The movie

(I wrote this last night but got home way too late to post it)

I'm sitting in the lobby of the Cinerama watching the staff clean up the concession stand and waiting of the 2nd showing of Inlaws & Outlaws to end. If I had been thinking ahead I would've brought Harry Potter 4 to read, but I rarely remember to think ahead. Earlier this evening I remember thinking I should grab it, but then forgot when it was actually time to leave. Slowly all the other concession workers leave until there's only 2 left doing the last bit of clean up and checks. They, like me, are stuck here until the very end. One is going to start at UW in the fall to become a teacher. The other is regaling him with tales of his parents' lives as teachers. I want to tell them he's wrong and it isn't as easy as he is making it out to be but I keep silent and sit in this blue chair in the lobby. I try not to think about all of those who sat here before me. There's a knock at the locked doors and this older Asian couple is trying to come in to see Star Wars. They get turned away and sent to Pacific Place. I doze off a couple of times. Finally the movie is almost done and the director and his assistant return. I stand up and straighten my little booth area. People stream out and I thank them for coming, a few come over to me. A few donate money, and finally it is time to go home.

On to the movie review... well, my crying during movies streak remains unbroken. I really enjoyed the movie, and not just because my name appears in the credits - although that will be part of the reason I purchase this on DVD when it gets released. Y'all know I don't generally like indie films, so for me to say I liked it is a pretty big deal. :) It was very honest, these people's stories - very real. (Duh it is a documentary and not fiction.) It was really interesting to me how little of the hours of tape I listened to actually ended up on the finished product. Luckily the couple I didn't like didn't appear at all. They were just unpleasant and I think would've been counterproductive to the tone of the finished product. He was fairly anti-establishment and anti-marriage. His wife parroted him but it was hard to tell from the bits I heard how much of that was her own belief. It's very much a movie about hope and about believing that there is someone out there for you and once you've found it, hold on tight. It definitely isn't all roses and flowers though. There was a lot of pain in some of these people's lives. Each segment is introduced by this simply amazing singer. Each piece she sang was in line with the tone of the segment. Her version of REM's Everybody Hurts made my tears fall harder since that's always been my (and many other's I'm sure) song of tears. I'm amazed and kind of awed by the people we saw on the screen, sharing their personal stories in that manner. I'm also amazed and kind of in awe of those who managed to find the love of their lives and hold on for so long. There was an older gentleman who was with his partner for 50 years before the partner died in 1999. For all 50 of those years, they were in the closet. Somehow that was so sad to me, but at the same time joyous too. It takes a lot of love to keep that kind of secret from the world for that long. After the movie, people were coming up to my table and asking about distribution. They're shopping it around for a DVD release. I would love to see this go into the mainstream, or at least the art house movie theaters ala Penguin March. Although I guess the people who really need to see this wouldn't go.