Sunday, July 28, 2013

The Phenomenon of Sleeping in Cinema

I REMEMBER my irritation at Robinson's Movieworld for cancelling the showing of Before Midnight before I even had the chance to see it. I'd been looking forward to watching it on the second week it was shown in our neighborhood cinema. I felt a combination of anger and disappointment, the way a child feels when he is promised an afternoon at the beach and is told the beach no longer exists. The moral of this story: don't let good movies pass you by. Watch them with urgency.

As a second option I watched Pacific Rim. If not for the fact that it was directed by Guillermo del Toro, who also directed the awesome Pan's Labyrinth, I wouldn't have given it much thought. But I had the money I had saved up for the movie, so I said, "Okay, I'll watch it." That's the convenience of watching movies alone. You don't have to discuss with your companions what films to watch instead.

The movie was so-so, the way I find most movies with robots in them. I did pick up the terms "neural handshake" and "drift", which I now use to refer to instances when other people say the the very things I'm just about to say next. The fighting scenes between the jaegers (the giant robotic fighting machines) and the kaiju (dinosaur-like alien species bent on destroying the earth) lulled me to sleep. The fact that it was dark and cold and I just came from the Emergency Room didn't help at all. I did wake up minutes later, only to realize that I didn't miss anything significant.

Two nights ago I watched The Wolverine. He's not my favorite X-men character, but I love the X-men, and my brothers used to watch it at our neighbor's house when we didn't have a television set then. Our parents acquired a TV later in our childhood, a fact that has worked to our advantage: early on we've proven we can live without it.

I found The Wolverine a bit so-so, as well. He's not exactly my favorite character, and if I had the chance I wouldn't pick his powers. But the film was worthwhile in that it showed an immortal man wanting to die like normal beings would. The recurring scenes with Jean Grey were rather disturbing and could be done away with. The Japanese girl was really pretty. But there was a lot of rain in the movie. Incidentally it was raining outside, too. The rain was a powerful soporific, and so I slept again.

My father sleeps at the cinema all the time, especially when there's too much conversation and not much action-packed scenes going on. This phenomenon is probably genetic.

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