Turns out we were sitting next to Shirley Manson while watching Lydia Lunch last Thursday. Not that it matters much to me—by the time her band, Garbage, was in the public eye, I was way too deep in my hipster fuckery to be into it. I wouldn’t listen to anything on the radio! College radio excepted, of course. I needed music that was much darker, weirder, and impossible to get a copy of.

Actually, it was my girlfriend, Nico, who was literally sitting next to her, and pointed it out later when we were looking at Instagram, scrolling through, and found a group pic of this odd crew of artsy weirdos. Shirley Manson is the blonde on the far right—she has hair, it’s just really close to her head.

This is the typical LA experience: when you see a performer, the most famous people are in the audience.

I have many cinematic regrets, and most of them are not seeing a film when it was in the theater. There are second run theaters and art house places, but usually if you pass up seeing something in the theater, you’re not getting another chance. As a film nerd, there are reasons for seeing a film in the theater, mainly getting the full audience experience and experiencing the medium in the size and with the sound it is intended. If there’s a chance that the film might be an all-timer, I definitely will want to see it in the theater first.

New Scorsese film=see it in the theater. Passing on Casino in the theater is one of my aforementioned regrets; Killers of the Flower Moon was immediately on my big screen list. But at three-and-a-half hours, I was a bit intimidated. I’m a large man, and don’t fit well in a lot of theaters, mostly for the leg room. Sitting in a too-small seat becomes exponentially unbearable over time.

The remodeled AMC in Montebello to the rescue! They have the best seats of any theater—recliners that go almost all the way back. It’s usually filled with the worst Hollywood garbage in circulation, entire neighborhoods of families stuffing themselves into a room and each one cramming every biological space inside them with flavored corn syrup, salts, and saturated fat while they coat their brains with similarly oversweetened sights and sounds like an capitalist-entertainment Turducken wearing knockoff-cotoure sweatpants. But did I mention the drink refills are free?

My first real job was working for a comic book publisher, Last Gasp. We did a lot of business with George DiCaprio, who then was managing two comic book stores in Los Angeles, and had previously edited titles for us such as Cocaine Comix. He was one marching weirdo in a parade of counterculture freaks, some of which were genuises and the others mentally broken, but most of whom were a fun mix of both.

George had a kid who was trying to make it in acting! Yeah, good luck with that.

Hey, did you see George’s Kid is in a film with DeNiro? and I just saw the new Johnny Depp film, and George’s Kid stole the show! Did you hear he’s going to be in a screen version of The Basketball Diaries?

And then…Titanic hit the theaters like a passenger ship hitting an iceberg, and the little kid we remembered running around ComicCon trying to find back issues of old comics was suddenly the number one actor in the world.

Well, aside from George’s Kid playing someone more than 20 years younger than he is in real life, his performance was spot on. And DeNiro is onscreen with him again, a nice bookend to This Boy’s Life, a fantastic and underrated film. But the supporting cast is really astounding. All of the no-name performances were up to the task, filling the screen with the enigmatic actors and equalling their presence. There were characters that had only a few lines, but nailed every single one. I’m putting this on a combination of shrewd casting and brilliant directing. Most notably, Tommy Schultz’s role as Blackie Thompson was small but critical and I was surprised to find out that it was his first screen appearance.

Check it out, in a theater with good seats.

I really loved Daliland, a film about Salvador Dali, focusing on one exhibition in 1973. Ben Kingsley plays Dali, in a role that would get him an Oscar nod had this film been a bigger deal. It’s streaming on Hulu right now.

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