Back to Back

Not long ago, I mentioned the Continental movie theater, Denver's special giant screen. Well, it's not just for current big blockbusters. On Wednesday nights (and Saturday mornings) they also often run older movies in special, one-time only showings on the enormous, three- or four-story tall screen. And last night was a very special movie for me: Back to the Future.

This remains the #1 movie on my personal top 100 list. For one thing, I just think it's a damn entertaining movie. But also, I have fond memories of going to seeing it in the theater back in 1985. It was the first time I can recall going to the same movie twice in one day. I went with my mother and sister in the early afternoon, and we all loved it so much, we roped my father in that night to go again when he got home from work. I haven't seen all that many movies with my father, and fewer still with my mother, which makes this a pretty rare memory. This was also before half my brothers and sisters came along, thereby making "family movie night" a pretty dicey proposition -- again, just going to show that this was highly unusual behavior for my family (despite my own personal love of movies)..

I'm thrilled to report that last night's experience was every bit as wonderful. I know every single line and every single moment of this movie, but it still works. It rushes along at a breakneck pace. The jokes are still funny. The action scenes are still tense and suspenseful. The writing is no less clever; the acting comes off just as pitch perfect. And magnified to enormous scale, with an audience full of fans just as thrilled to be there as me, it was even better. They laughed at everything. They moaned (tongue-in-cheek) when a bad splice at the end of a reel clipped off a memorable line. They cheered riotously when George McFly finally comes through and "lays out Biff in one punch."

In addition to getting to see my favorite movie on the big screen again, it was a much-needed reminder that going to the movies is not always the miserable experience I've come to think it is. Sometimes the audience is not a rude, talking, seat-kicking, cell-phone answering curse; it can be a fun-loving, excited, cathartic blessing.

I also got to enjoy Back to the Future on a sort of "meta" level. As throroughly as I know the movie, I still haven't actually seen it in several years. Now that it's (gulp) over 20 years old, there's a whole new layer at play. Originally, a big piece of the joke was "here we all are in the 80s; look at how quaint and odd and different and funny the 50s were." Now, on top of that, you have "here we are in the 21st century; look at how ridiculous and strange and outrageous the 80s were." Sure, we have nostalgic TV retrospectives like "I Love the 80s" to make snarky comments about and laugh at high hair and super-tight jeans. But it's another thing to see it projected larger than life, with no comment made on it whatsoever.

In short, it was the best time I've had at the movies in years.