Nothing exceeds like excess

The history, logistics, and philosophy of the M4 (or M5, or, on rare occasions, M6)

Years ago--jesus, almost a quarter of a century ago--when I was between wives and girlfriends and working the 4-to-midnight shift on the sports desk at the newspaper in Champaign, Ill., I decided one day off that there was nothing I'd rather do with my free day than go to movies. A couple of movies. Maybe three. Hell, why not four? I would call it a Movie Madness Marathon.

So I checked the listings and established a workable itinerary, and that day in 1984 I went to (this is strictly from memory; the short-term has started to go, but the long-term's still pretty sharp) Splash at the Co-Ed on campus (long since gutted); Against All Odds at Country Fair Shopping Center (long since gutted); Repo Man at the Market Place Mall (theater long since razed, though the mall has grown to eat the entire north end of town); and Heat and Dust at the downtown Orpheum (long since tragically gutted). The films were, respectively, enchanting, plodding (had not yet seen the wonderful original, Out of the Past), transporting (though the other guy in the audience didn't seem to enjoy it as much; who had the bright idea to book this at a suburban shopping mall multiplex?), and Merchant-Ivorian. I still watch Repo Man regularly; it's a sort of benchmark for oddball flicks.

Years passed. A regional relocation ensued. A marriage blossomed and died. Now it's 2003, and I'm postmarriage/girlfriend/whatever. And it occurs to me that one good thing about this state is that, aside from the 37½ hours a week at work and the occasional phone call to reassure family that I'm still eating sufficiently and drinking sublethally, I don't have to answer to anyone. I can pretty much do what I fucking please. And if it pleases me, say, to take a train to Manhattan and go to movies all damn day, not only will no one object, no one will even care, or even know unless I tell them. And it occurs to me, moreover, that that is precisely what will please me. Thus was born the Manhattan Movie Madness Marathon, or M4.

(Four was the number of films I'd routinely see in a day at first, so the 4 in M4 was particularly appropriate. When I first did five, I adjusted the number to fit the number of movies, but I never did come up with a satisfactory fifth M-word to describe the shift, and the couple of times I've seen six films in day . . . well, Mega- would need to be in there somewhere, I suppose. But I digress . . . )

The typical M# (as I now sometimes call the generic form, before I've established an itinerary and plugged in a number) takes place on the Sunday of a three-day weekend. As you might gather, six to ten hours of cinemating, sandwiched between a couple of not-quite-two-hour train rides, take a toll on a fifty-four-year-old body, and it also gets me home well past my school-night bedtime, so I would never do one immediately ahead of a workday. Sunday is a better fit than Saturday because Sunday is the one day of the week I don't work out (though I do sometimes make myself get up early enough on Sat. to allow for a workout and shower before leaving--and on rare occasion I'll even adjust my workout schedule, taking Sat. off and working out on Sun., but that goes against my anal grain [Anal Grain, 100% fiber--eat it for breakfast, discard it an hour later!]).

I walk the not-quite-a-mile to the train station, get in the front car of the Metro North train, and settle down w/ water bottle and Times or a book. At Grand Central, I zoom to the subway station and grab, typically, a downtown 6. Virtually every M# is a strictly downtown mission, that being where the art houses congregate.

That's usually my last subway ride of the day until I'm ready to come home--and if I get to GCT with plenty of time and it's a nice day, I'll skip even the first ride and stroll down Park or Fifth Avenue. (I like to point out to people I tell about these movie days that I do spend some time outside, and I do walk at least a couple of miles in the course of the day, sometimes quite a bit more; I think people envision me as Jabba the Hutt in a dark room for twelve hours straight.) Invariably, if I start out strolling, there comes a moment when I realize that if I don't start pushing it, I'm not going to have time to hit the head before my first movie--and frequent head-hitting is one of the many keys to a successful M#.

Guess I should say a word about costs: currently my Metro North trip between New Haven and Manhattan costs $11.13½ (I buy an off-peak 10-ride pass online, the cheapest per-ride fare available) and each subway or bus ride costs $1.67 2/3 (I give the MTA $20, they give me $24 worth of Metrocard, or 12 rides--though the 20% bonus is scheduled to drop to 15% in March, making the effective price $1.73 per ride). Movie tickets vary from theater to theater, but they're all over $10 now, and $11.50 is becoming standard, with no "bargain matinees." The large corn and large diet caffeinated brown drink that constitute my lunch (plenty of salt on the corn, of course, the better to avoid having the large caffeinated beverage force me to take a bathroom break before the movie is over) come to $10 more or less, pretty much the same as at home. So, not counting whatever I might grab for dinner, if there's time, a five-movie day comes in at a hair less than $100; given what people pay to see a Broadway musical, I consider that a bargain.

So now I'm ready to see movies. But what movies? The planning process is part of the fun. Naturally, I have to ask the usual question of any consumer contemplating any purchase: can I expect to like it? But on an M# I also have to ask: is it likely to come to one of my more-or-less local theaters? Manhattan trips are relatively rare and relatively expensive: I don't want to waste an M4 slot on something that, if I wait a couple of weeks, I'll be able to walk downtown and see at a bargain matinee for $7.50. There's no surefire way of predicting what the downtown theater and the suburban multiplexes (one of which shows some art house fare) will eventually screen--you can check out the lobby posters and the trailers and, in the case of the downtown house, the "Coming Soon" page on the Web site, but these are all merely suggestive, not definitive.

Experience has taught me that films showing at certain Manhattan art houses--the Angelika and the Sunshine, e.g.--are nearly certain to come within a bus ride, or at worst a bus ride + a death-defying roadside walk of home, while those showing at, say, the IFC Center almost never come to Greater New Haven. So these days I tend to see a lot of films at IFC, and I almost never go to Sunshine or the Angelika--though if I'm so hot for a film that I don't want to take the slightest chance of missing it, I'll take a bigger risk of "wasting" the M4 slot.

Once I have an idea of "what," the logistical questions of "how long" and "how much time between" come into play: if a film showing at 11 a.m. at IFC (which routinely shows at least 15 minutes of trailers and other preliminaries) has a running time of 110 minutes, e.g., can I get from there to Film Forum (which occasionally shows no prelims at all)-- for a 1:15 show? Yes, though it may be cutting it too close for a bathroom trip between films. On the other hand, if that 1:15 at FF runs 110 minutes, a 3:15 a mile away at Cinema Village is a no-go.

I go through the Movie Clock in the Friday Times, writing down the titles of all films I might be interested in seeing, their running times, and their screening times (stringing the latter across the page such times more or less line up vertically--i.e., a 7:15 on one line is slightly to the left of a 7:30 on the line below). I order the venues geographically, describing a rough clockwise parabola, starting on the Lower East Side and ending in the East Village. To wit: Landmark Sunshine, on Houston between First and Second Avenues; Angelika, Houston and Mercer, just west of Broadway, less than 10 minutes from the Sunshine; Film Forum, Houston west of Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas), less than 10 minutes from the Ang; IFC, Sixth Avenue at 3rd Street, maybe 5 minutes from FF; Quad, 13th Street between Sixth and Fifth Avenues, 10 min from IFC; Cinema Village, 12th Street just west of University Place, 5 minutes from the Quad; Village East, 12th Street and Second Avenue, 10 minutes from CV; Two Boots Pioneer, 3rd Street just east of Avenue A, less than 15 minutes from the VE; to close the parabola, the Sunshine is barely 5 minutes from Two Boots.

So I use different colored highlighter pens to sketch out possible itineraries, and then it's just a matter of weighing my alternatives and going to the flicks. Then to the nearest subway and back to Grand Central--trains to New Haven run late enough that I have once or twice gotten home at 4 a.m. or so, but usually I'm home not long after midnight. "Don't all those movies run together?" people ask? Well, no: it's essentially just a one-day film festival, with the crucial difference that I'm programmer as well as patron.

And that, my friends, is a beautiful thing: being able to see the gorgeous or thought-provoking or mild-blowing film that the vast majority of the country must wait to see on DVD--if it ever comes out on DVD, if the St. Louis film lover, say, ever even hears about it. And after all, isn't that what it's all about? Having something others don't have, even if it's only an informed critical opinion about, say, Sanxia haoren (Still life)?