Lights, Camera, Action!

Cinema going has always been challenging. It typically starts with ‘touring’ the shopping mall parking lot at least a million times before you can lock on to & trail some poor hapless shopper that has inconveniently forgotten where he’s parked. Once in the mall, be prepared to jostle with the surging weekend crowd as you try and cut a path to the cinema floor only to resign yourself to lining up for ages in a snaking line only to get front row seats (that's if you're lucky to even get tickets!).

Well of course you can reserve tickets right? Wrong. By some secret conspiracy, weekend shows are always fully booked. I imagine an entire battalion of people hunched in front of their PC’s waiting for the very moment the show opens for booking on the cinema website.

Which bring me to the fact that last week we watched 3 movies in Cathay Cineleisure at The Curve: Pirates of The Caribbean Dead Man’s Chest, Superman Returns & Slither, the first one free and the last two, back-to-back. It just occurred to me that we’ve never done this standard couple extra-curricular activity ever before. And while we’ve occasionally exclaimed that we ought to ‘one of these days’ we never got round to it. Guess this time we might have been mysteriously bitten by the mainstream cinema bug.

Back to the movies, fortunately all were pretty decent. Slither was tongue-in-cheek funny in a totally gross-out way as only movies about alien slugs with nefarious plans to take over the world can be. Definitely recommended, however it's still advisable to watch on an empty stomach ;)

Superman Returns was a nicely rounded story. I didn’t expect much but it turned out well anyway. Must say that the Superman theme did stir memories, though not as strong as that of the Star Wars theme (Big fan, big fan. I remember getting all sparkly-eyed and almost bouncing in my seat with excitement during the opening theme of the Star Wars prequels even though they eventually turned out to be huge letdowns)

The best part of this rare cinema-going experience? The look of rapt attention, complete with ‘goggly’ eyes and gaping mouth of my movie mate who for all intents and purposes might as well not have stepped into the cinema since they stopped making silent movies!

So next in line to watch will be the new M. Night Shyamalan movie, Lady in the Water. The movie snippets seem quite promising. Now whether we watch it in the cinema or via other ‘alternative’ means remains to be seen.