The AllNighter – A Journey through food and movies
On November 15th at 8pm, hundreds of valiant students attended the autumn term ‘AllNighter’ at the Warwick Student Cinema. Tons of food, energy drinks and blankets accompanied six movies and over thirteen hours spent in front of the big screen – the best night of my life at Warwick thus far.
We all arrived full of optimism, confidently claiming that we would not surrender to sleep. Everything started as planned; my friend and I sat in centre of the first row and prepared ourselves for the night to come. This movie marathon may seem trivial, a joke even, to anyone else – something to do when you haven’t planned a night out at Kasbah – but for us, two film fresher students, it was more a tale of survival. With two litres of energy drinks, sweets, popcorn, crisps, sausage rolls (and the list goes on), nothing could have stopped us.
Round one: Monsters University (the prequel of a movie from many a childhood). It was a great movie to start the night. Reuniting with those characters was a nostalgic experience. There is something special about Mike and Sullivan’s relationship that keeps amazing us – it doesn’t matter how old you are, this is the kind of movie that everyone can enjoy and learn from. I was glad that they screened this instead of another forgettable summer blockbuster.
Next, the creative Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World continued the line-up. I am proud now to add it to my favourite movies list. It might have been because of its unique cartoonish style or even because of Michael Cera’s performance, which I found extraordinary. I just hope I was not the only one to enjoy it, since it can be hard to relate to the video game universe of the movie.
At this point of the night we had finished a pack of popcorn, two bottles of lemonade, two hot dogs and we were only starting to eat our packs of peanuts. That is when the cinema quiz started, I could not have hoped for anything better. Our team, which we proudly named Oozma Kappa, managed to get to the second place, which meant even more food to eat during the marathon. I have to admit that for one time in my whole life winning never had such a bad taste.
Third level and the hardest to pass through: Now You See Me, a movie that I had already seen and that in my opinion was a 
more cheerful yet badly directed version of The Prestige. Fortunately it soon ended and finally the moment that everyone was waiting for came the mystery film: We’re the Millers. In my opinion, incredibly funny and gritty even if in the end what I really loved about it was hearing all those people in the room echoing my laughs, it was immense.
This is the moment of the night when I started feeling kind of sick, unable to keep eating or drinking, I was destined to fall asleep. Suddenly I remembered what was next: claws and nostalgic beard, The Wolverine was on. Its oriental, serene and relaxed scenario gave a new image to the character, almost Hamlet-esque, I cannot explain in a few words how much I enjoyed it.
The last movie was not something special, I have always considered Ocean’s Eleven to be the most ‘normal’ movie ever made, one of those movies you cannot label as bad but not as good either. This made me realize how at the beginning of this journey I was really sceptical, especially since it seemed that the movies were chosen randomly without any particular theme.
What I would have loved to see was a homage screening for a specific director. We could have started, for example, with a decent short movie no one knows and then climb over their mountain of greatness until arriving to their last piece of work. Tarantino, Nolan, Fincher probably any of those would have amazed the audience. Instead they decided to show an animated movie, an action-comedy, an action movie, a family comedy and a superhero movie, ending it with an easy caper starring the greatest stars of Hollywood.
Despite my mood succeeding the AllNighter, on the Saturday at 9am in the morning we were all leaving science concourse looking at the sky and wondering how time went so fast; we had such a great time.
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