I'm not brave. I don't do things like sneak into movies, eat out of the bulk candy bin, climb fences to swim in forbidden pools. I fear getting in trouble.

So when the opportunity arose for a Grand Cinematic Experiment involving mild misbehavior—so half-hearted! so delicately tepid!—I leapt. My time had come. I would hatch defiant from my shell of lame-itude!

In the early hours of Easter Sunday, I would arrive at the Pacific Place Cinemas and purchase a single ticket. Then, when my first movie was over, I would slip unseen into another theater, then another, and another, and another, until the day was gone and I had glimpsed every offering on the 11 screens at the unsuspecting multiplex! It would be a gluttonous concoction—a grand, disjointed narrative of American popular cinema. Surely I would learn something about movies!

10:00 AM: I depart for Pacific Place, my bag stocked with the following: wallet, keys, four Cougar Mountain molasses cookies, one expert disguise (sweater, hat, scarf), one notebook, one copy of Lolita (in case I get bored), one iPod (ditto).

Pacific Place is strangely empty, save for several lone males (the familyless), and a smattering of weirdos. In the elevator, a guy tells his girlfriend: "There's a girl in Russia that has X-ray vision. Yeah. They tested it." The girlfriend looks away.

10:20 AM: My first film of the day is Zodiac. The movie is fine. A pregnant girl behind me, all alone on Easter, sighs gustily at every gunshot and stab-stab-stab, and louder still when Robert Downey Jr. shows his upper thighs. How I love those thighs.

NOON: Zodiac still. I am restless. I am a fan of a police procedural, and a true-crime story, and a Mark Ruffalo, but my favorite part of this movie will always be when Downey Jr. makes fun of Jake Gyllenhaal for his fruity blue cocktail. The rest is an anticlimax. Time to move on.

1:05 PM: I walk purposefully toward the bathroom, to throw the theater employees off my scent. The bathroom smells like diapers. I don't touch anything. Ducking from pillar to pillar, I manage to make it through the door of 300 without being noticed. I am not bound by the laws of man!

A queen makes a speech. A sarcastic slow clap. More stabbing. Stab-stab-stab! More man-thighs. I get to see that gay Persian emperor everyone has been talking about. "This day we rescue a world from mysticism and tyranny." I sneeze. I am allergic to allegorical racist bullshit.

1:35 PM: Grindhouse is okay. Why does Quentin Tarantino insist on being an actor? He is horrible to look at.

2:30 PM: Grindhouse still. I eat a molasses cookie, feel unsatisfied. I wish I had a beer. Rosario Dawson is annoying. I have now been an inhabitant of Pacific Place for four whole hours, but we have developed no affection for one another. When I slip out of Grindhouse the whole theater seems tired. The employees' weird Star Trek polo shirts sag resignedly toward the barf-proof carpet. The long down escalator is out of order. I descend resignedly on human legs. Stupid logs are everywhere.

3:30 PM: I have already seen Meet the Robinsons in 3-D. Today, in Regular-D, it is cornier than I remember. A family from the future battles a dinosaur from the past. Nobody dies. In this movie, the future is all shiny and pink and green, like a giant Easter egg hunt. When the future gets fucked up (which tends to happen in time-travel movies), it turns into a Matrix-style industrial wasteland with human zombie slaves. Can we not handle a movie with any ambiguity? Most of the films I see today inhabit one extreme or the other: happy candy bubble land, or black fog death land. We, as a species, are either ecstatic or doomed. How boring.

4:15 PM: Oh good, it's The Reaping, a movie about biblical plagues and Hilary Swank's huge fucking mouth. (Which plague is that again? Fourth?) As I walk in, a man is being suffocated by locusts. (Good to know: If you're ever being eaten to death by a biblical plague of locusts, just take a quick dunk in a river of blood.) After a BIG REVEAL, God explodes Satan in a giant fireball, and Satan gets all up in H-Swank's womb. Yawn.

4:45 PM: Did you know that they sell BEER at the movie theater? They make you sit and drink it in a pen, which is kind of humiliating. A nice theater employee named Lawrence pours me a Hefeweizen with a desiccated lemon wedge. The lemon wedge looks like a wound in the white foam. Like what I imagine a Biblical boil might look like, post-lancing.

"A lot of people are here to see Grindhouse today," says Lawrence. "Is that what you saw?"

I panic. I am about to be found out.

"Uhhh, no. No, I just got out of that one." I point. "The Hilary Swank one."

"You know, that Grindhouse is three and a half hours long."

"Oh, really? Wow! I had no idea! HAHAHAHAHA!"

I sip my second beer, which has an oily film on top. It is full of seeds. Lawrence glances at me with an indifference that seems suspicious. Is he on to me? Will he spot me skulking through the door of Shooter after telling him I had just seen Hilary Swank's southern-fried boils? It's time to employ one of my disguises. I put on a sweater.

5:05 PM: In Firehouse Dog, a dog shits in a stewpot. Can we have a ban on animals wearing sunglasses? And also the song "Bad to the Bone"? Thanks. Maybe it's the lack of food, but I'm starting to feel a little emotionally unstable. Firehouse Dog is strangely moving. All of these movies are about the same thing: dying or not dying. The ones about dying tend to be more entertaining.

5:56 PM: I've already seen The Last Mimzy, so I stay just long enough for Rainn Wilson to say, "What were you doing driving a truck? You're a little boy!"

6:22 PM: Somehow I get Mark Wahlberg mixed up with Matt Damon. In Shooter, Wahlberg is some sort of guy who shoots stuff. Danny Glover is evil, which is ridiculous. "Sometimes to catch a wolf you need to tie the bait to a tree," whispers Evil D-Glove. That is stupid. What do you do other times you're trying to catch a wolf? Cast the bait in cement? Encourage the bait to take some community-college classes? Marky "Matt" Damon-berg agrees to meet Evil D-Glove on a mountaintop, which appears to be in the Andes. How did he get there? Did he walk? Fuck this movie.

7:05 PM: I wander dazedly into the last five minutes of The Hoax. Molina! Shadowy figures tell secrets to Richard Gere's jowls. A postscript reads, "In the end, he left out the sodomy part." What's the sodomy part? I missed the sodomy part? Dang!

7:15 PM: It's all over. I have now seen every movie playing at Pacific Place for $5. And you know what I learned? Nobody gives a shit. You don't have to be brave or sneaky to watch movies all day for free, just stupid enough to want to. And after nine hours of Hollywood brain scrubbing, I feel fairly certain that I will be stabbed, shot, pooped on, and/or motivationally spoken to by every person I pass on the way back to my car. It's raining outside. I am hungry.

I hate movies.