Spontaneous movie watching and awesome cinema crowds

12 Jun 2006

I decided I really didn’t want to endure a game of rugby(-watching… pfft as if anyone would actually play sport) and, being halfway home, decided to give Tori a call and see if she was un-busy. So I wound up in Newtown for the second consecutive night. We were kind of contemplating going somewhere and a film was flagged as an option… so, after calling Vodafone Directory Assist on my PDA (hilarity ensues as I had called from a menu screen and didn’t have access to touch-tone numbers until I navigated various applications mid-phone-call whilst calling the phone all kinds of names, to both our amusement/my disdain) we managed to get session times (because Women’s College routes all Internet traffic through the uni, which makes for a great way to spend lots of money downloading things quickly, and Tori’s account was empty. USyd Internet rates are comparable with most private educational institution over-quota rates: that is to say, horrifically expensive per [insert metric here]. Maybe they’ve got slightly better rates for residential students but I doubt it. It’s the biggest scam on the planet, far out.) for… The Omen.

Tori’s choice, note ;-) So we headed down to Broadway for a 9.45 session and got there with time to spare (spare time being spent acquiring Podz, which sufficed as dinner for me :-/) which was nice. The carpark there late at night is retarded, though, as the food court shuts and there’s a cinema-only entrance which is accessible only from a certain end of a certain floor despite many many signs to the contrary. Anger inducing. Ah well… we did get there in the end.

The movie was crap. Predictably. It took itself seriously as I imagine only the Da Vinci Code could (though, having not seen the film — only every trailer ever made for it about three million times, which is probably the sum of its content — I probably have no right to say that. Disclaimer in place. I’ve at least read the book.) but was laughably less convincing. And gratuitously open for a sequel. Including the inexplicable jackal-giving-birth thing, which, incidentally, although presented as Biblical allusion, has absolutely no foundation in Revelation or elsewhere.

Fortunately, it was a fun audience. I love it when there are fun cinema audiences, because it’s such a linear top-down medium and it’s wonderful seeing that careful editing subverted by an audience that feeds off itself to turn rather turgid horror into black (or even not so black) comedy. One person recognises humour in the ludicrousness of a situation, for example, and their laughter feeds the other 90 people to interpret a tense moment as something truely pathetic. It is the ultimate in suspension of disbelief.

So, yes. Good fun, crap movie. Incidentally, the number “666″/significance of dates features far more heavily in promo material than the film itself. Fortunately. It just makes it all that much less ridiculous. Still, ridiculous was definitely the flavour of the film. Probably not worth seeing if you’re not there to revel in it’s crapness and generally pay it out. On the subject of such films, don’t even waste your time with the just-released-to-video film, Cerberus. Not only is it a bad movie (not in itself a bad thing), it’s also so obviously mediocre there’s no great pleasure to be derived from insulting it.

It scores points on the graphic-violence front, wherein it bears stark resemblance to the injuries sustained by a certain heavily-impaired knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but apart from that… well, I’d happily take back that ninety minutes of my life. Which I’d instead spend staying up stupidly late writing blog posts and wondering when I’m going to start actually moving beyond lots and lots of vague ideas, pick a base image (I’ve been shooting all this stuff I’d love to turn into designs lately!), and start coding CSS.

And now, I’m going to bed.