Take some time out to relax and go see a movie

By Mark Costello
Collegian Editor
April 5, 2006

Words were being hurled at me from the screen in a South African dialect, a mixture of English, Dutch Afrikaner and the aboriginal tongue. I was sitting in the middle viewing gallery of the Ritz 5 watching the recently released and critically-acclaimed reflection on apartheid Tsotsi. The movie was inconsequential. I was merely enjoying sitting in an intimate theater, surrounded by the artistic class of Philadelphia, sipping a coffee and nibbling on Swiss chocolate.

A few rows behind me sat a mother and child. They conversed in English, and then the mother took the opportunity to quiz her companion on her progress in her French studies. The people next to me discussed the difference between the communisms of Russia and China. They amended their arguments to separate philosophic influences from economic influences. They further noted that their arguments were as inconsequential to them as the film I was about to see was to me.

My memories of my experiences in the Ritz theater—indeed, most movie houses—are as silvery and sterling as the celluloid of the screen; as luminescent as the projector overseeing the behaviors of the accumulated personae. My friends and I have spent countless hours pouring over the contents of films in the air conditioned bliss of movie theaters, whether we’re criticizing plots or lack thereof or casting curious glances towards the floor as our feet become inexplicably stuck to a spot of ground that looked clean enough when walking towards our seats.

It’s a simple joy to be relished in a life that grows ever-complicated. For the college student that has deadlines looming everywhere he or she looks—a 10-page paper, a 15-page paper, a presentation or three, more extracurricular than curricular activity—the human desires satisfied by sitting in a dark, cool room while having a story told for your entertainment are just the thing to soothe those jangled nerves. Unfortunately, it gives students like me reasons to procrastinate. If it’s for my mental health, I see no reason why I shouldn’t partake of V for Vendetta four or five times.

College students are overworked and overtaxed, by choice or by circumstance, for the most part. We walk the line between sanity and insanity every semester with a vast portion of us straying too close towards insanity by piling upon ourselves heaps of deadlines ignored for too long and an extracurricular roster that would make any graduate studies admissions counselor blush with pride. At the close of every semester, our papers handed in, our exams finished, our newspapers published, our sports run, our plays produced, our organizations established for another year, we lie to ourselves as we mumble, “Never again...”

Finals are closer than you’d think and paper deadlines speed ever-closer. Take two hours for yourself and go enjoy the simple pleasures of sitting in a movie theater.

It doesn’t even matter what’s playing.

costellom4@lasalle.edu