Lighter stuff

Okay, if you want my long-winded and boring opinions on Fahrenheit 9/11, read the last post. This is just a quick report on how fun it was to see it at my favorite movie theater, The Alamo Drafthouse. It's run by a couple of true-believing film geeks and it shows. Going there will renew your enthusiasm for movies, that's for sure.
Anyway, I pulled up 20 minutes until the movie began. There were signs all over the ticket booth declaring that Fahrenheit 9/11 was sold out. It had been sold out for all night by mid-afternoon, so I expected that. Then I saw something I have never seen at a movie. A man was scalping tickets in front of the theater. No joke. He had the whole thing down, waving them in the air, yelling the movie's name. A couple people wandered over and talked to him. I walked in but I think I heard someone else start scalping more.
One of the great things about the Alamo Drafthouse is that they try to make the whole period where you have your seat but the movie hasn't started interesting. When I walked in, the infamous conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was off on a rant. It's hard to dislike Alex, even though he acts like a Jack Russell terrier on crack. He drifts close to reason quite often and a number of otherwise smart people have made alliances with him. Alex is a right-winger of sorts, a genuine libertarian. He said he really liked the movie, but that he felt it didn't go far enough. He was hawking his videos telling the "real" story of 9/11, as well as shirts mocking Bush that I was tempted to buy. When radicals like Jim Hightower and myself suggest that a genuine populism could pull right wingers like Alex Jones into the fold, we aren't kidding. The crowd was happy to have him. I told him I liked him, and it's the truth.
It was good that Alex Jones was there, because his theories are a good example of real conspiracy theories. I've heard noises claiming that Moore is peddling conspiracy theories, which is a way to equate him with the JFK assasination freaks and people like Alex Jones who think that the masters of the world are carefully organized and have regular meetings that involve Satanism. Moore isn't close. He just points out the truth--that our current leaders are ass-deep in Middle East oil money and that might be clouding their judgement.
After Alex spoke, they showed the usual round of trailers and ads. However, the Alamo Drafthouse fucks with the formula and makes it entertaining. They showed a piece from Moore's show "The Awful Truth", where he actually tries to have white collar criminals arrested and brought to jail like other criminals and fails. After that, the lowered the lights and showed the trailers. But those trailers were mixed in with submissions from the MoveOn.org contest. Next weekend, you can see a whole bunch of submissions, much fun. We got to see two. In one, the subject was "What if the Bush administration was a parent?" and showed the parents treating a child like shit and taking out debts in her name. The other was, "What if Bush were a roommate?" and it showed two roommates furious and inept in the face of their roommate who has decided to decorate and that their input is irrelevant.
Then they showed a remix of the State of the Union address, which was hilarious.
Again, go see your movies there. They make even the dinkiest movie feel like an event.