In addition to the zombie goodness, also fun from the trip to the suburb-of-Adelaide cinema is how cutely pathetic it is. I'm sure most of you are familiar with how cinemas generally have big swirly animated things explaining how you should switch off your cellphones, not throw popcorn, and so forth. In our cinema, on its really-not-very-big screen, all this was done with a sequence of four or five single frames. Each frame had its own soundtrack, separated from the others by a gap, such that the background music goes back to the start with each new frame even though it's the exact same music, making the announcements seem like some sort of hellish telephone hold-queue. One of the frames seemed to depict a large curly dog-turd in an ice-cream cone.
After these terrible frames come the proper advertisements made by other people. But they aren't proper expensive advertisements for products - no big-screen Tango ads here. No, instead they're for local shops. They don't animate either; the best of them had two frames. Why not visit the cafe that's in the same building as the cinema? How about going to Adelaide's surf shop? Or there are some shoes on sale somewhere nearby, if you fancy wandering around to look for them. But it'll be closed because it's 10pm.
About then came the best thing ever - the advertisement for placing advertisements. "Why not advertise on the big screen?" it challenges, after showing us the appallingness that will result if you do. "You'll have a captive audience!" It mentioned some other benefits too, but yes, it really did tell us, the audience, that we were captive to advertisers. Divertingly brutal, I thought.
Just before the trailers there was the second-best thing ever - an advertisement in a theatre for not downloading pirated movies. "You wouldn't steal a video from a video shop!" it informs us, "So you shouldn't download it because that's stealing too!" It says this without even any small print at the bottom telling the truth of the matter, that "piracy is legally distinct from stealing, so the thing we just said was an outright lie." This advertisement for stealing videotapes also opened with a display of someone's computer which obviously has the best broadband connection ever, even faster than copying from one hard-drive to another in the same machine. That or the movie they were downloading was less than one megabyte. I'd download thousands of movies if they downloaded half as quick as their imaginary evil Internet does it. "Hey, you people who have just paid money to see this movie - don't pirate things!" Surely the cinema audience is not the best target audience for this message?
Alas, the experience just doesn't seem as funny in the retelling. Perhaps I should sneak a video camera into the cinema next time so I can display the insanity properly. Do you think they'd mind if I distributed their anti-piracy advertisement on the Internet?
[13:54]
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