We made our way through the building to our theater and settled down for the show. We sat through a couple of previews for a few upcoming major releases. Oddly enough, all of the previews were for "family films." The final preview was for a big, over-the-top production of a film about the Nativity that is supposedly due out around Christmas. I thought it was kind of weird, because I hadn’t heard anything about it but, then again, here we were sitting in a theater getting ready to watch a movie that we hadn’t heard anything about, either. Oh well. Then the film started. As soon as I saw the setting — which looked like the Middle East some centuries ago — I had a kind of unsettling feeling. Then, a narrator spoke and I heard names like "Hadassah" and "Esther" and I turned to Thomai and said, "You know, this might be a religious film." Sure enough, it was. For about three minutes, we whispered back and forth: "What should we do?"..."Should we stay?"..."Do you want to leave?" And then the awful, awful dialogue started. To say we ran out of the theater screaming is an exaggeration, but just a slight one. We were met at the door by a group of very excited and enthusiastic ladies who were obviously running late for the film. As they passed us, they said, "Did it start? Did it start?" We were like, "Ummm...Yeah, it sure did."
We made it out of the theater and to the main corridor where we briefly discussed how stupid we are. We then reviewed our three options:
1) Sneak into another theater and try to catch most of a different film
2) Go back to the lobby and pay full price for more tickets to see another film
3) Explain our situation to a theater employee and see if we could get a refund or some tickets to a different film.
2) Go back to the lobby and pay full price for more tickets to see another film
3) Explain our situation to a theater employee and see if we could get a refund or some tickets to a different film.
We strongly
considered option #1 and for a couple of minutes we actually crept around the
corridor trying to see if there were any other films that were even
worth sneaking into. No dice. A couple of theaters were
playing Saw III (which we had
no interest in seeing) and I can’t remember what else was playing in
the particular wing of the theater that we were in, but I am pretty
sure they were all bad. For a few seconds, we had pretty much
resigned ourselves to the fact that we were going to have to go all the
way out to the main lobby and buy new tickets (it was $19.00 for two
people -- ouch!). But at the last minute, we grabbed an usher and
explained our predicament to her, making special note of the fact that
we had no interest in seeing a religious film. Within a few
minutes, we were hooked up with a manager who understood our plight and
gave us two new tickets to see The Illusionist, which turned out to be one hell of a great movie.It’s kind of hard to believe that in this day and age, we could be so ill-informed as to accidentally pay money to see some kind of creepy religious film, but I guess that’s what we get for not doing our homework beforehand. When we got home that evening, I did a little looking on the ‘net in an attempt to find out some more about One Night with the King. The most helpful resource was the IMDb listing for the film, which included one reviewer’s comment that the film was a “great movie for young and old alike,” adding: “Highly recommend taking the wife and kids.” Did I mention that one of the first scenes in the film was a massacre that included scenes of scores of bloodied dead and dying people? Family fun, indeed. And maybe next week I will take the kids to see Reservoir Dogs. I also found out that One Night was produced by by the son of TBN founders Paul & Jan Crouch, which means that had we stayed for the entire film, we might very well have ended up a couple of Bible-beating zombies because I am pretty sure that TBN uses all kinds of subliminal brainwashing technology in their productions. Talk about dodging a bullet. Whew!
Further Reading
The Illusionist official site
