Yo, everyone who I added to the guest posters list for this world - you are all able to post, correct? Just want to make sure I added you all in correctly ... if I do something wrong, I'm pretty sure this place will explode.
Anyway! Second entry to the library. Excitement!
A Year at the Movies: One Man's Filmgoing Odyssey by Kevin Murphy
After Mystery Science Theater 3000 ended, and before the advent of Rifftrax, the most immediate way to get a fix of the MST3K crew was through the books they released. Before this, I'd read both of Michael J. Nelson's books - Mind Over Matters is pretty funny, while Movie Megacheese is really disappointing. My expectations of this were similar to the types of books Mike Nelson was writing, but what I got was something totally different and much more interesting and affecting.
The basic premise of the book is that Kevin Murphy watches at least one movie a day for an entire year, sticking mainly to movie theaters though he does have portable projectors in a pinch. Kevin's purpose with this experiment is to rediscover his love of movies and to find out what really makes the theater experience, from the largest multiplexes in America to the smallest places in the most out of the way regions in the world. It's a journey to find what he believes was lost in the film industry long ago: The magic of the theater experience.
This could easily devolve into some bizarre, publicity-seeking stunt, but it's much more than that (though Kevin's achievement was mentioned on Ripley's Believe It or Not). The stories he finds everywhere are fascinating, and the love of movies he unearths wherever he goes is a ton of fun to read about. Many of the best chapters concern the smallest, most rundown places in the middle of nowhere, where dedicated groups of people watch movies for the sheer love of it. There are groups of people in Minneapolis who gather every Saturday to watch Hong Kong action films; the world's most friendly, outgoing film festival, located at Sodankyla, Finland; a tin-roofed, rain-soaked theater at the Cook Islands in the South Pacific; and a lot more interesting stuff.
How Kevin's view of the moviegoing experience evolves throughout the book is just as interesting as the places he goes. Going in, you should know that calling him a film snob is an understatement. He's seen tons of movies, has a more complete knowledge of film history than I could ever hope to achieve, and is prone to writing intellectually in a way that is a bit annoying at times. But his love of the movies is so infectious that the smile on my face grew to Grinch-like proportions by the time I finished the book. When you read about him sitting down to watch movies outside on an old film projector with family and friends in Venice, it's difficult to not feel the utter joy the experience brought him.
It's sort of disappointing that Kevin doesn't talk more about the movies he's seen (I was dying for his thoughts on Mulholland Drive, among others), but that's not what this book is about. Although there are a couple of chapters dedicated to this, he's not writing this book to rip on bad movies - it's not MST3K2. I've read reviews online where people are legitimately annoyed that Kevin doesn't spend the whole book reviewing the movies he saw. I don't say this much because it smacks of pretension, but those people totally misunderstood the point of the book. This is a journey about why people love the movies and how they express that love. It's not a super hilarious ripfest, but that isn't what the book is trying to be.
A Year at the Movies is one of the best books about the movies you'll read. Give it a shot. For me.
