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sister_luckSo, Thursday and Friday we actually went to a real-life totally old-fashioned multiplex cinema. In the Netherlands. When my colleagues ask me about where I went on holiday I'm going to say that I spent two nights in Holland.
Last time I went to the cinema was the local shoebox, which is very cozy, but as I was herding a bunch of kids, it wasn't actually much fun. The film was a German A Knight's Tale only with Goethe instead of knights - slight hyperbole, I know. And I won't tell you about the time before that, because it's honest-to-god embarrassing how long I went without seeing the inside of a cinema. That new Bond film has been delayed for an awfully long time, hasn't it?
First, let me just celebrate and squee the experience of going to a moviehouse to see a film (yes, I'm mixing BE and AE to my heart's content) and the excitement of not knowing whether you'd still get tickets and didn't just drive roughly 35 km in vain. We got the tickets and thus I saw Cabin in the Woods on Friday the 13th with lots of Dutch people, a surprisingly high numbers of which were girls probably lured by the male actor hunks, and some Germans who'd come even further than we did, judging from the licence plates in the parking garage.
I enjoyed both in very different ways and I totally didn't expect that it is easy to draw parallels between them (even though I knew the basic premises and in case of The Hungers Games the books). There are big differences, too, especially because Cabin in the Woods is very funny and The Hunger Games isn't. This is rather significant, because they're both basically about the same thing: killing a bunch of young people for the greater good, which does not mean that Cabin plays it for laughs - the horror, even if some of it made me scream with laughter, is real, though a lot less scary than I expected. Both films work as a critique of the media, with one focusing on (reality)television and the other on horror films, obviously. They are also both about what audiences need and want and about the manipulation of audiences and players. I could go on and on which I might do in a version full of spoilers.
Last time I went to the cinema was the local shoebox, which is very cozy, but as I was herding a bunch of kids, it wasn't actually much fun. The film was a German A Knight's Tale only with Goethe instead of knights - slight hyperbole, I know. And I won't tell you about the time before that, because it's honest-to-god embarrassing how long I went without seeing the inside of a cinema. That new Bond film has been delayed for an awfully long time, hasn't it?
First, let me just celebrate and squee the experience of going to a moviehouse to see a film (yes, I'm mixing BE and AE to my heart's content) and the excitement of not knowing whether you'd still get tickets and didn't just drive roughly 35 km in vain. We got the tickets and thus I saw Cabin in the Woods on Friday the 13th with lots of Dutch people, a surprisingly high numbers of which were girls probably lured by the male actor hunks, and some Germans who'd come even further than we did, judging from the licence plates in the parking garage.
I enjoyed both in very different ways and I totally didn't expect that it is easy to draw parallels between them (even though I knew the basic premises and in case of The Hungers Games the books). There are big differences, too, especially because Cabin in the Woods is very funny and The Hunger Games isn't. This is rather significant, because they're both basically about the same thing: killing a bunch of young people for the greater good, which does not mean that Cabin plays it for laughs - the horror, even if some of it made me scream with laughter, is real, though a lot less scary than I expected. Both films work as a critique of the media, with one focusing on (reality)television and the other on horror films, obviously. They are also both about what audiences need and want and about the manipulation of audiences and players. I could go on and on which I might do in a version full of spoilers.
