Thanks to Sinners and The Minecraft Movie, Cinema is Back, Baby!
In 2021, Nicole Kidman appeared in an AMC ad written by Billy Ray, the screenwriter of The Color of Night and Shattered Glass. The ad wasn’t for any specific movie. Instead, it promoted movie-going, quickly going viral and attaining an ironic cult following.
Kidman wasn’t shilling for one of her movies; she was rhapsodizing about the ecstasy of a night out at the theater.
The commercial was a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which ensured empty theaters and dismal box-office results for movies unfortunate enough to open at the worst possible time.
Kidman’s widely mocked tribute to the glory of seeing movies on the big screen was also a reaction to streaming. In the most iconic line in the ad, Kidman marvels, “Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.”
Online streaming represents the biggest threat to moviegoing since the birth of television because streaming has replaced television in so many ways.
Why pay a small fortune to see the latest interchangeable MCU outing or Disney live-action remake of an animated classic when you have access to a dizzying array of motion pictures through Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, or Tubi?
Hollywood doesn’t seem to know how to deal with streaming or the sinister prospect of AI changing the way we make and consume movies.
Over the last few years, I’ve seen sarcastic social media posts about how cinema was officially back thanks to silly ephemera like, I dunno, Sneaks, Joker: Folie a Deux, or Megalopolis.
Despite writing about film for the last twenty-eight years, I shamefully went a solid half-decade without seeing movies in the theaters for weird psychological and professional reasons. People no longer wanted to pay to review movies professionally, which made me sad.
Then, I launched Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas in 2023 and fell back in love with the moviegoing experience. I can’t tell you how happy I have been to go to the movie theater every weekend. I loved the experience so much that I’m not writing up two new movies every weekend for Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas.
It’s a stone-cold bummer that I didn’t see movies like Sorry to Bother You in the theater for reasons that I honestly do not understand, but I’ve made up for it by becoming a steady weekly visitor to the movies.
As a film critic for Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas, I’ve seen two movies recently that made me think, unironically or at least semi-ironically, “Cinema is back!”
They’re very different movies. One is an adaptation of kid-friendly intellectual property so insanely popular that it was guaranteed to make hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, regardless of quality.
The other is a staggeringly original motion picture for grown-ups.
I’m speaking, of course, about The Minecraft Movie and Sinners. They’re different to the point of being antithetical, but they nevertheless have much in common.
The Minecraft Movie and Sinners are, first and foremost, spectacles that angrily demand to be seen on the biggest possible screen, with the largest and most enthusiastic audience possible.
I could not be more excited about Sinners. It thrills me that the whole damn world is talking about a black vampire movie that’s dominating the cultural conversation, making a fortune at the box office, and scoring serious Oscar buzz. If Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan don’t win Oscars, the Academy should disband out of shame.
Calling Sinners a horror movie seems reductive when it’s about so much more than scaring audiences. Sinners is about race, racism, class, capitalism, brotherhood, family, sex, the beauty and horror of the South, and a great, glorious melting pot that regularly boils over.
I had an explosive response to Sinners because it is a timeless masterpiece and because it is about the transcendent, life-altering, spiritual power of live music.
Sinners is about a man so good at playing the guitar that his talent rips a hole in the time-space continuum, through which musicians from the past and future jam with the best of the present.
Ryan Coogler’s zeitgeist-capturing pop culture phenomenon takes massive chances that pay off spectacularly, like having rappers and breakdancers in a movie set in 1932.
Watching Sinners in the theater, first by myself and then with my wife, I experienced a feeling that I otherwise only knew from Phish and Insane Clown Posse shows when I was incredibly high.
I’ve been to Phish shows where the band played so sublimely and the crowd was so enraptured that it genuinely felt like we were on the verge of leaving this world behind as a group and rocketing to a higher state of consciousness. Did I mention the drugs? They were pretty crucial to the whole deal, but you don’t have to be high on MDMA or LSD for a particularly powerful show to send you tripping through time.
That’s the theme of my 2013 memoir, You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me, which you can buy directly from me through this site.
Drugs and jam bands don't even need to be involved. Following "Weird Al” Yankovic, I marveled at what an intense spiritual experience seeing the man behind such songs as “She Never Told Me She Was a Mime” and “Party at the Leper Colony” could be, how it connected fans to the best parts of their youths and the most satisfying part of being parents.
In a wonderful bit of synchronicity, Sinners is an ecstatic communal experience about an ecstatic communal experience. And vampires. And the blues. And Irish folk music.
I enjoyed The Minecraft Movie, but I’ll be the first to concede that Sinners is art, while the adaptation of the popular video game is good enough entertainment. I’m nevertheless impressed by how children have responded to it. It’s become a crowd-participation phenomenon, The Rocky Horror Picture Show minus the sex and gender-bending.
There have been special showings of The Minecraft Movie where the audience is actively encouraged to act a fool and engage in crowd-participation bits. That sounds like hell to most adults, but I wanted to go because it’d be fun to write about and, as someone who has wrestled with depression and mental illness, I like being around people who are not just happy but blissful.
If you want to be around people having the time of their lives, I recommend going to The Minecraft Movie and Sinners, even as one is several thousand times better and more important than the other.
Cinema is back, baby, and we have a very silly movie and a very awesome movie to thank. Moviegoers play a part as well. Their excitement and enthusiasm have made the multiplex a happening place to be right now.
It’s undoubtedly a better place to see a film than Netflix, which continues to pay a vast fortune for nonsense like The Electric State, which can’t help but make going to the theaters to see Sinners (and, to a lesser extent, The Minecraft Movie) seem like even better by comparison.
You can pre-order The Fractured Mirror here: https://the-fractured-mirror.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Nathan needed expensive, life-saving dental implants, and his dental plan didn’t cover them, so he started a GoFundMe at https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-nathans-journey-to-dental-implants. Give if you can!
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