Date: 1-24-2001

From: Thomas P. Flanagan, Jr.
tommy7666@****.com

To: cineman@spacegroove.com

   One of my favorite and most memorable movie experiences was in 1983. I was a junior in high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Downtown Ann Arbor, amidst the trees, buildings, students of the University of Michigan, and more trees, was my destination. I walked down State Street to the single theater (or was it a double? - too many brain cells ago) State Theater (I wonder how they got the name?), obtained necessary rations of popcorn (no butter) and pop, and settled into a plush scarlet cushion. In patient anticipation I sat until the lights dimmed and upon the screen appeared The Crimson Permanent Assurance. I had come to see Monty Python's Meaning of Life, but their philosophy would have to wait while held prisoner by the pirates aboard the Crimson Permanent Assurance. Breaking free from the shackles of corporate management, this film fucking rocked in every way. It looked beautiful - the glorious buttresses of the pirate building and the rich wood of the filing cabinets made cannons launching their attack upon the cold glass superships of corporate tyranny. I reveled in the anti-executive and rebellius spirit of these office mutinists, forgetting completely the Python prisoners and their theories of existence. Action, cinematography, substance, satire. Hell yeah. After about fifteen minutes of liberating assaults upon the boardrooms of big business, our pirate-heroes fall off the end of the flat Earth, and all is revealed to be a Python Production. Those bastards! Those brilliant fucking bastards! The Meaning of Life then commenced and was hilarious and wonderful from the first frame to the last, but I will always remember The Crimson Permanent Assurance as an important and defining moment in my life. The spirit of this film and the magic of Ann Arbor combined with youth brought a necessary part of me to light that day. I got it. Someone else got it, too. Someone else understood what I felt and knew but couldn't yet say. Yeah.

Date: 4-29-2001

From: Fredson101@***.com

To: cineman@spacegroove.com

   It was a sultry night. I was called by my friend Kenny (the whiner). He and his lady-friend Cheryl (the tolerant) wanted to go see Sean Connery in the Russia House at the La Paloma Theatre in Encinitas (where "the Theatre is part of the show"). Forever complaining, regardless of where he goes, Kenny became part of the show that night. Par for the course we all arrived 20 minutes into the film. That Saturday night the room was particularly packed. There were THREE seats left open together, and they were right in the middle of absolutely everyone. Not crazy about interrupting and crawling over 20 strangers just to sit next to my pain in the ass friend, for a movie well into the plot, that had such a poor sound track it really did sound like Russian, I bit my lip and followed the leaders. When we finally got seated, Kenny began to spaz out. His Jackson Browne doo started flailing about as he began rubbing his head and peering straight up into the blackness. Then he vocally let the throng in on his latest problem he was experiencing. Kenny had sat beneath the one place in the room where the condensation was dripping from the air conditioner. With plenty of commotion we all left the same way we came. Come to think of it, to make matters even worse, I'm the one who paid for all of us to see the friggin movie.