Monday, October 23, 2006

Cinema Ikspiari

It was the saturday before diwali, and people were getting in a festive mood at home. I was at the apartment till about 4.00 in the evening finishing of housekeeping stuff. Got really bored and picked up a copy of the metropolis. This magazine has now become kind of my tour operator. It's a weekly that can be picked up free of cost from the apartment's reception. It has all the listings of sports, cultural and other events happenning in and around Tokyo. There didn't seem anything intersting in it, so i decided I would go watch a movie.
There were quite a few playing, and I picked up "Thank you for smoking". The next pick was "Snakes on Planes", so I chose the former.

Now comes the tough part. Finding the theatre. It was playing only at 2 places, a cinema hall at maraounochi close to home and cinema iskpiari at maihama which was god knows where. I got on a train and reached yurakucho where I was supposed to find this theatre. After searching for about 20 minutes, I decided to give up as the show must have already begun. The next option was to go to maihama and search for the theatre again. And I didn't even know what time the show was and even whether there was an evening show.I was already giving up, when I remembered it was saturday and I had nothing to do. The age old question for weekends "Ghar jaake kya Karega? " popped up and I said let's go for it.

Turns out maihama was on the edge of the city. I had to go to Tokyo and take the Disney Line to maihama. After 20 minutes on the train( which is a long time to travel by Japan standards) I reached maihama station. And Lo .. . And behold. Turns out maihama station is the entry point for Tokyo DisneyLand. Even more depressing when you are trying not to remember it's the festive season back home. I plan to visit DisneyLand sometime soon, so I don't wanna write about it much. The good part was, they had an information desk and they pointed me right towards cinema iskpiari. The ticket counter girl spoke a little english, and i was given a ticket to the 7.30 show. I am sure it must have been the most expensive ticket (1800 yen) in the house, but i was no mood to ask for balcony or stall. That's definitely the most I have paid for a movie ticket and I was hoping that at the price I was paying, It had some mind blowing chota chetan 3-D effects(It didn't. There was tim burton's "Nightmare before Christmas" playing at the same place which did. Blasting Barnacles !!!). I had more than an hour to kill before the show started, so after confirming that the show was actually in english ( Not an english movie dubbed in Japanese), I set off to take a stroll outside DisneyLand.

I didn't go far. Found a Planet hollywood close by and walked in. They had a lifesize statue of arnie from terminator at the door. The funny part was that it was halloween season and they had put a witch's robe and hat on it.Was escorted to a bar stool in a couple of minutes. I am already getting sick of sitting all alone on bar stools. Sipped on a cocktail, till it was about time. Didn't pick up any souveniurs, will do that later.

Back to the movie hall then. I was a bit early, which is quite unusual to our movie outings in mumbai where we are almost always late. I noticed they had beer and popcorn and hotdogs and decided i would come back later. I was skeptical till the movie started and was finally at peace when the soundtrack was in english. There was no national anthem ( Maybe we are the only ones who do it) and no interval, so i had to rush out in the middle of the movie to grab a beer. I didn't feel like a beer, but when was I going to sit in a movie hall and sip beer again? The movie hall was typical of a mid-size multiplex and there were only about 15 people in it. Guess that's the amount of folks you'd find anywhere for a foreign language film. The movie was average, it would have to be a classic of Forrest Gump's magnitude to make me feel like it was money well spent. I think i'll stick to renting dvd's for some time now.

All in all, a good time was had and a saturday night was not completely wasted.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

dvd pakka milenga.agle bday pe.keychain hai na?