It’s 12:15 am, and I’m sitting in the fourth row of theatre #14 at Universal City plex, waiting for a 35mm screening of The Dark Knight to begin. (The midnight IMAX show would have been preferable, of course.) I’m the only over-40 guy in the theatre. Jett just called from Boston, walking home from a midnight showing at the Fenway plex. “Fasten your seat belt,” he said. “The time flies right by. Ledger is phenomenal…amazing.”
Knight is my third film of the evening. Three films in a row feels like something here, but at Sundance or Toronto it’s nothing. I’ve had two king-sized Red Bulls within the last three hours. Cranked and primed.
The evening began with a Stepbrothers screening at 7:30 pm at the Sherman Oaks Arclight. I sat next to “JoMo” (the hip-hop “street” name for Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern) and talked a bit about the breaking Dark Knight reviews and poor Sydney Pollack. Nothing to say yet about Stepbrothers except that Richard Jenkins gives the funniest performance.
I next drove down to Santa Monica’s Aero Theatre to catch a 9:45 pm screening of Blake Edwards‘ Experiment in Terror, which still works in an alluring monochrome time-machine sort of way but is paced slow as molasses. I caught about 75 minutes’ worth, and then drove up to Universal City. I’ll probably bang something out when I get home around 3 am.