Moobie Nite

Free popcorn, good people, intelligent discussion, all in a homelike setting, nobody texting on their phones, it doesn’t cost $6.50 and up and its free at the Human Potential Center.
I love movies. Its storytelling in its most expensive form. There are movies made to scare you, make you cry, make you laugh, make you angry, happy, inform you, and, with the industry’ descent into gross subjects involving precious bodily fluids introduced under the guise of humor, movies to make you sick and cause you to question your own sanity for paying the price of admission.
When I was a little guy, my folks could get rid of me for 3 hours for 25 cents at the movie house two blocks away. A dime to get in, a dime for popcorn, and a nickel for a soda. Yup, loooong time ago. And they were all double features with a cartoon to start things off. Ah, those were the days. In all that time I’ve only walked out on three of them. One was an Arnold Schwarzenegger, the second an Andy Warhol, and the most recent one by that “Borat” guy.
As the country grew, so did filmmaking. Special effects, incredible stunts, 3-D (the second time around for that genre), computer generated anything and everything, extreme violence with stupendous explosions and … well, if you can imagine it, you can make a movie of it. And several new movies opening every weekend. Movies with budgets equal to or more than the GNP of some small countries. Then there are the smaller films, independents and experimental, that you won’t see at the multiplex. And now you can use your phones to shoot and edit movies, add a soundtrack and put it on the web. Who’da thunk? I certainly didn’t.
Yet with all these advancements in technology, it all gets down to the story. What was the filmmaker trying to say? Did they succeed? The promos for all these movies exclaim “greatest”, “best”, etc. So you turn to the reviews by the professional reviewers, dependent on their mood at the time they saw the film, whether they saw it in a theater or at home, or how much they may be getting paid by the producers to give it a good rating.
We pays our money and we takes our chances. We spend cash to share the vision of the reputed filmmakers, suspending belief, allowing ourselves to be manipulated into exploring feelings we wouldn’t be able to in our “normal” lives.
We do it differently at the Human Potential Center. The films we view together still cover the range of American and foreign, independents, and even animation once in a while. Then we discuss how we were touched by them, what moved us individually, creating questions around the themes discussed that have a more universal ring. It’s amazing to watch that happen and be a part of, since so much of what you and I watch goes uncommunicated, underdiscussed, not shared. The Human Potential Center is the place for that…the joy of exploration. A safe place, good movies, supportive atmosphere, and free popcorn. What more could you ask for?
Namaste
Ramdassnt