In Praise of the Movie Date
(Not Necessarily The Date Movie)

Here at CineConnections®, we love everything about cinema, up to and very much including film criticism. We’ve asked some of our favorite film critics to contribute essays for our blog on the fathomless topics of cinema and romance.

We’re thrilled to present for our first guest critic column a the esteemed NY Times / RogerEbert.com writer Glenn Kenny, talking about movies and dating, not necessarily in that order:

I’ve seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show maybe seventy-five times.

Yes, it was when I was in my late teens/early twenties; no, it was not because I was enamored of the film, which I found a trifle cheesy in spite of its ostensible progressive bonafides. No, I did it for love. My first real girlfriend, Nicole, who I met up at the college paper as I began my freshman year at what was then William Paterson College, worked weekends at the concession stand at Hackensack’s Oritani Theater, and she had the Rocky Horror midnight shift on both Friday AND Saturday night. Such was my devotion that I’d show up at 11:30, hang out with her a bit, duck into the theater itself as the mad rumpus began, and at about two in the morning our actual “date” would begin.

In some circles, conventional wisdom states that the movies are not suitable for dating, or at least not early dating. After all, you’re supposed to get to know each other when you’re first stepping out. But no one, or hardly anyone, could deny that learning a romantic partner’s movie tastes is a useful aesthetic sonar so to speak. If one is being honest, one’s taste in movies reveals something subterranean in a way that one’s taste in literature or even music does not. Even the most banal motion picture speaks a language of dreams, after all. But everyone interprets that language differently. After things fell apart with the Oritani Girl, I dated an NYU student. Fair-skinned, with pale blonde hair, she wore black Danskin leotards and long pleated black skirts and white blouses. Almost exclusively. She liked to walk from the NYU dorm to Chinatown to get any dish that featured snow peas. On our second date we went to another midnight movie: David Lynch’s Eraserhead, playing Friday and Saturday evenings at the Third Street Playhouse, now the IFC Center. What a wondrous place this was when it was just a single-screen theater. As we left the theater, lifted by the dulcet tones of the movie’s theme song, “In Heaven,” I asked Debra what she thought. “It reminded me that I needed to do my laundry,” she said in her dreamy voice. It was love, for sure. Thing is, I can’t recollect a single movie we saw together after that.

Sometimes it doesn’t quite work out. There was the willowy former model who suggested we see Claire Denis’ Chocolat blamed me when she ended up not liking it. This did not augur well for the relationship. When I was trying to get the Village Voice to publish my ruminations on contemporary youth culture, an editor suggested I see St. Elmo’s Fire, and my then girlfriend and I did, both leaving the theater with a severe resentment toward the editor, because there were so many other ways we would have preferred to carpe the diem.

When introduced to the woman who would become my wife — now of almost 20 years — circumstances were such that our date wasn’t a movie but the after-party for one. The picture was 24 Hour Party People and the ruckus was at the famous New York City roller disco The Roxy and it was a riot. Kind of set the mood for the rest of our journey. Our first “real” movie date was outdoors, at Bryant Park, for Jailhouse Rock, and we were mutually heartened to discover we both were crazy about Elvis, and not in any ironical way either. It’s still crash, boom, bang at our house.

But if I WERE still dating — heaven forbid, but let’s work together here — I’d be delighted that I no longer had to leave my movie dates to happenstance. I’d rely on CineConnections®, truly the dating app for REAL film lovers.

#top10 #romanticfilms #cineconnections #filmlovers #moviedate #datemovie #dating #singles

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny is the author of “Made Men: The Story of ‘Goodfellas’” and “The World Is Yours: The Story of ’Scarface.’” He writes for the New York TImes and RogerEbert.com

28May