So that's what it's like to get stuck in an elevator. Hmm.

Sorry, Butt-head, according to Archer, that won't work.

It happened to Archie Bunker. It happened to Beavis and Butt-head. A couple of weeks ago, it even happened to the gang on Archer. And today, my friends, it happened to me. After a lifetime of riding elevators without incident, I finally had the experience of getting stuck on one.

Obviously, I got out alive and unharmed. I'm not blogging from inside an elevator car, in case you were wondering. My "ordeal" only lasted about half an hour -- perfect sitcom length -- and was not even that unpleasant. Disconcerting, sure, but not traumatizing. Anyway, here's what happened.

(Note: I use the word "happened" advisedly. Like most of my "stories," this barely qualifies as a series of events.)

My train into Chicago was actually running a little ahead of schedule, so I arrived at my place of business a good ten minutes early. I was actually looking forward to beginning my day in a leisurely manner, decadently sipping my artificially-sweetened tea without having to glance nervously at the little clock in the lower right hand corner of my computer monitor. I work in a 35-story skyscraper, so there are three big banks of elevators, and a whole mess of 'em seemed to arrive in the lobby at the exact same time.

I chose (unwisely, as it turned out) Car #3 simply because I could have it all to myself. For some reason, at 7:20am, I considered this a coup. Remember that Simpsons episode with the theme park employee greedily rubbing his hands together? "All for Silas! All for Silas!" That was me, Undisputed Lord God and King of the Elevator. I work on the fifth floor, so this should have been a short ride. Somewhere between floors 3 and 4, however, I had the sensation that my elevator car had just been hit by a Buick or possibly a Plymouth.

This was not entirely unexpected. The elevators in our building have been malfunctioning for the last few months, and reports of hapless riders getting stranded en route were common. But this time, it was happening to me and not some schmucks I don't even know. Therefore: relevant.

The elevator car came immediately to a stop. The "5" button was no longer lit. In fact, none of the buttons, including the blessed "Door Open," responded to my touch. The one button which did work was the one which contacted the security guard. A genuinely concerned-sounding woman told me that (by chance, I guess?) an elevator technician was in the building and would immediately start to work on the problem. She also asked if I was okay, which I thought was a nice touch. I said I was fine and thanked her.

From there, not having a copy of Hungry Hungry Hippos on hand, I had no choice but to play the waiting game. (Damn, that's my second Simpsons reference in one article.) It was weird and solitary, sort of Twilight Zone-y.

Does it add anything to my story that I've been repeatedly listening for the last few days to the soundtrack for John Carpenter's Dark Star, which includes a lengthy elevator-based suspense sequence? It's true. In that sci-fi comedy, set in the far reaches of space aboard a lonely scout ship, poor astronaut Pinback (Dan O'Bannon) is almost crushed by an elevator while trying to feed an uncooperative alien. Now, I was Pinback!

The "repair" process was halting and strange, from what I could tell of it. At one point, the power went out on the elevator, but this was very brief. The security guard -- who kept in fairly regular contact throughout the ordeal, bless her heart -- told me it was necessary for the technician to restart the elevator this way. None of the buttons were responding yet.

After a while -- and I deliberately refrained from checking my watch -- the elevator came back to life and started to move upwards, only to crash again. A few more minutes of silence later, the elevator started going up, up, way up, way past the fifth floor. I frantically pressed all the buttons. Nothing happened. This particular bank of elevators only goes up as high as the 12th floor, which is where the Car #3 finally topped out.

Then it started descending slowly, slowly, and very slowly toward the lobby. I had that "car crash" sensation again when Car #3 eventually touched down. When the doors opened (and this was not immediate), I was rather surprised to see that the elevator car was not flush with the floor. In fact, the lobby floor was about at waist level or so, and I would have to climb up to it. It would be sort of like climbing up on your kitchen counter, if you're trying to picture it, i.e. easier for a cat than a person. But, lucky me, there was a guy in a blazer who extended his arm to help me up and out.

Sadly, I still had to get to work, so I thanked the man and got in the next elevator car over. Knowing the rules of television as I do, I half-suspected that this second elevator would stall, too. It didn't.

So today, I had the experience of actually living through the plot of so many sitcom episodes. Minus all the jokes and plot complications and so forth. Now, I'm hoping to get bonked on the head and get amnesia.

Loomis, not Michael, is the real bogeyman: An alternate reading of John Carpenter's "Halloween" (1978)

October 31, 1978 is the Halloween that Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald  Pleasence) has been anticipating for 15 years.

"Your compassion is overwhelming, doctor."

-Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens), sarcastically addressing Dr. Loomis

"The concept is valid no matter where it originates!"

-A line from John Carpenter's debut film, Dark Star (1974)

The first film in the franchise.

For a moment, I want you to cast your mind back to 1978, when John Carpenter's immensely influential (and still enormously entertaining) slasher film, Halloween, made its debut on American movie screens. At that time, there was no such thing as "the Halloween franchise." The film's ten sequels (1981-2022) had not been made yet, to say nothing of the 2007 remake, which inspired its own 2009 sequel. For those of you keeping score, there are now thirteen Halloween movies all together. 

But back in '78, there was just one movie. Based on the comments made by the film's co-creators, director/writer John Carpenter and producer/co-writer Debra Hill, Halloween was not meant to be the first chapter in an ongoing saga. It was a contractual obligation, not a creative drive, that led to Halloween II (1982) and all that followed.

Naturally, the subsequent films explored and expanded the mythology of the original film's three central characters, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), Michael Myers aka The Shape (Nick Castle, among others), and Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence). Thirty-five years ago, however, there was no mythology to explore. The only information we had about these characters—and the only information the creators ever intended us to have about them—came from this one movie. 

I say all of this because I want to present an alternate interpretation of Halloween that willfully ignores everything revealed about Laurie, Michael, and Loomis in the subsequent films and treats the 1978 original as an isolated, standalone story. Still with me? Good. Let us continue.

Is "Gravity" a great movie? Depends what you mean by great, I guess.

An untethered Sandra Bullock tumbles through space in Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity.

I have now seen at least three Alfonso Cuaron movies—Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), and now Gravity (2013)—and I'll be damned if I can find any thematic connection between them. The guy gets around, that's for sure. As I'm writing this, I've just come back from the experience of seeing Gravity in IMAX 3D, mainly because this review in The AV Club told me to. (What can I say? I'm a mindless sheep sometimes and can be easily led by just about anyone who sounds even halfway convincing.) The movie couldn't be any fresher in my memory than it is now, so I figured I'd write about it sooner rather than later. As you may notice, most of the flicks I review around here are 50 years old or more, so this is a rare occasion indeed.

I suppose I wanted to write about whether or not Gravity can be truly considered a "great" movie. Matt Pais, the often-contrarian critic for Chicago's feisty Red Eye, made a special point in his three-star review to declare it "not a great film." Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern has been making the rounds to discuss his review in which he declares Gravity to be unlike any movie that has ever been released before, a true landmark in cinema. Obviously, the greatness or not-greatness of Gravity will be decided by history. In our instant-oatmeal society (thanks for that analogy, Lisa Simpson), we're often too eager to rank every new movie that comes out and determine its place in the pantheon. Cuaron's picture has been out for about three or four days now. All we can do is guess. History makes monkeys of us all, so we should prepare to be wrong whenever we start prognosticating.

2001 clearly influenced Gravity.

Based on my initial impression, I can say that Gravity is indeed an impressive technical achievement and is frequently something marvelous to look at. One of my core beliefs about movies is that they should provide us with "extraordinary things to see and to hear," and Gravity accomplishes that. Offhand, I can't think of a recent film which used special effects more convincingly in service of a compelling story. 

Gravity is a very effects-heavy film that tries not to look like an effects-heavy film. Cuaron is going for realism and plausibility here rather than impossible fantasy, and I believes he succeeds at that. In that sense, his film is reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which was obviously one of the inspirations for Gravity. At one point, Sandra Bullock's character, stranded first-time astronaut Ryan Stone, is seen curled up in the fetal position attached to an umbilical-cord-like tether, and it's damned near impossible not to think about Kubrick's space baby. (Speaking of homages, is it possible that the scene of Bullock removing her space suit in zero gravity is a descendant of Jane Fonda's free-floating striptease in Barbarella? Just a thought.) 

A major difference, though, between Kubrick's film and Cuaron's is that 2001 is open-ended, philosophical, and abstract, while Gravity is sentimental, inspirational, and uplifting, complete with heartwarming music and a sympathy-building backstory for its lead character. Did Cuaron, who also cowrote the script with his son Jonas, add these conventional storytelling elements because he truly believed in them... or was it just to make Gravity (which must have been expensive and time-consuming to produce) more commercial? Either way, the very traditional plot of this film will probably make many viewers enjoy Gravity more, but it sort of lessened my enjoyment. I'll put it this way: Gravity didn't shake me to my core and make me re-examine life or anything. When it was over, my thought was, "Hmmm. That was pretty neat," and not, "I have just seen a masterpiece." I might not have gone in the direction Cuaron did, but then again, my version of Gravity might have lost $100 million.

I thought about Dark Star during Gravity.

The other movie that I was thinking about during Gravity was John Carpenter's Dark Star (1974), a satirical sci-fi film with a vaguely similar "we're stranded in space and what the hell are we going to do?" plot. Very briefly, Carpenter's film—set in the 22nd century—centers around the crew of a scout ship whose mission is to destroy "unstable planets" in the deepest reaches of explored space. These men have been out in space so long that they've lost all interest in each other and in the mission. Frankly, they've all gone a little crazy—in some cases, a lot crazy—from isolation and boredom. 

Without spoiling things, a life-threatening crisis arises aboard the ship, and we see how these men deal with it. Or, more accurately, how they fail to deal with it effectively. Made very cheaply (an alleged "alien" is quite obviously a beach ball), Dark Star is one of those films which did manage to rattle around in my subconscious after I saw it. That's probably why I've revisited it periodically over the years. I can't see myself doing that with Gravity. Does that mean Gravity is not a "great" movie? Hell, I don't know. Time, my dear readers, is the only true indicator of that, and I just don't have enough of it. But I wanted to record my initial impression. Let's check back in ten, maybe twenty years and see if I was right. Deal?

By the way, if you're wondering whether it's worth the extra dough to see this flick in IMAX 3D, I'd say sure. Visually, it's trippy and transportive, and it's worthwhile to see the film in the immersive surrounding that an IMAX theater can provide. But, if you're running a little light on cash this month, you can live without it. The AV Club says that, if you don't view this movie on the largest-possible screen, you're not really seeing it at all. But I don't necessarily agree with that. You can see Gravity in a regular theater, and you'd still get the film's single-best element: a career-best performance by Sandra Bullock, who spends a great deal of screen time alone and conveys a lot of her character's emotions not through words but through facial expressions. You don't need IMAX or 3D for that.