A Few Good (Looking) Men



Things are looking up: Mom can go to the movies again, ready to cash in  AMC gift cards that are as  old as her birth certificate.

Neither expires. Nor have her complaints about being kept away from the movie house, because of COVID and other reasons. She took it personally: It was an affront, a "how dare they?" situation, ridiculous, unfair. 

You get the picture, pun intended. Moviegoing, in mom's eyes, is a sacred right to which she's entitled at her age. (It's not the only entitlement she claims, but I digress.)  

Enter Tom Cruise. The actor occupies a stratosphere unlike his peers, and not just because his new movie, "Top Gun: Maverick," finds him battling enemies in a dangerous dance with loaded fighter jets. He is a throwback to the days of studio-owned but beautiful movie stars, despite three marriages, questions about his sexuality and his adherence to Scientology.

Mom cares about none of that: She just likes the way the guy looks. And the film, she tells me, features other young hunks as yummy as the star.

Sold! 

But another hunk has now trumped Cruise at the movies: Elvis. I suspect my mother is not alone in that considering her age and gender. She does, after all, remember when the singer and his swirling hips came on the scene in the '50s, shocking the world with a flaunted sexuality.

Mom has now seen "Elvis" the movie twice, and she would go again. Referring to Austin Butler, who plays the title role, "I could feast my eyes on that fellow many more times."

Repeat viewings and new films will keep her in a movie theater for hours, letting her forget the rest of the world, a place, at times, she doesn't recognize anymore, even though it has recently engaged her: Mass murder. Jan. 6. Roe vs. Robin (as she puts it). 

Until her old age, her interest in politics was somewhat limited to her vote for Kennedy, and I don't mean Ted.

"I was busy raising five kids," she will say in her defense. 

But now she is full of questions and comments: How long can those guys stay on the Supreme Court?  That Cheney woman is really smart. What's a fill buster?  (The political tactic that allows legislators to delay or prevent a vote.) Why can't I watch Netflick on my TV? 

So the movies are a way to escape current events, and people have been doing it for years. FDR once said this about Shirley Temple at the height of the Depression: "It is a splendid thing that for just 15 cents, an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby and forget his troubles."

The patrician president was a little off on the ticket price; it was closer to a quarter. But he was right about Temple: At the time, the "baby" was a movie money machine.     

Later, so was Elvis. So is Tom Cruise. Both of them are on mom's radar right now. For a while they will block out a world she continually says she's "glad to be leaving," one she doesn't recognize.

Except for the hunks. Except at the movies.    

             


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