SHE'S THE MAN: Ten Years Later

Ten years ago I was beginning my second semester of college, working thirty hours or so a week at Wendy's and increasingly enjoying more and more movies in my free time. My schedule throughout the week was decent as I only had class on Tuesdays and Thursdays while working the other three days to get a solid enough paycheck to sustain my mostly free weekends. Still, if there was a way to save money I would certainly take advantage of such opportunities and one of the ways to do so was to enjoy $5 Tuesdays at my locally owned movie theater. They also had a deal where, if you brought your own bowl on Thursdays, they would fill it up with popcorn for you. This popcorn deal of course spawned several interesting stories, but to the more pertinent point I was reminded of such movie-going experiences because over the last few weeks I've seen a number of anniversary articles about films that are turning twenty this year. While prestigious fare like Fargo and the now more affectionately rendered The Birdcage make for understandable reflections I was only nine in 1996 and therefore could only comment on something like Disney's stop-motion James and the Giant Peach (trust me, I checked) feature that I remember enjoying as a child, but probably haven't seen since 1997. And so, I bumped things up a decade to the year where I went to the theater consistently on Tuesday nights, for $5 dollars, and every now and then stumbled upon something more enjoyable than I might have expected particularly in these early months of the year.