Hi everyone. It’s 96 degrees in Los Angeles and it’s making me so sleepy. The few times I left my air-conditioned home in the past week were for, you guessed it, movies. I’ve been bringing this cutie notebook from McNally Jackson to screenings with me so here are some notes I took during the last few.

2pm Monday, Frank G. Wells Theater at Walt Disney Studios

Pre-screening: I’m on the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank to watch Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (thanks Searchlight and Agenda Collective!) and it’s a tough 90 degrees outside. The Starbucks on the lot is open this time (last time it was closed due to a fire) so I wanted to bring coffee in to the screening room but my grave mistake was going with a hot cappuccino (literally why?). Took a short walk around the lot and almost passed out so I had to switch the coffee out with a Diet Coke. I’ve never seen the lot this crowded, there’s filming going on for Nobody Wants This as well as some sorta conference.

Post-screening: I suspect I got this invite not because I’m a seasoned Ready or Not fan but because I talk about Shawn Hatosy nonstop on the internet and he’s part of the cast (led by Samara Weaving, who makes a fab final girl). Even though I knew this, nothing could have prepared me for the “hot new heartthrob in town” treatment this film gave Hatosy. Cinema! Not to mention him and Sarah Michelle Gellar play twin children of David Cronenberg. A sentence I didn’t think I would ever write.

6pm Friday, Soho House West Hollywood Screening Room

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7:10pm Last Thursday, “Wuthering Heights” (dir. Emerald Fennell)

Must a movie be “good”? Is it not enough to sit in a theater with your friends and a generously poured glass of AMC red wine and listen to “House” by Charli xcx, loud?

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Hi everyone. It’s been a big week at Beating A Dead Horse HQ over here, discussing every angle of the WB x Netflix x Paramount situation. First of all I didn’t want to ever have an opinion on a “hostile takeover” if it didn’t involve the names Kendall Roy and Stewy Hosseini. I’m not any type of authority on news about this, on The Ankler is who I go to to make sense of what’s going on, as well as Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast when I’m driving. But no matter which annoying option prevails in acquiring Warner Bros, I don’t actually think it will mean the end of movie theaters, simply because it can’t. Movie theaters are too important for the culture to be allowed to go extinct. What’s next, we’ll let Them shut all restaurants down so Doordash can thrive? That’s not an option that’s on the table so we will all have to internalize that and go from there.

The easiest thing we can all do to preserve the culture of moviegoing against all streaming CEOs is to become more annoying and talk about the value in going to the movies all the time. To illustrate that today I will recount my experience seeing (/sobbing through) Hamnet. I saw this on a two-show day that started with a matinee of Jay Kelly (where Nancy Meyers came out to interview Noah Baumbach and grilled him for ten minutes about his rule of no chairs on sets). Jay Kelly ended roughly 15 minutes before Hamnet started at a theater thankfully 5 minutes away, and with the added time of navigating both parking lots, I sat down about a minute before Jessie Buckley first appeared on screen.

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I went to see Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein on IMAX at the Chinese Theatre yesterday. It was a beautiful day in LA and I felt like recording instead of writ…

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4:30pm Sunday, Splitsville dir. Michael Angelo Covino, AMC at The Grove

Going on my 8th year of living in Los Angeles, I try to avoid being in situations that could lead me to The Grove. If you’ve never been, The Grove is an outdoor shopping mall in West Hollywood that was once a cute tourist destination/pleasant afternoon, currently somewhere you only need to be if you’re attending one of the endless makeup brand pop-ups or hoping to run into a Love Island USA contestant. What’s unfortunate is the AMC theater at The Grove is pretty good, so I do begrudgingly find myself there when there’s no alternative available.

@exploringlosangelesJust out shopping when i see ✨Taylor Swift ✨ LA things! #onlyinla #taylorswift #losangeles #celebrity #paparazzi #taylornation #swifties #funthingsinla

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I went to see Splitsville because Caught Stealing wasn’t out yet and I was in the mood to see something. My friend Cherilyn met me there and we tried to get Einspanner coffees to sneak into the movie but there was a downright offensive line at the cafe that makes them. Which begs the question, why aren’t trendy LA cafes doing pop-ups at movie theaters? More on this later.

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One thing you’re not supposed to do in LA is make dinner plans in Pasadena at 6.30pm when you have a movie scheduled at 8pm in Burbank, yet that’s exactly what I did. Arriving in Burbank ten minutes to showtime I thought, finally, I’m one of those people who can time their entrance so they don’t sit through the pre-trailer commercials.

I went up the escalator by the Panda Express (iykyk) and into the AMC Burbank 8 lobby ready to find my friend Peyton. The usher took one look at my ticket and grimaced, and I heard the words no A-List member ever wants to hear: “So… you’re at the wrong AMC”. We looked at each other for a second and both started laughing. He said it happens more often than you’d think, given this one-mile stretch of Burbank inexplicably houses three separate AMCs. Thankfully the correct one was literally two blocks away, so I was able to make it right before Nicole Kidman sat down.

Everyone and their cousin already shared their take on Materialists including me, but if I had to contribute one original thought I’d say it was a good representation of accidentally becoming important at a job you later realize you hate. I also made a note to remember to go to Thursday evening showings more often. We had such a good audience - maybe that’s why I liked the movie more than most?

6pm Wednesday, Jurassic World: Rebirth dir. Gareth Edwards, Universal Studios Lot

I love when something comes along to remind me that moviegoing experience ≠ how good the movie is.

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2pm Sunday, The Virgin Suicides dir. Sofia Coppola, Academy Museum/David Geffen Theater

This was a transformative week at the movies for me. Following a sinus infection that made me write things like “remember what it felt like to not be congested?” in my journal, my spirits were not the highest when I parked at the mysteriously small lot under the Academy Museum. You know those days when nothing other than going to the movies sounds like a good idea? That.

I’ve written about how much I enjoy this museum before, but it was never cuter than that morning with everyone dressed in their best Lisbon Sisters attire. Emily and I saved our seats (4th row, left side) then ran back downstairs to Fanny’s to chug iced coffees before the screening, because food and drinks are strictly banned from the David Geffen theater (which I think is a bummer).

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Hi everyone. A quick letter today inspired by the above quote from Isabelle Huppert, une vie pour jouer. I wanted to share a few notes from four recent moviegoing experiences to remind myself that no…

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No portmanteau word in recent years has caused quite a stir, at least in my world, like Barbenheimer. No one knows why we were so ready to have two completely different yet equally huge movies come out on the same day - but we were. My friends and I had a particularly memorable and stupid Barbenheimer Saturday™ (July 22, 2023) at one of the 3 AMCs that are for some reason in the same one-mile radius in Burbank.

The day started out normal enough; putting together an outfit equal times pink and black in wholesome excitement, making sure we stop hydrating a few hours before to avoid interrupting either movie with a bathroom break, etc. We had gotten tickets literal months ago (it was sold out to the point of people selling tickets on Craigslist) and the itinerary was: Oppenheimer matinee, dinner and drinks break, Barbie at 8pm to cap things off.

It was a 90-degree day in Burbank and the first thing you noticed was the sheer amount of people. Listen, I’m at this theater once a week at minimum and there are times when I’m one of the only 3 people there, and that’s unfortunately something that's become normal over the years. So seeing the place at capacity with a line out the door was a shock to every system:

The air inside the theater was buzzing with the awareness that we hadn’t experienced collective intrigue like this since… a while. Oppenheimer began, with the now-iconic opening scene of raindrops resembling atomic blasts falling on the ground, when suddenly, things took a turn for the absurd.

The loudest alarm you’ve ever heard started blaring and the screen went black. We were ushered out of the theater, and when I say we I mean all 4000 of us in the building, towards the patio and right under the 2pm Valley sun.

An employee came out (as we were in deep regret over not grabbing our sodas on the way out) to let us know they’d reopen in 2 HOURS after a thorough inspection (spoiler alert: some jokester pulled the fire alarm because they thought it’d be a funny story. and they were right!)

All you heard on the patio were groans and sounds of phones being pulled out to book the next available screening: “I just grabbed the single seat available for 11:55pm tonight” “are you fine to go three Saturdays from now if we all sit separately?” and so on. That is until the firefighters arrived and groaning turned into hootin’ and hollerin’ as the (very hot and capable) men ran up the stairs.

We decided to nurse our disappointment at a nearby bar until our Barbie showing in 4 hours. We gave up on seeing Oppenheimer together and booked individual seats across different theaters. I had a beer, then coffee, then another beer. We watched the crowds in front of the Batman statue get somehow increasingly larger as prime time for moviegoing approached. 

When we returned for Barbie, the theater looked like it went through a war. Floors sticky, popcorn and napkins absolutely everywhere, employees beyond irritated and of course - air conditioners broken. They put out a stack of drink trays to be used as makeshift fans and we thought, sure! Why would we want to experience Barbie any other way, than in steamy a room with 100s of people and no ventilation? (thankfully the air kicked in before Ryan Gosling’s first musical number)

All in all, couldn’t have asked for a more memorable experience seeing 2023’s biggest movies (or not seeing, in Oppenheimer’s case, but it’s OK as I went on to see it a whopping 4 times in theaters). There was one shared feeling that managed to break through the sweat and disappointment that day - the appreciation for experiencing the highs and lows of moviegoing with a large amount of strangers. I don’t care how many think pieces are written about the habit of going to the movies being dead. It is at most lying dormant in every one of us, waiting to be activated with the right combination of movie, marketing campaign and themed dress code. Praying for a repeat this year for Twisters.