Film Review: Watching 'Lady Bird' at East Hampton Cinema

Went to see the movie Lady Bird at the East Hampton Cinema last week. This is a five-plex, but on this night the heat was off in two of the theaters inside the building, and Lady Bird was in one of those two but also in another theater with heat, so we said we’d sit in the one with the heat. That was sold-out, though. So, anyway, we watched it without the heat.

This movie theater has had structural problems since it was built. I’ve been around a while. An earlier movie theater called the Edwards Theatre, made of wood, burned down around 1965. So they built the new theater out of cinderblocks and concrete. In building it, there was a delay because one wall went up crooked. But they fixed it. Then over the years they’ve had lots of other problems such as broken bathroom pipes, floods, electrical problems and now, on this day, a heating problem. It’s like the movie theater itself is a movie, going from one big crisis to another and you never know what’s going to happen until you get there.

Anyhow, when the movie started in our cold theater, I got to my feet to try to get out. On the screen was the wrong movie. It starts in the present day in a Catholic School and the stars are teenagers, and I’m thinking, Where is Lyndon? How could this be about Lady Bird Johnson? Is there going to be a 50-year flashback? We’d wanted to see this. It certainly was a very timely idea to make a movie about that First Lady all those years ago. Lady Bird Johnson was quite a controversial figure at the time.

But I got pulled back down. This was about another Lady Bird. A high school student who is 17 called Lady Bird. It’s about a young girl coming of age, made by movie-making people not much older than the young actors in the show. Don’t they know about Lady Bird Johnson? This is what happens when young people don’t learn anything because everything is on Google. Anyway, I stayed down.

Also in the middle of the movie, an usher came down the center aisle using his flashlight to guide his way so he could attend to what looked like a control panel at the front of the theater alongside the screen that might have been for the heat. We’d been able to come up and down the aisle without a flashlight. And this was a distraction. What made him so special?

Other than these problems, this is a very good movie. So that’s my review.