Gee, I enjoyed that. A lot of us met first for dinner at a place that serves "artisan pizza," a term which I've learned denotes pizzas that are small, overpriced and covered with toppings I don't want on my pizza. Then we walked over to the Cinerama Dome Theatre at the Arclight in Hollywood to see It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World — a movie I first saw in that building the evening of November 23, 1963. As I'm pretty sure I've mentioned here before, that was one day after Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John F. Kennedy and one day before Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald.
That was a weekend of great despair in America with people genuinely fearing the nation was doomed and that we were without leadership. Thank Heaven it isn't like that anymore.
(It's after Midnight so our Trump-Free Weekend here is over.)
Perhaps some of my love for Stanley Kramer's epic comedy flows from the emotions of that first viewing. I was eleven and a half years old, which was old enough to appreciate an event that took me and everyone around me away from the agony of that weekend. But I was also old enough to be a student of most of the great comedians in that cast. At intermission, I (age 11.5, remember) explained who some of them were to the folks sitting next to us who were in their forties. To see all those great artists working together and off each other was a pure joy for me and probably more important than any escapism that night. I still marvel at the skills on display in the film.
Don't like it? Fine. I probably don't like something that makes you very happy and I won't try to argue it shouldn't. We all need as many of those as we can get. I hear the theater is going to make this an annual event. If they do, so will I.