— पांच हजार छह सौ सैंतालीस —
Okay, so it's been
five days but I'm finally going to mention Action Movie Night on Wednesday! Really just for my record keeping, even though if I go looking for any written account of it by date, I'll probably get confused and not even think about looking for a reference to it in a post the following week. But! This
will get referenced—and linked to—in the next Social Review, and that's the more likely way I might ever try to find this in the future anyway. Not that there was anything specific that would make me want to search for this. Except, maybe, the movie choice?
It was
The Beekeeper. This was an objectively dumb, yet somehow still legitimately enjoyable movie that I actually went to see in theaters back in January—and
gave it a solid B. Honestly, this movie could not possibly be more on-brand for "Action Movie Night," being actually action-packed, with good fight choreography, and performances and pacing that somehow make up for the relatively mindless script. The intellegence level of scripts among these movies we watch every other Wednesday really runs the gamut, but this movie is much more in the spirit of the group's historic intentions for what types of movies they watch.
It was also an unusually well-attended Action Movie Night: 12 people in attendance. The theater has 14 theater seats in it, so this left only two empty seats, which is pretty rare. We usually have closer to 8 or 10 people. And luckily considering how long it took me to write about this one, I actually wrote down the list while I was there, because the number was so high: Tony, Jake, Ryan, Chris G, Chris B, Derek, Sean, Ulysses, a guy I had never met but who apparently used to come regularly a decade ago named Andy, a newer guy I've seen once before but whose name I still don't know, Shobhit, and myself.
Shobhit decided to make a cold dish, and so we made pasta salad. I actually ate the very last of the leftovers of that on the bus on my way to the Tacoma Pride Festival on Saturday. You won't read more about that even in this post because I already wrote
a dedicated post about that yesterday morning.
— पांच हजार छह सौ सैंतालीस —
— पांच हजार छह सौ सैंतालीस —
That still leaves Friday and Sunday, though, and I hung out with Laney on both days. Friday was a movie I went to see with Laney, at The Grand Illusion Cinema in the U District. And before I mention the movie, there's a few things I need to note about
that theater, which they claim to be "Seattle's oldest continuously running movie theater."
As far as I can ascertain, this was only the second time I had ever seen a movie at this theater. I had no record of a plan to see a movie there in my Google Calendar, which only dates back to 2006. I did some googling to search my old LiveJournal, and found one instance of having gone to this theater,
in April 2005—nineteen years ago! It took me a bit to get it straight from that journal entry, but it appears I had been invited by Clarica, a friend I hung out with at the time I had met through chorus friends; she had invited a bunch of
her friends to join her there to watch her favorite movie,
Ruben and Ed, and this included Llyra from the chorus; and both Shobhit and Barbara joined us as well.
When Laney and I got into the theater, which Laney was a little nerous about it being sold out—she had not attended a sold-out movie since before covid, but at least this is a small theater with a seating capacity of 68—the
decor and low ceiling did bring back memory of having been in there before. But, Laney and I got there a few minutes before they opened the doors at 7:00 (for a 7:30 showtime) and there are tables outside the door, on a deck up some stairs, that we sat at while we waited. I didn't remember any of that area at all, but it must have all always been there.
Honestly, by far the biggest difference between attending a movie there last Friday and when I went in 2005 was the transit options for getting there. Back in 2005, kind of incredibly for just going to a movie, Barbara and Shobhit and I all
walked there, a distance of nearly four miles. I guess we had a lot of extra time that day. At the time, the other options would have been either for Shobhit to drive us, or to take the bus. The bus was the only public transit option, and probably took at least half an hour, probably more when accounting for walking to and from bus stops.
Today, however, we have Light Rail, something that was a distant dream back in 2005. Laney and I met at the Capitol Hill Light Rail Station, which opened in 2016; and we sayed on the train until U District Station, which was one of the three stations extending to Northgate that opened in 2021. (Lynnwood Extension opens later this summer!) The train gets from Capitol Hill to U District Station in a matter of minutes—
seven, specifically. The only added time for either of us was walking to Capitol Hill Station, and then the cinema was a five block walk to 50th and University Way from U District Station. It's ridiculously easy to get up there now.
So anyway! The movie: we saw the absolutely wonderful animated feature
Robot Dreams, which we both loved. We had seen trailers for it several times at AMC theaters, only for it to never open in one of those theaters, even though the published release date was May 31! These movies often have a later local release date, but as often as I checked every week, we I just never saw it playing anywhere. And then, all of a sudden, I discovered showtimes at The Grand Illusion. We both got
very excited and I bought our tickets about two weeks ago.
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That brings us to yesterday, when Laney and I did a new thing for our monthly weekend afternoon Happy Hour. We pivot sometimes to a park in the summer months, so that part isn't new—but we went to a new park:
McGilvra Place, a small one-block, triangular-shaped park right in front of the Bullitt Center, all of one block to the south of my condo complex (and thus six blocks from Laney's apartment building).
I had suggested this a couple of months ago, largely because that park has a public ping pong table, and I had yet to use the ping pong paddles and balls set Shobhit got me, at my request, for
Christmas in 2020—three and a half years ago! I literally opened the packaging for the first time just yesterday. I had talked a few times with Tracy about playing ping pong there with her but that just never happened.
Well, it finally happened. I played ping pong, with my own paddle set and at the public ping pong table only a block away! It was really fun.
Shobhit and I packed lunches and he came over there with me, mostly to garner himself a Social Review point. And incidentally, the last time I counted where he and Laney were at, I had not yet accounted for Action Movie Night. After yesterday, he's actually at
ten points, and so is Laney. They're tied! I'm seeing Laney for another movie this Thursday and Shobhit is on his conference trip to Wenatchee today until Friday, but luckily for him, even while he's away Laney will only get ahead by one point. Easy to catch up again! He can rest easy.
He was actually going to leave right after eating, and drinking his cocktail of the two we brought. But, after several minutes of cajoling, Laney convinced him to stay and
play a few games with us. Once he finally did it, he clearly enjoyed himself. But, he still left after maybe an hour, and then Laney and I, as we are often wont to do when we hang out at parks, hung out and chatted for a total of at least three and a half hours. We did play a few more games again, and we were fairly good and about evenly matched in skill. All we cared about was keeping a volley going, though; neither of us cared about keeping score.
Once we left and I walked the block back home, Shobhit and I spent the rest of the day watching TV, both this week's episode of
House of the Dragon, and we finished up the first season of
Slow Horses on Apple TV+ which Alexia had recommended and which we were immediately hooked on as soon as we started it. At least that show, though there are three seasons available, has only six episodes per season so it's not a gigantic time commitment.
— पांच हजार छह सौ सैंतालीस —
[posted 12:31 pm]
