Summer in Summary: An Annual Address

This summer was nothing compared to last summer. Last summer I had the pleasure of Moscow and its decadent delights, and this summer all I had was Cullowhee and its enduring ennui punctuated with erratic excitement. Which was okay, really.

I worked on organizing a summit on energy independence, read a lot, hung out with people on occasion, and watched a shit load of movies.

I’m a movie junkie. Fuck DVDs, I love going to the theaters on opening night when the crowd is excited. Jackson County has the advantage of Quin Theaters, the best movie theater I’ve ever been in. A four screen affair (used to be three, but a few years back they expanded), it is the hub of all public social activity in town, putting the competition of the bowling alley to shame. Quin is one of the few places where I really feel the small town thing: you will always meet your friends or acquaintances there. Before the movies start, people walk up and down the aisles, visiting. Opening nights, there’s always a long line of people lined up to go see whatever is opening that week while crowds of young teenagers hang out by the payphones and smoke before they go home. After the movies, people hang out by their cars with the people they met there to figure out the rest of their night. It’s noisy, rowdy, and there is always a Deputy stationed with parking lot duty on the weekend.

It’s an old theater, but with new seats and a new sound system. Ticket price: $5 for an evening show with cheap popcorn and drinks. You can not beat that shit. So when I’m home (Winter and Summer Breaks: Oscar and Blockbuster Seasons, respectively), I go 2-3 times a week, often alone. As bad as it is to have to go sit alone at the movies, the employees there, embarrassingly, know me, and the ones who I recognize from high school make fun of me. Whatever’s showing, I see it. I’m a movie omnivore. I don’t necessarily like it all, but I see it all. The film is often beside the point: I just like to go to the movies.

There are some movies of course that I get excited to see, that I make a point out of seeing immediately. I spend my free time looking at trailers and movie schedules. I read dumb news sites and blogs. And since the beginning of summer, I knew it was coming. The creeping sense of inevitability and my overdeveloped sense of narrative flow led me to one logical conclusion. The summer had been building up to one thing and I knew what I had to do.

Maybe it was merely a coincidence of timing of release dates and move-in days, but there was only one way I could cap this summer.

Snakes on a Motherfucking Plane.

I saw it tonight and it did not disappoint: It was the perfect cap, doing exactly what it was supposed to do: showing us beyond horrific gratuitousness there is a sublime area of genius. Snakes on a Plane delivers everything that my expectations could have promised.

You should see it. You will have fun, I promise. I could talk about why, but I don’t want to ruin any of the movies many fun surprises. I will instead offer these few items that you may not have considered:

The music video during the credits: Stay. It has an aesthetic previously achieved only by European acts such as Gunther and his Magnificent Mustache (“Ooooo! You touch my tra-la-la. My ding-ding-dong.”).

and

“Snakes on my dick!”

My summer is complete, and now, back to Chapel Hill.