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dolorosa_12) wrote2024-03-08 06:20 pm
dolorosa_12) wrote2024-03-08 06:20 pm
Friday open thread: memorable cinema experiences
The sun shone all day, I can hear birdsong outside my kitchen window, and the bulbs and fruit trees in the garden are starting to flower: dare I hope that spring is finally in the air?
This week's open thread prompt is sparked by my plans to watch the second Dune film in the IMAX cinema in Cambridge tomorrow:
What are your most memorable experiences of watching a film in the cinema?
(These do not need to involve IMAX or otherwise flashy set-ups — viewing a film could be memorable for a whole range of reasons.)
The release dates of the three Lord of the Rings film adaptations coincided with the long Christmas/summer holidays of my penultimate year of secondary school, final year of secondary school, and first year of undergraduate university studies (the Australian school year runs roughly February-December; the university year is roughly March-November, depending on the university). I can't remember anything much about viewing the first film — it was a cinema experience like any other — but The Two Towers and The Return of the King were singular for very different reasons.
Every three summers, my family decamped with a bunch of other families to stay in a disused old hotel in Lake Tyers (in coastal Victoria) which was co-owned by the family of one of my mum's closest friends. The summer of 2002-2003 coincided with one of those returns, and was spent as it always was — on the beach, wandering around the dilapidated and decaying rooms of the hotel, refreshing our three-year-old memories of familiar spaces rendered uncannily unfamiliar due to the passage of time, catching up on three years' of life with the gang of kids/teenagers who for the most part only saw each other for two weeks every three years, etc. On the last night, we made our ritual-like return to the nearby town of Lake's Entrance (which after two weeks with the same thirty people in a decaying 19th-century hotel always seemed like a teeming metropolis) for the fish and chips dinner, followed by ice cream, with which holidays to Lake Tyers always concluded. However, this year everyone decided we should see The Two Towers, since it was showing in the local cinema.
The local cinema, it transpired, was a community hall with plastic fold-out chairs set up in front of a large piece of white cloth, onto which the film was projected. Their operation was such that they didn't have the capacity to show the whole film from start to finish with one roll of film, so there was a fifteen minute 'interval' in which the lights were switched on and the rolls of film were changed over! Obviously this is not how Peter Jackson would have imagined his work ideally to have been viewed, but it certainly made for a memorable experience which is fixed in my mind forever.
By the time The Return of the King was released, I'd been living in Sydney for one year, having moved there for university in order to stay living with my mum and sister (instead of remaining in Canberra and going to university there, which is what the vast majority of my friends did). But I usually went back for a week every holiday to visit my dad, stepmother and Sister #2 (who still lived in Canberra at that point; sisters 3 and 4 weren't born then), and my old school friends, and my friends and I decided that we were all going to see The Return of the King on the day it released, together, in Canberra. As this necessitated me travelling there for four hours by coach, we didn't want to risk booking for the first session, since I'd need to get to Canberra, get a bus to my dad's place, and then get another bus to the shopping centre where the cinema was, so instead we booked for the last evening screening on release day. (Some of the more intense of my male school friends took it as a point of personal nerd pride to not only view the first screening, but also to queue overnight so they'd be first in line and first into the cinema; they did this for all the LotR films, all the Star Wars prequels, and all three Matrix films, but the rest of us thought this was taking things to extremes. However, there was always a cluster of intensely nerdy people queuing up unnecessarily at the cinema on release days for these sorts of films — this detail will become important later.)
In order to accommodate my travelling schedule, my friends and I met up at the cinema, and then decided to book tickets for a screening of Love, Actually to pass the time until our evening screening of The Return of the King. We were about halfway through the film, when all of a sudden, smoke started to pour into the cinema from the ceiling, fire alarms went off, and we were all hastily ushered from the cinema — past the queue of intense fans, who were angrily refusing to leave their place in the line in case it meant that they'd miss out on being able to boast that they were first into the cinema on the opening day of The Return of the King! It transpired that the cinema ceiling had caught fire! Thankfully, they caught it in time, the fire was extinguished, and we were all given free tickets to make up for our interrupted viewing of Love, Actually — and all my friends were blessing the fact that I now lived in Sydney and had therefore necessitated a later viewing of The Return of the King, one which would not be interrupted by a fire evacuation!
Several hours later, we all watched The Return of the King without incident.
This week's open thread prompt is sparked by my plans to watch the second Dune film in the IMAX cinema in Cambridge tomorrow:
What are your most memorable experiences of watching a film in the cinema?
(These do not need to involve IMAX or otherwise flashy set-ups — viewing a film could be memorable for a whole range of reasons.)
The release dates of the three Lord of the Rings film adaptations coincided with the long Christmas/summer holidays of my penultimate year of secondary school, final year of secondary school, and first year of undergraduate university studies (the Australian school year runs roughly February-December; the university year is roughly March-November, depending on the university). I can't remember anything much about viewing the first film — it was a cinema experience like any other — but The Two Towers and The Return of the King were singular for very different reasons.
Every three summers, my family decamped with a bunch of other families to stay in a disused old hotel in Lake Tyers (in coastal Victoria) which was co-owned by the family of one of my mum's closest friends. The summer of 2002-2003 coincided with one of those returns, and was spent as it always was — on the beach, wandering around the dilapidated and decaying rooms of the hotel, refreshing our three-year-old memories of familiar spaces rendered uncannily unfamiliar due to the passage of time, catching up on three years' of life with the gang of kids/teenagers who for the most part only saw each other for two weeks every three years, etc. On the last night, we made our ritual-like return to the nearby town of Lake's Entrance (which after two weeks with the same thirty people in a decaying 19th-century hotel always seemed like a teeming metropolis) for the fish and chips dinner, followed by ice cream, with which holidays to Lake Tyers always concluded. However, this year everyone decided we should see The Two Towers, since it was showing in the local cinema.
The local cinema, it transpired, was a community hall with plastic fold-out chairs set up in front of a large piece of white cloth, onto which the film was projected. Their operation was such that they didn't have the capacity to show the whole film from start to finish with one roll of film, so there was a fifteen minute 'interval' in which the lights were switched on and the rolls of film were changed over! Obviously this is not how Peter Jackson would have imagined his work ideally to have been viewed, but it certainly made for a memorable experience which is fixed in my mind forever.
By the time The Return of the King was released, I'd been living in Sydney for one year, having moved there for university in order to stay living with my mum and sister (instead of remaining in Canberra and going to university there, which is what the vast majority of my friends did). But I usually went back for a week every holiday to visit my dad, stepmother and Sister #2 (who still lived in Canberra at that point; sisters 3 and 4 weren't born then), and my old school friends, and my friends and I decided that we were all going to see The Return of the King on the day it released, together, in Canberra. As this necessitated me travelling there for four hours by coach, we didn't want to risk booking for the first session, since I'd need to get to Canberra, get a bus to my dad's place, and then get another bus to the shopping centre where the cinema was, so instead we booked for the last evening screening on release day. (Some of the more intense of my male school friends took it as a point of personal nerd pride to not only view the first screening, but also to queue overnight so they'd be first in line and first into the cinema; they did this for all the LotR films, all the Star Wars prequels, and all three Matrix films, but the rest of us thought this was taking things to extremes. However, there was always a cluster of intensely nerdy people queuing up unnecessarily at the cinema on release days for these sorts of films — this detail will become important later.)
In order to accommodate my travelling schedule, my friends and I met up at the cinema, and then decided to book tickets for a screening of Love, Actually to pass the time until our evening screening of The Return of the King. We were about halfway through the film, when all of a sudden, smoke started to pour into the cinema from the ceiling, fire alarms went off, and we were all hastily ushered from the cinema — past the queue of intense fans, who were angrily refusing to leave their place in the line in case it meant that they'd miss out on being able to boast that they were first into the cinema on the opening day of The Return of the King! It transpired that the cinema ceiling had caught fire! Thankfully, they caught it in time, the fire was extinguished, and we were all given free tickets to make up for our interrupted viewing of Love, Actually — and all my friends were blessing the fact that I now lived in Sydney and had therefore necessitated a later viewing of The Return of the King, one which would not be interrupted by a fire evacuation!
Several hours later, we all watched The Return of the King without incident.
no subject
when the movie ended, nobody turned up to open the doors again - not the one to the exit, and not the one that led back into the cinema. we thought that was a bit odd but decided to go back out through the cinema rather than try the other door. we enter the big lobby.....and all the lights are off. nobody is around. the ticket booth is empty. nobody is in the kiosk. it is DARK. we think it's weird, but we aren't like, scared? and the doors to the outside are these typical glass doors you can see through, and plenty of light from street lamps etc outside came in, we could see - it wasn't pitch dark. and it's (in hindsight) a small lobby. we were like 11 or something I don't know, it seemed big to us at the time. we just start walking towards the doors - and we're chatting, nothing out of the ordinary really, though we are also kind of like 'where is everybody? did they close already? do you think those doors are locked?' and about halfway towards the doors AN ALARM STARTS BLARING and we FREEZE and look at each other and then SCREAM "RUN!!" and we run to the outside doors, which are not locked, and out, while yelling things like "HURRY!" and "WHAT IS HAPPENING". I genuinely can't remember what happened after this, if we kept running or what, but I'm 100% sure one of their parents picked us up and was likely waiting for us at the agreed pick up point when we came out (this was before everyone had mobile phones). we were definitely freaked out by the alarm suddenly going off and were more scared about being 'caught' because people thought we were thieves, than anything else!
to this day I still don't know if a bored employee was just fucking with us, or if they had genuinely shut down the cinema and forgot we were in there. I'm guessing in the latter case the doors to the outside might have been only locked from the outside (fire safety? they had those push bars in the middle like you see on emergency exits). they might also have been in the process of shutting down the cinema, but I have a hard time believing the alarm would be turned on *before* the public doors were locked. either way, this is a mystery I'll likely never solve.
as for the movie, it was OK I guess? we were a bit 'ehh okay' about it. I haven't seen it since because I've not felt any need to see it again, but I still remember the song from the bar scene, and random other scenes from it, so I guess it must've left an impression anyway. maybe I wouldn't have remembered this much from it if not for the weird experience afterwards!
no subject
For some reason, I ended up seeing Coyote Ugly three times in the cinema, even though even at the time I didn't think it was that good a movie! I think it just ended up happening that way because different people kept wanting to see it with me.
no subject
That sounds terrible 😅 I’m not sure I’d have the patience to see a film I don’t like that much *three* times, in the cinema no less.
no subject
I really was the least assertive person on the planet, especially when I was a teenager — it essentially took moving to the other side of the globe, emerging from the other side of an abusive relationship, and a whole lot of other life experience before I became the kind of person able to say 'no, I don't want to do that,' even in relation to something so trivial as someone else's choice of movie. Teenage me would not even have dreamt of voicing an opinion on such things — which resulted in sitting through a lot of films (both in the cinema and as video rentals watched during sleepovers) and activities in which I had little interest.
Even my first date when I was 15 involved watching Charlie's Angels (the one with Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu) for the third time in cinemas because I wasn't assertive enough to tell the guy who invited me that I'd already seen it twice ... the fact that he later broke up with me for (as I found out years later) always seeming anxious and uncertain is absolutely hilarious in retrospect.