Movie Night

As I have mentioned before, in the haircut post, one of the best ways of assessing your new home is by doing things you liked to do back "home." Today, I finally went out to the movies for the first time since I've been in Korea. The experience wasn't all that strange, but there was enough local flavor to make it worth posting about.

I decided to go to the Lotte Cinemaplex in Samsandong to see Martin Scorsese's latest picture, "The Departed." This particular theater is attached to the ultra-chic Lotte Department Store, and thus I thought it would be a very nice theater, which turned out to be partially true. In order to purchase a ticket, one takes the escalator to the third floor and takes a number from an "automatic queueing" machine, like the ones at DMVs in the States. When the number on the ticket appears on the digital display above one of the ticket counters, one can make a purchase. This wasn't particularly strange for me (in fact, I thought it was a good method of controlling the flow of customers), but the fact that there were only eight counters and they were numbered one through fourteen, with several numbers omitted, obviously, was very strange. Stranger still was the fact that there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to which numbers were left out. At any rate, I made my request and learned that the next show was already sold out and so I would have to buy a ticket for the later screening. I then got to pick my seat from a computer display. Seating is assigned in Korean cinemas, which makes the American practice of arriving early in order to get a good seat entirely obsolete.

After sitting in a cafe drinking coffee and reading a book for three hours, it was time for the movie and so I headed back over to Lotte. I ascended what I assumed was the stairway to the screens themselves, but soon realized that I had ended up in an empty hallway. Two cinema employees approached me as if I was doing something very taboo and kindly informed me that I was in the wrong place (the inexplicable deference that Koreans seem to show to clueless foreigners is a subject for another post). Thus, I descended and waited for the correct entryway to open, as it was cordoned off by one of those nylon gates that one finds in airports and banks. It finally opened about ten minutes before the movie was set to begin and my fellow viewers made their way into the cinema, seeking out their assigned seats. In a way, it makes finding a seat that much easier since one literally has only one option. The seats were padded and much more comfortable than I have come to expect from American cinemas (with the notable exception of "Reel Pizza" in my hometown, which is outfitted with plush couches and Lay-Z-Boys). It reminded me of the theater in Charlottetown, P.E.I. where I saw "The Thomas Crown Affair" remake, which is still the most comfortable theater I've ever been in. I was one of three foreigners in the theater and I got the sense that many of the amusing parts of the movie were lost in the subtitle translation as I seemed to be the only one laughing at certain points. When the movie ended, everyone exited out of a different door than the one we had entered and climbed down the stairs I had mistakenly taken earlier.

By the way, I enjoyed the movie; if a super-violent, obscenity riddled tale about the Irish in Boston is your cup of tea, then I recommend it. And for anyone in Korea who is interested, "Casino Royale," the new James Bond flick, opens on the 21st, so I know what I'll be doing on Christmas weekend.