The Devils Rejects
What We Left Behind: Looking Back at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Theatre full of Trekkies so it was a target audience only.
Nice. I went to see the picard season three finale and same. It was so fucking good and we were able to share it with all the trekkies.
Rejected by Don Hertzfeldt.
In fairness, it was a screening with Don Hertzfeldt… or it was supposed to be. He was sick or something, but we didn’t find that out until the end.
We went to a screening of The Room that Tommy Wiseau was supposed to do a Q&A after. He didn’t show either. Probably for the best cuz we were mocking it the whole time and throwing plastic spoons at the screen.
Are you sure he didn’t show? Or did he run away crying after seeing you disrespect his art?
Gladiator, I saw it opening weekend
Went to Fahrenheit 9/11 on opening day, and the entire theater clapped at the end.
I’m not sure anyone there necessarily thought it was a good movie, but we were all unified in our disdain of George W. Bush.
The Passion of the Christ. I was very confused that people thought it was a good film. And in my specific case, confused about why my school thought it was a good idea to take a bunch of minors to see a very gory R-rated film. That was the most violent movie I had seen up to that point. The whole experience was surreal, and not in a good way.
For me it was “The Last Samurai” and Return of the King"
But The Last Samurai was so bad…
The Force Awakens. Not just at the end, though, but also when the opening crawl started and when every returning character showed up.
"I know what that is! I clapped when I saw it!
Zebraman, by Takashi Miike.
Yup.
Jurassic Park.
Everyone was blown away, like holy shit, that was amazing
Jurassic Park is the only movie I saw where people clapped at the end. And that was during a screening in 2018. There was no reason, no one was there related to the movie, it was just that good.
It’s hard to describe what it was like seeing Jurassic Park in the theater for the first time as a kid.
Picture this… You’re a teenager going to see that big blockbuster everyone’s been talking about, but it’s 1993. There is no YouTube. There’s basically no internet. No spoilers. You’ve seen the trailers, and they’re carefully done so as not to give away the big reveals. So you know this is some kind of dinosaur movie, but you don’t know much else.
And then the dinosaurs show up. And they look 100% fucking real.
Even today, that movie’s special effects hold up, and that’s for three reasons:
- They had CGI, but used it sparingly because it wasn’t ready to be all the effects in a movie yet. Where they could use practical effects, they did. And they did an astonishingly good job with them.
- The dinosaurs are shown sparingly until the audience is practically begging for the various “money” shots - which are then provided, with perfect timing. It’s like cinematographic edging.
- Spielberg was at the absolute top of his game. Scenes were thoughtfully executed and beautifully shot. The water in the glass scene? People in the audience were dead silent, holding their breath. Then the T-motherfucking-rex appears, and it’s glorious. Everyone screaming and shouting, half-thrilled and half-terrified.
It changed movies, permanently.
Brilliantly put, and I had basically the exact same experience. I was 13, I think, and I was just blown away by JP.
Yesterday. Godzilla Minus One. Fantastic movie!
I went yesterday too and that was the best movie I’ve seen in a LOOOONG time. Even taking Godzilla out of it, it would still be great. I’m not a movie clapper but if I was going to start that would have been the one to do it.
Saving Private Ryan.
It was a subdued clapping out of respect for those the movie represented.
For me it was the only movie I’ve been to that left the theater dead silent at the end as everyone filed out. For a lot of us it made us realize why our grandparents who served never talked about what they went through.
I joined the army specifically because my grandfather was RA in 1939 and had been wounded in the Aleutian island campaign before being reppled into the ETO in time for the battle of the bulge and dachau. He didn’t talk to his (non military, non combat) son but when I came back from having seen the elephant we had long talks.
The hell with that war.
The Sixth Sense
Heaps of festival films and premieres.
But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a New Zealand audience applaud anything that was just a mainstream release playing in a cinema, even on opening weekend.
A View To A Kill got a lot of random yelling though.
Just as a disclaimer: I can count on one hand the number of films I’ve seen in the theater but the answer is “none”.
