In March of 2020, as the country locked down for the COVID pandemic, teenagers were suddenly left with limited options for entertainment and social connection. That same month, my wife and I decided to host a movie night, inviting our four teenage grandchildren to join us. We rearranged the furniture to mimic a drive-in theater and even created posters to go along with the popcorn and theater candy.
It’s now 2025—and the weekly movie night continues.
The posters are long gone, but popcorn, theater candy, and now dinner have become permanent fixtures. One of our grandkids is now 21, the youngest is 17. Not long after we started, they asked if friends could come too, and we happily said yes. These days, we typically have anywhere from three to ten teenagers over every Friday night.
Somehow, after five years, we still haven’t run out of movies—though most of the classics, like Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, and My Man Godfrey, have been well covered. Coming up with something fresh (even if it’s old) can be a challenge. It turns out that movies more than five years old can feel entirely new to them. Recently, we showed Rear Window with some hesitation—yet it turned out to be a hit. Fiddler on the Roof, on the other hand… not so much.
This summer, I’m planning to show three science fiction films. As much as I’d love to screen Zardoz (yes, the one with Sean Connery in red suspenders—but that’s a story for another time), we’re starting with Mars Attacks! this Friday night.
This 1996 box office flop was Tim Burton’s tongue-in-cheek homage to 1950s B-grade sci-fi films. It’s glossy, weird, occasionally hilarious—and very much in the spirit of Ed Wood. And what a cast: Jack Nicholson, Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Martin Short, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J. Fox, Rod Steiger, Natalie Portman, Jim Brown… The kids actually enjoyed Roger Corman’s The Raven (1963), so maybe Mars Attacks! will land well too. It’s certainly got the camp factor.
The other two sci-fi picks for this summer are The Fifth Element (1997) starring Bruce Willis, and the more recent Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017). Both films remind me of European graphic novels—and for good reason. The Fifth Element was, at the time, the most expensive European film ever made, and it was especially successful in Europe. We’ll see how it plays here in central Utah.