The Big Kah-snooz-a

reviewed Fri, 26 May 2000

I walked out of The Big Kahuna after about half an hour, but I didn't feel bad, because I actually made money on the deal.  I had a free pass, good at virtually any theater, that expired today, and I had the day off from work.  Unfortunately, the only theater playing anything I remotely wanted to see was the evil Regal Cinemas at Ballston.  This would be the stunningly incompetent place that I have complained about many a time, and if you're wondering why I keep going back there, it's because I complain so often that they give me free passes.  Also, it's very convenient for me (and today, free, thanks to Arlington County's free bus passes).  But for once, the incompetence worked in my favor.  The box office employee had no idea what my pass was, but evidently he only read the part of it that said, "Good for any admission up to $9.50" and not the part that said, "No change shall be given," because he handed me my ticket plus $4.25.  At any other theater, I would have corrected him... but this place owes me.

Anyway, the movie was sort of beside the point.  I can best sum it up by saying, "Blah blah blah."  You know how they have these "Bad Hemingway" and "Bad Faulkner" contests?  Well, they must have a "Bad Mamet" contest, and the grand prize must have been to get to write this movie.  It's these three salesmen in a hotel suite waiting for some potential clients to arrive for a reception, and they talk and talk and talk and talk and talk and... you get the picture.  We have the Three Ages of Man here:  Peter Facinelli (aka Mr. Jenny Garth) is naive youth, Kevin Spacey is cynical middle age, and Danny DeVito is tired out.  What that means is that they're boring in three separate and very predictable ways.  So, when it became obvious that no other characters were going to appear, no action was going to occur, and the three men would pretty much stay in the hotel suite the entire movie -- in other words, Lifeboat on the top floor of a Wichita hotel -- I left and wandered around the theaters on my level looking for something else to see.  Unfortunately, nothing else was running at the time -- really a shame, because Battlefield Earth was in the theater next door, and I've got to see anything that's being called the worst movie of the century, but I don't want to pay for it.

Even more unfortunately, the evil Regal puts its auditoriums on two levels, and to get from one to the other, you have to cross the lobby.  And I just didn't have the brazenness to stroll across the completely empty lobby to go see what was playing on the lower level, so I decided to go spend my ill-gotten $4.25 on a grande iced vanilla latte.  As I was leaving the theater, I noticed all three employees in the lobby were staring anxiously at me, and I suddenly realized they thought I was coming to ask for my money back.  Oh, wouldn't that make a great story?  But I have to admit I just didn't have the cojones to ask for a refund.

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