Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Gone to the Movies

This past week I've been to the movies a couple of times. The first go round was to get a horror movie fix with Paranormal Activity but sadly it didn't live up to the hype and it never once made me a)jump b)scream c)throw off my glasses in fear or d)all of the above even once. The second movie was Saejin's choice so that meant seeing the latest big budget movie pretending it has a convincing story line, so we went to see 2012. It too was crap.

The fun part for me was remembering how different theatres are here compared to my old stomping grounds on the ROK. They mostly surround pricing. Here the tickets are almost five dollars more for the same movie, released mostly on the same day and housed in the same quality of movie theatre but here you have to go a whole lot earlier to get a seat. In Korea your ticket gives you a seat number that you can choose when you buy it. I'd love this system to catch on here but it won't because the crazy people who camp out for tickets would then disappear. If they aren't there then the news cameras aren't there and the big studios are no longer getting free publicity so then people wouldn't know what crappy movie they should be wasting their money on.

Saejin had a few good laughs at the theatre. He ordered a small coke and found out it was bigger than the largest coke in Korea. When he pointed this out to the cashier she pointed back that this is why we're so fat here. What bothered Saejin even more was that he couldn't believe the price of a small popcorn, "$6.21 for popcorn? That's more than the price of a beer!" In a world of monthly budgets. he knows where his loyalties lie and declined the popcorn.

1 comment:

Jes said...

Ant and I were trying to explain the greatness of picking your seats ahead of time to everybody here. I'm hoping it catches on.