QOTD 144: Theater of the Absurd.

By Scott Keith on April 22, 2014

The picture to the left is from one of the strangest, most entertaining,
oddly produced, actually not-that-bad-but-still-so-bad-its-good movies
I’ve ever seen.

What’s the weirdest movie theater experience you’ve ever had? Dead crowd? Hyped Crowd? Drunk folks? What are your fondest and least fondest movie theater memories?

For me it was the time I saw a movie with Oprah and about 300 incredible human beings.

That movie? Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls.

It’s wild for a few reasons. For starters, the movie is exceedingly dark – there’s murder, rape, child murder, PTSD, drug addiction, back alley abortions, Janet Jackson getting HIV, and Macy Gray. For seconds, characters will randomly go on long, poetic monologues that are
absolutely chilling – not sure if there’s a lot of cross over in the WWE
and Loretta Devine fan-bases, but she can cut a promo, brother.

The theatre
was one of these ‘lux level’ setups, a balcony, a GIANT screen, and
probably double the amount of seats you’d be used too for a movie
theater. It was a pre-release screening, and the theater was packed full
of, well, black people, including Opera, Tyler Perry himself, and
Thandie Newton, star of “Crash” and super charming British lady.

And at the risk of propagating the stereotype that black people have far more fun in movie theaters than white people do, HOO BOY was that crowd rowdy. People were cat-calling at the screen, making sly comments about various characters, and the crowd WAS EATING IT UP, myself included.

At one very dramatic point in the movie a character reveals they have HIV. His lover says something like “What do I do now?!” and without missing a damn beat, a guy in the audience perked up “Run!” and the place EXPLODED.

But here’s the REALLY weird part. This wasn’t mean spirited heckling, and it didn’t take away from the movie at all. The heart-crushing scenes were still heart-crushing, and the boring ones had folks chirping in from the audience to make them fun and entertaining.

Every now and then I did a look over to where Oprah was, and because she was in front and to the right of me I couldn’t quiteeee tell if she was eating all this up, too, but man, never in my life has such a dour movie left me so uplifted about community and interaction – until the two women I saw the movie with began to list off all the problems they had with the movie’s supposed sexist subtext.

The thing I took from this whole incredible experience is that Tyler Perry Movies seem to endear themselves to this kind of interaction. Speaking with a couple of African American friends in college I related the experience and said that was about par for the course. People get rowdy – and it makes the movies better. Madea brandishing a gun? Kinda silly. Madea brandishing a gun and the crowd hooting and hollering along with the action? Fuckin’ brilliant.

Hopefully this didn’t come off as racist or offensive, but I do think that culture played a big role in why that movie clicked for both the audience (who stood and clapped and loved it at the end), and me – who had heard of the ‘stereotype’ of black folks in movie theaters, and found myself loving it not BECAUSE it was a stereotype, but because it was so damn fun I completely forgot it was one.

In fact, I now take this experience with me whenever I see a movie and the crowd isn’t really into it. If I’m digging jokes I’ll sometime give a little extra juice to my laugh, or give off a bemused “Pfffpt” of enjoyment toward a corny one-liner or plot point, but in a way that I think endears the other people in the theatre. Some movies are bad, some movies are good, and some bad movies are made better with the right mindset and a loosey goosey audience.

Heck, check out “Last Vegas” sometime and tell me THAT movie wouldn’t be made about 100000x more enjoyable with a crowd of rowdy movie-goers hell bent on having a great time at a movie, whether they need to help that movie along or not.

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