It started out so innocent. Three movies a week for only 25 dollars a month. That's a small price to pay for making your friends think you're a cinephile. Sure, I don't know what 35 mm means, or why Jack Nicolson packing a lip is considered auteur cinema; but at AMC, none of that matters.
At AMC, being a cinephile means co-opting Nicole Kidman's pre-screening ad as part of your personality and then donning her sparkly two-piece set on Halloween so you can regurgitate her monologue for Garret the DP in between swigs of craft beer (that tastes like shit). Garret doesn't get it, of course. He says irritating things like, “I go to The New Beverly for screenings of The Godfather in 35 mm.” But I remind Garret, for it is my duty, that an AMC Stubs subscription basically pays for itself.
This is where the tricky part comes in. Because, just like my mom who asks why she's paying for my Erewhon membership when I'm wasting 25 bucks to see movies that are streaming in a month, Garret says, “No one actually sees three movies a week.”
But I knew Garret would say this. Which is why I've committed to proving him wrong.
Three movies a week sounds like fun for someone who's really into movies. But I'm not really into movies. How could I be when 50 hour-long episodes of Love Island are released biweekly? The meme-saturated, TikTok-coded world I grew up in wasn't designed to support the attention span required to sit through 160-minute pans of men with boring haircuts grumble about who's behind the crime and why they have to kill their wives first to find out.
So, I do what any person with a massive secret to hide and no one to turn to would. I hide under the floorboards of my AMC and behave like a family of mice that torments movie-goers.
I know what you're thinking: isn't cosplaying as an eight-unit family of outlawed mice, each with their own distinct personalities, traumas, and hooligan-like street tricks (think Ocean's Eight meets Steel Magnolias), a lot more taxing than simply kicking your feet up on a reclinable, cushioned chair and watching hot people talk? To that I would ask, have you seen It Ends With Us? And also, if you had the chance to escape reality via the butter-sapped undergrounds of Glendale's AMC, would ya?
For me, the answer to the latter was abso-friggin-lutely! And to the former, no I didn't see It Ends With Us because I was preoccupied with my one-woman performance of a rag-tag group of criminal mice just trying to live long enough to get a real shot at their collective dream of becoming a Vegas-touring group of rodent acrobats (think Goodfellas meets Fame). It's not a breeze, but we got the cheese! (Tagline still in the works.)
Anyway, one thing led to another, gouda turned to Swiss, and now I'm living under an AMC. As it turns out, entering into a state of psychosis three times a week in 90- to 180-minute intervals does wonders for my emotional and spiritual health. You really don't realize how beautiful life is until you take a moment to step back and explore the generational trauma of a family of first-generation Russian immigrant mice who wake up every damn day to a pile of overdue bills, yet never run short on their currency of love and care for one another, oftentimes displayed through the medium of song (think Parasite meets Dear Evan Hansen).
In many ways, my life is better than it has ever been. But in other very real ways, I'm on the brink of losing everything. Look, it's my journey right now. I don't expect everyone to understand, but I hope you'll at least try. For what is life without a family to share it with? Certainly, no life worth leading. And I think that's something both I, the mice, and cinema, can agree on.