I'm Very Sleepy

I joined every 14 year-old boy in Park Slope to watch The Return of the King at the stroke of midnight on the 17th. Embarassingly enough it was my second movie that day, after Master and Commander no less, and 11:45 found me sitting in front of a blank television doubting my ability to make it through the night. "It will be sold out," I thought, but it wasn't, so I had no choice.

I love the movie theater across the street from my house. The audience clapped when the movie started, clapped whenever the good guys won anything, clapped when the movie ended, jeered when they found out it would end three more times before the actual ending and then clapped during the credits. The no smoking/be quiet animation is the best I've ever seen anywhere, a gregorian chant of "Thou shall not smoketh" interspersed with gospel improvisation all in a ye olde english font.

The movie was definitely worth getting only four hours of sleep for. Within the first half hour of I was already weeping just out of the beauty of it. I think I cried at least six times in all during the movie, most of the time not because anything sad had happened, but just because visually it was so breathtaking. I cried a couple of times in Lost in Translation for the same reasons (when Charlotte goes to Kyoto and when Bill Murray was golfing) but this was ridiculous. Every time there were horses sweeping down a hill (and that's a lot) or the camera would linger on a little butterfly or (this is embarassing) someone started to sing I would choke up. Oh to make such pretty things.