Javier, John, Julia and Jeff

News item: Javier Bardem appeared before the United Nations in Geneva yesterday supporting an international treaty to protect actor’s rights. “Bardem wants movie tickets to drop in price to dissuade potential movie pirates.”

I am with you, Javier! Not that I really care about actor’s rights (sorry, but it’s hard to muster much sympathy for anyone who goes home at night to two amazing trophies – an Oscar and Penelope Cruz), but it is now possible for a cheapskate like myself to do the dinner part of “dinner and a movie” for less than the movie part. As ridiculous as this sounds, coming on the heels of the new Harry Potter movie breaking all sorts of box office records last weekend, I wonder, “Who goes to the movie theater anymore?” There must be someone going, but it sure isn’t me. I think we’ve been to the movie theater twice since Christmas.

And it’s not just the cost that stops me. It’s what’s showing. I realize my demographic (middle-aged grumpy white guy) comes in a just above “deceased” on the list of demographics film studios are trying to capture. Be that as it may, there still are movies being made that I want to see. It’s just that most of them hardly show up at my theater. What does show up seems to be something like “Fast, Furious Vampire Transformer Apes Battle the X-Men, Captain America, Thor and the Green Lantern.” If you want to see a really good movie – like last year’s wonderful film Get Low, you have to be creative. And good luck seeing Biutiful, the movie Javier Bardem was nominated for Best Actor for last year at a theater.

I watch movies all the time in the comfort of our home. Most recently I saw Nowhere Boy, a biopic about John Lennon’s adolescence. The story goes a long way towards explaining the forces that propelled Lennon to write some of the world’s greatest pop tunes and become such an iconic figure. In a nutshell, he was raised by a loving (but undemonstrative) aunt who stepped in because his father had deserted his mother, who wasn’t fit to care for him. Unbeknownst to John, his mother was living around the corner with a man she wasn’t married to and their two daughters. Eventually the family secrets come out (as they always do) and John begins to have a relationship with his mother – who is the sort of life-of-the-party type of gal whose constant kissing and affection is a little much for a teenage boy with sexual urges to puzzle out. (Which helps you understand why Julia, the song he wrote about her ten years or so after the time in his life this movie covers, sounds like a love song.) Just as the triangle between John, Julia and Aunt Mimi is getting sorted out, Julia is tragically hit and killed by a car as she crosses the street in front of Mimi’s house. (John meanwhile is a few blocks away playing guitar with his new friend Paul.) John was simultaneously loved and rejected, taken in and abandoned, and that tension is all over his music.

To the best of my knowledge, Nowhere Boy never played in a theater here. We were looking for it. It was released in the UK in 2009 and in the US in October, 2010, to coincide with what would have been John Lennon’s 70th birthday. It is a compelling movie about a compelling figure. I sit scratching my head wondering why this movie never played here, while Zookeeper, which I would need to be paid at least four figures to sit through (okay, I lied, I’d watch it if someone paid me three hundred bucks, but that’s my limit!) gets promoted like crazy and is playing at every theater in town. Somebody help me understand this.

Let me ask you – what percentage of movies do you see in the theater versus the percentage you see at home? Would those numbers change if the prices were lower? Of course, I’m not optimistic that movie theaters are going to lower their prices anytime soon for the sake of Javier Bardem or his American lookalike Jeff Munroe. Guys like Javier and me will just muddle along, staying home with our trophy wives, watching what we want to see.