When I first moved to New York in March of 2018, I lived in Kips Bay & didn’t make a lot of money. I was cautious of running the air conditioning in my western-facing, wood sauna of a bedroom. I was anxiously awaiting my other friends graduating college and migrating to Manhattan. I often didn’t quite know what to do with myself. I had been sitting in my mother’s house since graduating college, desperate to escape back to the city and here I was, pretty sedentary, for financial & naïve reasons.
Then I heard about MoviePass… For $10 a month you could see a movie every day if you wanted to at participating theaters. Finally, something that was cheap & time consuming; I was hooked immediately. This was THE moment for asses in seats. Almost every movie I saw had a packed audience, and in the queue almost everyone was using a MoviePass ticket. Looking back, it was a total house of cards, but if you were there, you know the bliss that was the 2018-2018 cultural phenomenon. When that model imploded, we all finally understood, it was too good to be true.
In June of 2018, to compete with the MoviePass boom & siphon off some of the hype, AMC launched their A-List program. This gave users 3 movies per week in any format at any AMC theater for $19.95 per month. I didn’t hear about it until MoviePass flamed out later in the summer of 2018, but as soon as the pillars of the MP empire were crumbling, I jumped ship (I can mix metaphors, it’s my newsletter). There was a massive AMC two blocks north of my apartment with recently redone theaters that were clean and comfortable. Sure it was double the price I had been paying, but now I was accustomed to spending ~3 nights a week at the theater and a single ticket ran you about $22 anyway. Back then I saw the shiny chain theater as somehow nicer than my now most-loved theaters like Angelika & IFC Center.
I started going all the time. It was a hot, hot summer. I still can feel the heat radiating off of 2nd Avenue onto my bare legs on a 100 degree night & how walking into the blasting air conditioning of AMC Kips Bay immediately felt like paradise. I will admit to sometimes skirting the 3 movies per week rule by doing an illegal double feature just to stay in the climate controlled darkness a little longer. Looking back, I really think I spent that entire summer at my office, at Equinox (subsidized by my company, I did NOT have it like that on my own), at AMC, or laying perfectly still in my apartment.
That’s where I was sitting (Laying? Reclining?) when I heard Nicholas Britell’s If Beale Street Could Talk score for the first time. It’s wear I saw the 20th anniversary screening of Cruel Intentions. It’s where I gained a new, critical perspective on womanhood & motherhood through Jason Reitman’s Tully. It’s where I got so comfortable seeing movies by myself but also where I would beg my friends to join me for a thriller like Us or Hereditary. I was there all the time until March 2020.
I let my membership linger through the first few months of the Covid-19 lockdown but soon AMC said they’d pause everyone’s memberships. I didn’t mind financially contributing to something I cared about so much in a time where we didn’t know when we’d be back. I was also buying gift cards to Angelika and just banking them for someday when I’d be there again.
When we could return to theaters, I had moved to the West Village and wasn’t super close to any AMCs anymore so I decided not to reactivate my membership. I was very close to IFC Center which is the first theater I walked back into in 2021. I saw Gia Coppola’s Mainstream with tears running down my face even though it’s not sad. I was just so happy to be back in a movie theater with other people. I think they had limited screenings to less than 15 people per theater all spaced out but I’ll never forget what it felt like to hear the simultaneous laughter of strangers after going so long without it. I started spending 3-4 nights a week at Angelika, IFC, Nitehawk, Film Forum, etc. On the rare occasion that what I wanted to see demanded I go to AMC, I just booked a ticket as needed like I do the rest of the theaters.
Now it’s 2024, I’m still at the theater all the time. I still love to bring a sweatshirt to seat E5 when it’s 95 degrees out. Now I like to see a movie twice sometimes, once without closed captions and once with. I like to go to the IMAX at Lincoln Square. But maybe more than anything, I fucking love Nicole Kidman. I’m not even kidding, the first time I saw her AMC ad, I cried. Like we DO come to this place for magic! Heartbreak does feel good in a place like this! I still love when the ad plays in an AMC and people clap, whistle, stand up and salute, etc. Those are my movie freaks and I would die for them.
Time has passed and I’m in a financial place to buy my ad hoc indie tickets, to lurk at advanced showings and press screenings, but I can no longer deny myself an AMC A-List membership. So I reactivated today. It’s a rainy Sunday and I might walk over to Union Square and see whatever is playing simply because I can. Because I granted myself a forgotten freedom. Because stories feel perfect and powerful. Because here [at AMC], they are.
What I’m Watching This Week
By the time this goes out, I will have seen I Saw the TV Glow. I’m looking forward to it even though I snakily dogged it when I saw the trailer the first time.
This week’s Film Club movie is M (1931). I’m really excited to watch it as it’s known for being a film way ahead of its time. I love watching something that was so innovative at the time and thinking of all of the ways it changed the medium or gave us an original thing that is now somewhat cliche. Like the audience shot at the Open in Strangers On A Train.
Real Housewives of New Jersey is back and I am healed. After a long day of critical thinking, there’s nothing I need more than middle aged women behaving badly. It truly soothes me.