For every single day of 2001, from January to December, Kevin Murphy was at the movies. He went to the multiplexes and the independent theaters, watched the best foreign-language films and the dregs of Hollywood tripe. When he was done, he wrote a book about it. That book is “A Year at the Movies.”
“A Year at the Movies” reads like an experiment from the TV show “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” no surprise as Murphy provided the voice of wisecracking robot Tom Servo for 10 years. During that time, Murphy and his castmates subjected themselves to the worst films captured on celluloid stock.
For his latest experiment, Murphy travels from his closest multiplex to the more upscale theaters in downtown Minneapolis, to a theater in a hotel made of ice and to the smallest exhibition theater in Australia.
The book isn’t a collection of movie reviews or a rundown of promising and disturbing trends in modern cinema, although he’s not shy about his opinions on these matters. Rather, it’s a series of experiments run by a shrewd filmgoer, designed to re-ignite his passion for publicly exhibited films.
Murphy starts out with the basics, such as where to sit (never in the front), then attempts more daring feats, including sneaking into the Cannes film festival and smuggling Thanksgiving dinner into his local multiplex. Murphy said this trial-and-error method to enjoying movies is an integral part of his personality.
“I love the scientific method,” Murphy said in a telephone interview last Thursday. “I think it’s a great way to learn. Let’s put this on the table and mess with it. I used to take apart my toys. I have that same tendency with movies and with the experience itself.”
Murphy said his book isn’t about the declining quality of today’s movies, necessarily; it’s the experience in the most common type of theater, the multiplex, that needs work.
“Exhibition of films, in my mind, is a lost craft,” he said. “The multiplexes are just too big to have any sort of care put into the exhibition of film.”
In “A Year at the Movies,” Murphy tries many ways of making the exhibition more enjoyable. He brings six different women as dates to the same movie. He sees a movie in a hotel made completely out of ice.
In a chapter sure to appeal to “Mystery Science Theater” fans, Murphy gets his former castmate Mike Nelson to see “Corky Romano,” a movie made more enjoyable with the company of his good friend and beer.
According to Murphy, the habits he formed from his days at “MST3K” of making fun of movies creep up from time to time.
“There are a of couple times I was so outraged I had to say something,” he said. “I didn’t even know I was doing it when I did it. It was that Adam Sandler film ‘Billy Madison,’ and I was with a bunch of guys from ‘MST3K.’ Trace Beauleiu (Crow T. Robot) actually ran screaming and yelling from the theater. It’s an impulse; it’s not a conscious thing. It takes a film that bad to the point where it offends you while you’re sitting there.”
By the end of “A Year at the Movies,” the true realization transcends the gimmicky feeling of the previous chapters: the reader sees a disaffected movie buff fall back in love with going to the movies.
Murphy said there’s hope for the semi-intelligent audience looking for more than the latest iteration of “Corky Romano” to entertain them. They just need to go outside the confines of the multiplex to find it.
Kevin Murphy will be at the University Bookstore today at 6 p.m. to read from “A Year at the Movies.” As of press time, he has made no definite plans to sneak into a movie here in Madison.
