OUR WEEKS WITH MARILYN

 Do many of us stop to think about how we get to see a movie?  Personally we seldom give it much thought beyond watching for films that seem interesting and checking the local theaters and deciding where and when and if we shall go to the theater or simply wait for the DVD or decide a film just isn’t for us.

But for us, “My Week With Marilyn” was at the top of our to-see list when we first heard about it, and especially after we saw a trailer.  We often use a website called imdb.com, for International Movie Data Base, to find out when a film is going to be released, and then start watching for it to appear on the website for one of our local theaters.  And one would think that a movie such as MWWM would be available everywhere.  But it was not.  And we live in a large metropolitan area.

We checked and checked and finally found it only at a mall theater about eleven miles away, but we shrugged and said to ourselves, “Well, this is a special occasion.  OK.”  Then when we got to the theater and after we bought the tickets, we found that the movie was available only in one of those so-called dinner theater setups, with a total seating capacity of 32, and no seats available for us to sit together.  Now we like to have meals out, and we like to go to movies, but we just don’t care to do both at the same time.  To us it is incongruous to watch a meaningful film with the smell of French fries and burgers or whatever, wafting over everything.  So we got a refund and went home very disgruntled.  And kept looking for the possibility of the movie showing up in wider distribution, as sometimes mysteriously happens.  Well, finally, we found it at a ‘normal’ movie theater, fifteen miles away, and now we were flat determined to go see that movie.  And oh, how glad we were that we did.  The story was beautifully written and directed, the actors were all superb, and we walked out of the movie and all we could say was, “Wow”.  And we passed the word along to all our friends, along with the less than encouraging difficulty it was to even find the movie being shown, much less in what we consider a suitable venue.

We’ve been following this film on that imdb.com site and sure enough, the receipts on this film are remarkably low (because no one could find it), and yet the film has garnered all sorts of awards and nominations, including Academy nominations for two of the actors.  And we simply cannot figure out why on earth this jewel of a film was not as carefully marketed and displayed as it was carefully made.  Some of the films nominated for “Best Movie” made a lot of money.  At least two of them, in our opinions, weren’t worth the digital material it took to film them.   There’s no accounting for tastes.  But for all the folks out there who love good movies with good stories and good actors and wonderful settings, find this movie and see it if you can.  Or wait for the DVD to buy or rent.  Ours is already ordered.  We’ll want to see it again.  And again.