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As enjoyable as a midnight movie can be, it also requires effort. If you're not an insomniac, you probably need to fill up on coffee beforehand, or at least take a disco nap. If you have young kids, there is the problem of trying to find a babysitter for such odd hours
-- although as we saw with the Aurora shooting, there were plenty of children in the audience. Among the injured was a 4-month-old baby, who was treated at a hospital and released. When my husband and I went to the seventh-anniversary midnight showing of the famously terrible cult favorite "The Room" a couple of years ago, we hired a babysitter to watch our then-infant son so that we could laugh and scream and throw plastic spoons at the screen with all the other freaks. She slept on the couch, but at least she was there. Katy Kleinhans, a 43-year-old cultural theorist, attended a midnight Friday showing of "The Dark Knight Rises" in downtown Houston and said there were children in the audience as young as 5. The mother of a teenager herself, she suspects their parents either couldn't find a sitter at that time or didn't want to pay for one: "A lot of those kids just fell asleep," she said. "It was all about the parents wanting to be there for this singular event, this one-time thing." Kleinhans went with a friend who'd bought tickets online for the Sundance Cinema, where various fans dressed as Batman or Catwoman and employees behind the concession counter were in costume, as well. They made a night of it, with dinner at the theater beforehand. Kleinhans even wore a button she'd kept with the logo from the Tim Burton's 1989 "Batman" movie. And while the rest of the audience sat silently in rapt anticipation, she and her buddy were cheering and high-fiving. The whole experience reminded her of the excitement of seeing midnight movies in high school, she said: "The preparation and the excitement, that's how it used to be when you'd go to movie. You can only get that in the middle of the night. You have to be off people's regular clocks and responsibilities." Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who literally wrote the book on this topic
-- "Midnight Movies," which he co-authored with fellow critic J. Hoberman
-- thinks the time and place of the Colorado shooting aren't the issue. "I don't think it's very likely that this horrible killing has anything to do with midnight movies except incidentally," Rosenbaum said by email. "I'm sure it has a lot to do with how easy it is for people to get ahold of guns, including psychotics."
[Associated
Press;
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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