Director: Rustin Thompson
Cast: Ross Melnick, Rusting Thompson
Have I Seen It Before: On some level, I’ve lived it, but no. This is the first time I viewed the film.
Did I Like It: If movies are a great big empathy machine, and documentaries among them all the more so, than a documentary about people just like you is connecting with your fellow human beings more profoundly than you might hope to otherwise.
To even come up with a thought like that is indicative of someone who places movies above the larger swaths of human beings, or at least have the movies in outsized importance in their lives. The people of this documentary may come from different places, and be of different generations, and proceed along every other easily identifiable scale to be distinctly different people. Some are in it for the business it provides, some know that the only sane way to devote ones life to this venture is by not caring about money, as much as one living in late-stage capitalism can hope to do.
But we all love movie theaters, and we all love that they can—multiplexes be occasionally damned—be places that mean something to people, and beyond being merely the least convenient of all possibly ways to take in filmed entertainment.
It’s as close to a fool-proof documentary as one is likely to get. If you have a passion for movies that aren’t meant to contribute to a multinational conglomerate’s quarterly earnings report*, then you probably also have a strong feeling about the little place you go to to see those movies. In which case, you’re not just a kindred spirit, you’re my friend even if we’ve never met. At that point, all Thompson has to do is keep everything in the appropriate level of focus, and he’s got a winner.
*The only spoiler I will offer is that the film starts to feel—as a byproduct of when Thompson went to the movie houses—like an oblong commercial for Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023), only before reminding us that film cut itself down to size. It got a big laugh from everyone in the room, and none were bigger than me.