Friday, June 20, 2008

Alternative Cinema

We really like unconventional movie-going experiences, Like, recently we've seen 21 (great), Iron Man (rocked), Indiana Jones, (awesome), The Incredible Hulk (great until the big climax, which was lame), the new Adam Sandler movie (sucked)...

What's so unconventional about those? Well, we saw them all either at drive-in theaters or the local "Brew and View."

At the drive-in, we bring a picnic and a couple of baseball gloves for playing catch.

We take the train to the Brew and View, because driving back would be an issue.

Both let you see two movies for less than the price of one at the local multiplex. Both let you actually connect with the rest of the audience. (A stranger joined in our last game of catch.)

And the Brew and View is actually held at a Victorian opera-house turned concert-venue, where, it so happens, we had seen a concert the night before. The incomparable "Ladytron."

Really stadium seating is nothing compared to having your own table or car. We may never see a movie at a real theater again...

Of course, this might also having something to do with why, in spite of seeing dozens of movies last year, we hadn't seen a single one of the main Oscar contenders...

2 comments:

Simon said...

Both of those concepts sound really cool. It's something a little more akin to theatre a century or so ago, which did actually involve community interaction. Possibly cinemas did too before TV became common and people went there for newsreels etc.

I've occasionally wondered why drive-in cinema only ever appeared in the US (AFAIK). Prevalence of cars? Cheap land? Some other factor?
Probably all three.

Monkey With Keyboard said...

I'd say it was cheap land. Here in India, the only kind of community viewing we have is in the remotest villages, and that only for TV, and only cuz on an average they have one TV per village, so no choice.

Wikipedia does say there's one drive-in theater left in India, but I've never been there and I don't know anybody who has.