracting was the fact that the main character (other than the one behind the camera) looks very much like my friend Chris from Orlando.

So it was a double-barreled night of death, destruction, and depravity, frosted with snow and seasoned with very bad service. Hmmm. It was actually pretty fun, like something from college.