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So this is how it once was, part one. Between the ages of 11 and 17, I used to create imaginary movie-going schedules for myself based on the listings published for Portland movie theaters in the daily state paper, The Oregonian. The goal would be to make it through five films in one day in one theater without missing any part of a single film. Eating and bathroom breaks were not a consideration. This might explain why I am still obsessed with running times, why I have so many committed to memory and why it still drives me kinda batty when newspapers, magazines, online sources get the running time wrong or, more frequently, publish running times that are minus the closing credits. As you might guess, I am a "stay for the whole thing" kind of guy, regardless of whether or not there are credit cookies. The best source of accurate running times to the second (and also measured in total feet of film) is bbfc.org, for the British Board of Film Classification, the United Kingdom's equivalent of the Motion Picture Association of America. The MPAA apparently does not concern itself with piddly matters such as the length (in any dimension) of a motion picture.

So this is how it once was, part two. The day the summer movie preview and fall movie preview issues of Entertainment Weekly (again during my adolescent and early teen years) would arrive was just about the closest thing to Christmas for me. I would gather several sheets of lined notebook paper and set about a two-fold process. First I would determine what was opening (limited and wide) each week and then I would proceed to rank each film, based partly on what the preview had to say and partly by my own self-determined brand of buzz, on a scale of 1 to 5+. In the years before Internet chatter, "buzz" would be centered on actors/actresses, writers and directors whose previous work I had liked, or plots that sounded intriguing. A "1" would go to the film that I would least choose to watch of my own volition but that I would get around to "someday" (someday taken to mean if I lived for an infinite number of years, I would eventually get around to it). A 5+ ranking would be awarded to a film that I would be there for on opening day. If a weekend had several films with rankings in the 5s or even high 4s, watch out! That would be a heavy movie-going day, indeed.

So this is how it once was, part three. The summer of 1988 (age 12) was a big year for me in terms of breaking into the world of music and movies on a pop culture level. I began subscribing to both Premiere and Rolling Stone and I remember they both had Tom Cruise on the cover around the same time promoting Cocktail (a film I am open enough to admit I loathe). Rolling Stone turned me onto bands whose work I could seek out in the independent record store Paramount Records, 45 minutes away in Bend. More than a few of my all-time favorite albums (including Sonic Youth's "Daydream Nation", Camper Van Beethoven's "Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart", and De La Soul's "3 Feet High and Rising") were introduced to me over the next few months in the pages of RS. I liked Premiere more than RS but less than EW. There was a certain column in Premiere I loved to read although, it was revealed to me in retrospect, I was clueless as to how to "read" it. This was because as a preteen growing up in rural Oregon, I had no indicators with which to scan for camp or satire. One Libby Gelman-Waxner penned the column in question. If the silly illustrations that accompanied her writings each month were to be believed, she was a glamorous, though perhaps tad heavily made up, rich Upper East Side woman, married to a dentist and with one child. It would be years later when I discovered the truth about the matter. The focus of today's Chapter Two column review received a 5 on my buzz meter back in August of 1993 and was penned by Ms. Gelman-Waxner's real-life alter ego, gay playwright Paul Rudnick. This was Rudnick's first screenplay (he has since gone to pen In & Out and the 2004 remake of The Stepford Wives, among others) and since the primary cast, producer (Scott Rudin), director (Barry Sonnenfeld) and a number of key technical collaborators all remained the same the second time around, a lot of what makes the sequel different and in some cases, better, can be directly attributed to him.

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