Running your own business, you can set your own hours. You can meet your deadlines on your own time and nobody judges you for spending your days as you choose. I love this about being my own boss. Every time I’m tempted to take a job working for somebody else, I do the math on what I’m earning, and it evens out, give or take. But then, the loss of independence hits me. I find I’m always determined to stay in control of my affairs.
Case in point: On Monday I went and saw a movie at lunchtime on a whim. I Googled “movies playing near me” and went to the IFC on Sixth Avenue. They were playing Wong Kar Wai’s 2000 film, “In The Mood For Love,” which I hadn’t seen. I snuck in two minutes after it started, and spent 100 minutes in the blissful air conditioning. There’s a heat wave on in New York, so movie theaters are like sitting in fridges. I wore a panama hat down there and wafted myself with it for the first quarter-hour. There were two other people in the theater, and it seats 100. It was utter bliss.
It’s been five years since I went often to the cinema in Manhattan. When we moved here in 2018, my wife and I would go all the time. Then COVID happened, we had our child, and a trip to the movies got more complex. Do we go together? Do we go alone? Do we hire a sitter? And so on. When we lived in the Bay Area we used to go to the movies every Friday night. There was a run-down old cinema in downtown San Francisco that I loved to go to for the posters in the lobby. The staff all loved films, and were hanging on until the place got bought out and redeveloped. After we’d seen the film, I used to write a little review on a vintage typewriter, and give it to my wife in the empty M&Ms box. It was sweet and romantic and we both enjoyed the ritual as we got to know each other through seeing a ton of films. Now we’re happy and married. So: It worked!
When it comes to atmosphere, I like my movie theaters a bit like I like my hairdressers. There needs to be a sense that they’ve lived full lives, that they’ve fallen on hard times, and that they might die soon. Don’t ask me what that’s all about. I suppose it’s about the right atmosphere to see a movie in. I’m less of a multiplex guy. One barber actually did die on me in New York recently. He had a heart attack and I had to find someone else to cut my hair. If anything, it shows I do know how to pick them.
Likewise I prefer my films to be a bit on the gritty side. I do not like computer graphics. I do not like Marvel. I do not like “universes.” I like great acting, artful cinematography, great writing and auteur directing. On that basis “In The Mood for Love” is, it turns out, a fantastic movie. It was all about a couple having an emotional affair in Hong Kong in the 1960s. They find out their spouses are having an affair, so they start piecing together what’s going on. Then they grow closer. But they never actually get it on. There’s a lot of hands held in taxis and shared umbrellas in rain storms. It’s atmospheric, exotic, and full of yearning. It’s exactly the sort of film you want to see in Manhattan at 11:30 on a Monday.
The experience made me go hunting in my hard drive for some scanned photos I took when we first moved to the city. My wife’s mother gave me an old single lens reflex camera she hadn’t used in a while. I bought some slide film and shot “for atmosphere” for the first few months we were living here. I loved looking through the pictures for the sense they captured of the excitement of being new in New York. There was a photo of the IFC with the Empire State Building in the background (up top). There were some photos taken from the window of our old fifth-floor walk-up.
There was a black and white photo taken on West Fourth Street at night in the rain. Ask a photographer and they’ll tell you it’s not easy to pull this off. Ask me and I’ll tell you it’s not easy to pull it off, either.
There was even a photo of my wife pretending to use an old payphone on Seventh Avenue. They’ve since ripped the old payphones out, and replaced the old Riviera Cafe where Lou Reed kicked John Cale out of the Velvet Underground. Now it’s a magnet for Hedge Funders and their fiances. You know you’re a New Yorker when you hear yourself saying the city isn’t the same as it used to be.
Still, it was nice to reconnect with that part of myself on a Monday instead of being on Slack. Forget Slack. Go see a movie in New York City on your own in the middle of the working week. Thank you.
Matt Davis is a strategic communications consultant in Manhattan.
