Bellevue Abbey
Shobhit and I actually drove to Bellevue to see a movie last night. It was an advanced screening of the Downton Abbey movie for select Xfinity customers. Somewhat surprisingly, the theatre screening room wasn't even quite full -- although it was still nearly at capacity by the time the movie started.
Shobhit theorized it was something slightly exclusive, for higher-end cable customers. Shobhit and I have one of the more expensive cable packages, after all. I'm paying them $143 a month for our combined cable and internet package, and that's at a locked-in deal price for a year. Shobhit estimated how much money we alone give them per year. The actual total is $1,716 annually. I actually have no idea if that’s a relevant factor or not; for all I know my email was included in some kind of lottery.
Still, it was a bit different than your standard advanced free screening of a movie -- which I had not bothered even trying to attend since last year, as my monthly AMC A-List Plus subscription basically took away any incentive to try saving money with those things. They might still have the advantage of getting a look before the general public, but they also necessitate waiting in line an average of an hour beforehand and involve a lot of inconvenient rigmarole that the AMC subscription avoids with its reserved seating. I'm way more interested in saving money than I am in getting to see movies I'm excited about early.
For this movie, it was all Xfinity customers. I know this because at checkin they handed out Xfinity "VIP" lanyard passes for us to wear around our necks. The screening was at 6:30 but the email we got said doors opened at 5:30; in all likelihood there was indeed a line of some sort at 5:30 but we got to the actual cinema on the second floor of Lincoln Square at about 5:40. We checked in easily; they had vouchers for us each to get a free small bag of popcorn and a small drink (another perk not usually offered at standard free screenings); we made our way into the screening room and found nearly perfect seats in the front row of the back section complete with metal bars we could rest out feet on. It was all a bit more wonderful than I quite expected.
Shobhit also had both dinner to go and a thermos full of piña colada ready when I got home from work on my bike. We left for Bellevue only minutes after that, and got there surprisingly quickly given the time of day (the drive home was still way faster, like 10 minutes shorter), and we had a very tasty home-takeout dinner there in the theatre before the movie started. Then we had free popcorn to eat during the movie.
I had already eaten way too much crap all day at work. I'm calling it a win that I only gained a single pound as of this morning. I'm in a real rut right now with my compulsion to be constantly grazing on shit everywhere I am. I suppose "constantly" is too strong a word; I'm actually by and large maintaining my weight. The problem is that I want that maintained weight to be lower.
Anyway! The movie was just as fun as expected, and certainly a fun way to go see it. I stand by the solid B I gave it -- great for fans of the show; possibly pointless for anyone else.
What else? Not much! I actually considered not writing the movie review last night and doing it this morning instead, except I am seeing yet another movie tonight -- my third in as many days, something I usually avoid but I could not help the scheduling of the free screening -- and I'll want to write that review tonight. I prefer not to post two movie reviews on the same day. It's not the end of the world if I do, especially now that my reviews are on my own domain and LiveJournal's dating system isn't making it unnecessarily complicated like it used to, but I also found I had barely enough time to write it last night without it keeping me up too late. Later than I would prefer still, but only slightly.
I did consider moving what I plan to see tonight to tomorrow night, but it's shifting to only one showtime tomorrow in mid-afternoon so that's a no-go. I can see it tonight at 5:45.
My movie-going frequency will likely increase through the fall and to the end of the year, now that we're finally entering the best period of the year for movies, when most Oscar-bait comes out. Yesterday was the 81st movie I'd gone to see in 2019, and for some reason I was feeling like I was further behind than usual. Not so, I just figured out: by this time last year I had seen 74 movies in 2018. I made it to 110 movies last year so in all likelihood I'll get to that number again, if not even a few more than that.
[posted 12:33 pm]