How to make an at-home-theater to change up movie night

ACT I: The Set-Up

During this seemingly never-ending quarantine, it’s easy to slip into boredom and resort to YouTube and Netflix to binge “Bon Appetit” cooking videos and “Parks and Rec”  in your room for hours.

However, instead of rewatching old shows and movies, opting for an at-home theater experience brings more excitement and distraction from your mundane quarantine. To watch the latest flicks you can use AMC-on-Demand — with most movies being between $3.99-5.99, including all the recent movies that couldn’t be shown in theater due to the stay-at-home order. And since cinemas aren’t considered an essential business, I decided to bring the AMC movie theater right to my house.

With an old projector found during one of my many quarantine cleaning sessions, three bags of Hen House’s finest bagged popcorn and an ironed white sheet duct taped to the beam on our patio, I moved on to the more decorative side of creating the movie theater.

To add some comfort to the patio-cinema, my family and I foraged around our house to find objects that would provide peak coziness. This included a couple blankets, a sleeping bag and a blow-up mattress — air bed viewing is one of the many perks of home movie nights. The advantage of an at-home theater? You can get as creative as you’d like with it. If you feel like watching a movie from a blanket fort, then for all I care make a blanket fort.

To pick the movies we were going to watch, I went on the ‘New Releases’ tab of the website and chose a double feature of “Downhill” and “Knives Out” out of what seemed like every single movie. Our family typically likes movies with Will Ferrell and Julia Louis Dreyfous, so without reading reviews — which in retrospect would have been a good idea — we hunkered down to watch it.

With the 8’oclock sun setting on a dark pink sky, we were ready to watch our two movies — some might say having dogs bark through the movie is annoying, I just say it adds to the ambiance. What’s a movie theater without a little noise from the crowd? If you have any pets they might wanna join in — just keep an eye on the popcorn bowl. Now, you’re ready to enjoy watching whatever movie — or movies, I won’t judge — you decide on.

ACT II: The Experience

Scene I: Double feature review – “Downhill” 

I wanted the first movie we watched to keep us captivated, but the movie did not reflect the same excitement we got from our theater set up. “Downhill” follows a family’s reaction to almost dying in an avalanche while skiing on vacation. You’d think a natural disaster would be captivating, but the lousy dialogue and lack of a plot almost put me to sleep in our blanket and pillow dwelling.

Besides shifty snow-work, the dialogue was very average (and I’m being generous)— if the producers were going for a vanilla family on a ski resort they would get a gold star. When the actors tried to get in fights over some clouds of snow “attacking” them, it felt disingenuine, and the whole idea of a shift in family dynamics over a near death experience barely came across. Instead, it felt like I was watching well-disguised robots getting into a programmed argument. And it was only “Downhill” from there. 

The plot, much like leftover popcorn, got stale quickly. The central story of Julia Louis Dryfous being angry towards Will Ferrell — I say this because they were basically not acting like characters at all, rather “playing” themselves  — seemed like a crutch to pass the 80 minute mark.

However, with some yawns — the slightly-too-comfortable air mattress did not aid in our attentiveness — came some laughs. A peppy and invasive German woman became a saving grace of the snooze-fest, and from the second the broken couple sat down with her for dinner she spoke in such a comedic accent from Deutschland that the mundane aura of the movie pepped up into a campy, fun surprise.

While the movie was not the most attention-grabbing and insane movie, we didn’t really care because we were so happy with the set up we had made for ourselves. As my mother said “Who cares how good the movie was, it was a party,” which we all need more of these days.

Scene II: Double feature review continued – “Knives Out”

After some disappointing acting, my family chose “Knives Out” to keep up from drifting off on our air-mattress — and it certainly kept us awake.

“Knives Out” is a who-dunnit murder mystery film — one of my all time favorite tropes. The movie did a good job at modernization the murder mystery plot that’s entertained people since Alfred Hitchcock’s hayday. Almost all the characters seem real except for the clashing son and daughter who call each other “nazi-troll” and “libtard snowflake” — the usual Gen Z political clash in Instagram comments did not translate into real life smoothly.

Other than minor questionable acting skills from those two, the movie had us captivated from the first 15 minutes with the seemingly simple plot of trying to solve a death within the Thrombey family. With Daniel Craig playing a serious yet fun southern detective — old-timey accent and all — the movie kept our attention.

The movie was refreshingingly well-thought out, compared to “Downhill” — the director of this movie was creative with his inclusion of fatal details from pecular paintings to nods at other murder mysteries that we as the viewers completely missed. Even the set, a victorian mansion with a modern architecture of any Texan mansion, was filled with clues and foreshadowing at what was to come. Everytime a new explanation towards solving the murder appeared such as missing footprints and airtight destruction of revealing footage, it had me inching further and further towards the edge of the couch seat.

Soon, what was left of my family — half of them peaced out after “Downhill” — discovered the true fate of Mr. Thrombey and our double feature was coming to an end. Although we can’t go to the theaters, staying home and safe is all that matters, so you should try out your own DIY movie night sometime soon — what else is there to do?