“It’s funny,” I say simply. “Billy Crystal and John Goodman are the voices of the two main characters, and they’re both fantastic.”
Nora watches me, clearly waiting for more.
I shrug. “It’s a fun movie. Puts me in a good mood.”
There’s another long pause.
Someone in the group says, “Itisfunny. I like the way the two main characters, Mike and Sully, are such opposites but clearly care about each other and support one another. They’re good friends.”
I nod. I like that too. “You’ve seen it?” I ask the guy who is sitting with two women and another man.
“Well…yeah,” he says, as if that’s obvious.
Okay, fair enough. It’s an older movie. Maybe he’s got grandkids. It’s not at all anobscurefilm.
“Anything else?” Nora asks me.
I start to shake my head, but I look at the group again. They’re all watching me. I had no idea that we were going to watch a moviebecauseit was my favorite, but Nora specifically asked Astrid for a suggestion.
Many of these people have been in the diner when I’ve been there, and I remember how they all want to get to know me. Not about me as a hockey player, even though that’s why I’m in Rebel. They want facts about me as a person.
So I say, “I like the movie because to me it seems it’s about the idea that there’s often more to people than what you see on the surface. That just because we’ve been told something about a person, or a group of people, if you look deeper, you’ll find out that we have more in common than we have differences.”
Now Nora beams at me.
Yeah, she wanted a real answer. Well, I gave her one. That’s truly how I feel about the movie.
“I love that,” she says.
“Oh, I see that,” a woman off to the left says. “Like the idea that the monsters are supposed to be scary, but we immediately see them just going to work, and that they have families and friends, co-worker drama, paperwork, and all kinds of really normal things we can all relate to.”
“And they’re only scary because it’s their job. When they’re not working, they’re just like us. They have all the same emotions and experiences we do,” someone says.
“And of course there’s the message of laughter being stronger than the screams,” someone else says. “That happiness is stronger than fear. That’s such a great message.”
I’ve lean toward Nora. “Are they spoiling it?”
“What do you mean?”
“All of this discussion before we watch the movie might spoil it for the people who haven’t seen it.”
“But they’ve all seen it.”
I frown. “You’re going to make them watch a movie they’ve already seen? They’re going to be so bored.”
“If they already saw it, they didn’t have to watch again.”
“What?” I ask.
“What?” she asks in return, seeming puzzled.
We just stare at each other for a second.
“I had an imaginary friend when I was a kid,” the man near the front says.
Muriel is sitting next to him and says, “Sully wasn’t Boo’s imaginary friend. He was the monster in her closet.”
“But there aren’t really monsters,” the guy says.
