This… Is… Yet Another Quote From The Movie 300!

Yep, today was the day that I finally broke my 10+ year fast and stepped into a Canadian movie theater. Fortunately the experience was somewhat mitigated by the fact that I was watching a 4:00 pm matinee showing on the fringes of southeastern downtown Toronto. I think that made the whole affair far more palatable than it would have been otherwise, because, at least in this one regard, Singapore wins hands down over Canada in the theater going experience. I don’t know why neither America nor Canada has adopted this, but in Singapore, they have a much, MUCH more sensible mechanism for handling the “Want a ticket/Have a ticket” lines of North America. For Singapore readers, this may be a bit shocking, but the sad fact is, when you buy a ticket in North America, all that entitles you to is admission into the theater. So, especially if it’s a popular movie, this entails getting into a SECOND line hoping to be near the front so that when the theater doors open, you can make a mad dash for the better seats, ie, the center aisles. In Singapore, when you buy a ticket, the cashiers have a monitor built right into the bottom of their counter that displays a floorplan of the theater once you’ve told them which movie you want to see. On the floorplan, all occupied seats are graphically marked out, so you pick the empty seats and then the ticket is printed, WITH YOUR ROW AND SEAT NUMBER ON IT. This way, if you went in the afternoon to buy a ticket for the evening show, you can walk away, do some shopping, hang out with friends, whatever… and just casually stroll into the theater minutes from showtime to find your empty seats waiting for you. This is something I have actually done for myself on many an occasion and it’s BRILLIANT.

This is sensible and convenient, and I completely fail to understand why North America has not adopted this.

Idiosyncrasies of North American film culture aside, I was very happy with what I saw on the screen. I would go so far as to say in many ways, 300 the movie actually surpassed 300 the graphic novel. The graphic novel, while a truly impressive and visceral experience, was almost one-note in its constant emphasis on Duty, Honor, Glory. While it was obvious in the movie that these were still fundamental concepts for the Spartans, Snyder wisely interlaced this with a heavy dose of humanity. The Spartans here weren’t simply amazing killing machines looking for glorious death, as they appeared in the original graphic novel. Gerard Butler–as King Leonidas–managed to convey a sense of the Spartans actually fighting for something they cared about. They weren’t peerless combatants because they were sadists that reveled in war. They were expert soldiers because they wanted to defend a land and people they loved, and this was evident even in their strategy, which involved unity and working together as a cohesive unit. I found myself marveling at the visuals (then again, I suppose EVERYBODY is) but was caught off guard when I realized that even the Old Friend was moved to tears by what she saw on screen. This is a girl that cried at When Harry Met Sally and loves Lady & The Tramp, so to see her actually moved by a bunch of hyper-testosterone infused guys fighting for Sparta, Honor and a Glorious Death was more than a little surprising. Or maybe she was just overwhelmed by the amazing amount of male cheescake on the screen. That was a LOT of perfectly sculpted abs and pectorals…