Creeking More in the ATL (with your host Nate Creekmore) Episode #20

I'm not from Atlanta, but I live here, and (because I live here) people who don't live here ask me, "Creek, what's Atlanta really like?"  I don't know what Atlanta is really like, but if you'd like to know what it's like for me I invite you to sit back and enjoy another episode of CREEKING MORE IN THE ATL (with your host Nate Creekmore)!!!

[please hold your applause until the end of the episode]

In the city of Atlanta, movie theaters are easily found.  People often complain about the fact that folk are fond of talking during films.  Me?  I mostly enjoy the chatter, actually.  If I don't hear someone say something witty or (conversely) idiotic, I feel disappointed.  Years ago, when I lived in Nashville, I went out to see Kill Bill Vol. 2 on its opening night.  There's an unforgettable scene wherein Uma Thurman yanks out Darryl Hannah's eyeball in the middle of a sword fight.  It's a total surprise and no one in the room saw it coming.  The theater, appropriately, went nuts:

The reactions (audible and emphatic) made an outstanding sequence that much better.

But before I veer any further off track in my memories of Nashvegas, let me turn my thoughts back to Atlanta and an experience I had at one of her cinemas...

My favorite film director is Terrence Malick and when I watch a Terrence Malick film, I am too entranced to know if anyone around me is talking or laughing or alive or dead.  I could talk all day about the transcendent, pensive quality of his film making and about how his The New World is the absolute pinnacle of cinematic achievement, about his penchant for (somehow) simultaneously abandoning and embracing narrative, about his profound vision of humanity and nature and God... but, lest I be carried away in tones that seem hyperbolic (and would be hyperbolic were I speaking of anyone besides Malick) we'll move on.

About a year ago, Malick made a movie called The Tree of Life.  I went to go see it at the Tara theater on Cheshire Bridge Road...

The Tree of Life is a prayer.  Somehow, Terrence Malick convinced a movie studio to allow him to create a film that is, in fact, a prayer.  An exquisitely beautiful prayer.  But not everyone was as enraptured as me.  As soon as the final credits started rolling, a man began yelling at the screen:

He hated the movie and assumed we all felt the same way.  An old, professorial looking man walked over to the yelling man in an attempt to discuss some of the film's finer points:

I began to recall one of my father's favorite stories; the one where he goes to see 5 Fingers of Death (the first Kung Fu movie to come out in the States) and people in the theater begin trying out the Kung Fu moves they'd just seen in the movie on their fellow audience members.

Alas, there was no fight between the professor and the yelling man.

When the credits were done (and I stay until the credits are over if I feel the film is deserving) I left the theater, being careful to avoid the may pretentious conversations sparked by the film, and made my way through the parking lot.

...but a Terrence Malick film doesn't let you go right away; it lingers for days, floating purposefully like a dream, or a vision of the divine... a glimpse behind the celestial curtain.  The whole world is new and beautiful.

Amen.

There you have it folks, another episode of "Creeking More in the ATL (with your host Nate Creekmore)"!!! Be sure and come back for the next installment where I gush over the brilliant trailer for Malick's new film To The Wonder and go on at length to explain why Pinocchio is the greatest animated film of all time.