meish dot org: life, unfolding

Went to see LOTR at the Odeon Leicester Square. Our arrival was heralded by a sparkle of paparazzi flashes and a huge cheer from the waiting crowd – although it later transpired that they were actually waiting for Joshua Hairnet and crew to show up to the premiere of Black Hawk Down. Ah well.

I’ll save my mumblings on the movie for another time – suffice to say for the moment that it was visually spectacular, and there was a lot of it. An arse-numbing three hours, in fact. There was also a lot of it in the sense that there was just loads going on all the time – lots to take in, but I think I managed, mostly.

However, let me take this opportunity to mention that I don’t think I’ve ever been in such a mobile cinema, or at least, not for years.

In 1993 I visited New York, and at a movie theatre somewhere on Broadway, went to see Pulp Fiction. There were probably twenty people in the cinema throughout the performance, and by gum they were fidgety. Probably every person in there (except me) moved seats at least once during the show, and most moved a good deal more frequently than that. Perhaps it was too cold for them in the theatre, or too hot, or they couldn’t see properly, or they had ants in their pants, or something, but every couple of minutes throughout the movie, you’d see a head bob up, wander to the left or right, or climb over a seat, and then bob out of sight again. Like going to the cinema with a bunch of meercats or prairie dogs. Most odd.

A couple of years later, I had a similar experience in a cinema in Cochabamba, Bolivia – I popped into a cinema one afternoon to see a matinee double bill (Roadhouse and Congo – truly dreadful) and only stayed for twenty five minutes for two reasons (aside from the sheer awfulness of the movies themselves, which would have been reason enough to leave).

One, the projection of the film onto the bathtowel-sized screen was so painfully out of focus it made my eyes throb.

Two, it took me that long to realise that

a) The cinema was usually a porn cinema in the evenings,

b) oh so that’s what that funny smell was,

c) I was the only woman in the cinema and

d) everyone else at the performance was taking it in turns to sit in the row behind me and make moist flubbling noises with their cheeks. At least, that’s what I hope they were doing.

So the audience was perpetually on the move, which made it difficult to concentrate. I bailed.

Last night was pretty similar – though not in a seat-swapping or surreptitious wanking way. The Odeon Leicester Square probably seats three thousand people, and I swear at least a third of them must have got up and gone to the loo/to get some more popcorn/for a wander/to make a phone call/whatever. Who goes to a movie and then three minutes after the credits thinks “Oh man, I really need the loo. Let me just disturb my entire row and squeeze out….”?

Maybe I noticed it more because we were at the front of a seating block, beside the exit, and so every time someone from the right hand of the Circle wanted to leave the auditorium, a face-shaped sillhouette floated across Middle Earth. Regardless, there were definitely a lot of people wandering about for one reason or another. It’s not as if it was a particularly wet movie, like Titanic or whatever, which could inspire frequent trips to the bathroom.

This reminds me of one of the best jobs I’ve ever had – working at the 051 arts cinema in Liverpool – during my time there we screened The English Patient on two reels, so there was a short interval in the middle. We cut the film during the middle of one of the prolonged hot-oh-god-I’m-melting-and-parched desert scenes, and lo and behold, during the interval, a massive queue at our concessions stand, all asking for the biggest, wettest soft drinks we had. Ka-ching. Very cunning.

So as a matter of curiosity, if Titanic is a cold, wet movie, and The English Patient is a hot, dry movie, can you think of a hot, wet movie? Or a cold, dry one?