Max Silvestri doesn't understand Regal Cinemas in Union Square
"Everything about it is upside down"
Real estate brokers love to advertise that Brooklyn apartments off the L train are just seven minutes from Union Square, as if that’s something to get really excited about. "You could be trying on tights at the Filene's Basement in the time it takes you finish a cigarette." Ew. Why does that broker think I want to try on tights, or that I smoke slowly, like an orphan? And they call it the Filene's Basement? Are they my dad? That broker's a jerk. Anyway, regardless of its appeal, this claim is rarely true. Unless you live inside the subway station, you are not seven minutes away from Union Square. And if you live inside the subway station, you do not need speedy access to heritage pork links and chervil at the farmer's market.
For years, I lived a 10 minute walk from the subway in Williamsburg, so Manhattan always felt like more than just a quick train ride away. I recently moved just steps from the train, though, and now this real estate babble holds a bit truer for me. I am finally about 11 minutes from the Regal Cinemas on Broadway and 13th! Bragging about that is like a teenager in A Nightmare On Elm Street bragging about how quickly he's able to fall asleep. That Regal Cinemas is the Freddy Krueger of movie theaters, in that everyone over the age of 16 realizes it's terrible and also that the townspeople should have done a more thorough job of burning it to death years ago. Broken ticketing machines, long lines, unhelpful employees, and bad sound consistently make that place reverse fun—everything about it is upside down.
One night while first in line for 4 Fast 4 Furious (don't judge me) they were testing out a completely nonsensical in-line snack delivery system. Despite there being no wait at the actual counter for snacks, they gave us an order form to fill out, and then handed us a vibrating TGI Friday's pager in return. We took our seats and waited for the pager to start vibrating, at which point an employee came into the theater with our food and passed it person-to-person down the row. Then we passed money down the row. He left to get change and then returned to pass us nickels like an old-fashioned fire department trying to put out the No Nickels Fire in my pants. All this time there was a woman selling snacks at the cart inside the theater and an empty line at the actual snack area. What is going on, President Obama? This is a crazy amount of manpower and energy to spend on getting me snacks. I realize I am supposed to appreciate it, and I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. But what about looking a gift horse in the mouth when it's vomiting Sour Patch Straws?
I went to see a movie alone there recently and ended up walking out. It was a one-night only encore presentation of RiffTrax Live, where the guys who used to write and voice Mystery Science Theater 3000, a seminal program of my youth, present a (no longer) live riffing on Plan 9 From Outer Space. I was nervous as soon as I arrived, because the crowd was unsettlingly, let's say, devoted. To paraphrase a comedian I know named Todd Levin, it would not have surprised me if a startling percentage of the audience members had at one time possessed a rough schematic of their high schools. And when the sound wouldn't come up and the lights wouldn't go down for the first 10 minutes, I witnessed a release of pent-up "enthusiast" fury that made me scared for my life, as fans screamed to turn the sound on, one after another, in a way that was joking and desperate for attention but also pretty murder-y. I eventually decided to walk out after the audience clapped heartily when one of the RiffTrax stars, on screen, announced the winner of an iPod in one of the theaters, six months ago. Who were we clapping for? The guy who won that iPod could already be dead. And if he knows what's good for him, he is.
