Batgung

Seeing a movie in Hong Kong can be both a joy and a sorrow.

On the plus side, cinemas in Hong Kong allow their patrons to book seats in advance. This was a revelation to this American boy, who'd never come across this practice in his homeland. American moviegoers can buy tickets in advance, but then need to line up and push and shove well in advance of the film's start time in order to get decent seats. You'd think someone would have thought up a cinema seat-booking system in the land of the free and the home of the microcomputer, but I guess sometimes these things slip through the cracks.

Hong Kong cinemas also seem to be doing better in getting big-name movies up on the screen soon after they're released. When I first came to Hong Kong, more than a decade ago, it sometimes took half a year or more for popular films to make it to the screen here.

On the down side, however, seeing a movie in Hong Kong exposes the viewer to some special problems.

First there's the relentless use of mobile phones. For many Hong Kong people, when given a choice between watching a movie they've paid 70 dollars to see, and taking a call from Mom to discuss the electric dryer's lint trap, it's simply no contest.

A related hazard is the loud conversations Hong Kong moviegoers often carry on right through a film. My own theory is that many Hong Kong people follow movies almost exclusively by reading the Chinese subtitles -- this is surely the case for English-language movies, at least. And it doesn't seem to occur to them that anyone else in the cinema might need actually to listen to the dialogue.

A good example of this phenomenon was when Mrs Tall and I went to see that epic nightmare 'Titantic' a few years ago. We'd rather stupidly chosen a late-night screening of what must be the most tedious film in the history of harnessed electrons, but at least we were kept conscious by the play-by-play commentary we received from the two middle-aged women in the row behind us. Here's a roughly-translated snippet, taken at the point at which Leonardo di Caprio's frozen carcass is bumping into Kate Winslet's lifeboat:

Woman 1: HE'S DEAD!

Woman 2: NO HE'S NOT. HE'S JUST COLD.

Woman 1: HE IS TOO DEAD. HIS EYES ARE FROZEN SHUT, AND HE'S BLUE.

Woman 2: HE'S JUST SLEEPING.

Woman 1: HE IS NOT SLEEPING. HE'S DEAD!

Woman 2: HOW CAN HE BE DEAD? HE'S THE STAR!

Woman 1: I DON'T CARE IF HE'S THE STAR. HE'S STILL DEAD.

Congratulations to Woman 1 for being right on the money, plotwise, but perhaps all of us in the cinema that evening could have drawn our own conclusions regarding young Leonardo's body core temperature.

If a conversation going on near you in a Hong Kong cinema is less amusing than this one -- and most are, of course -- you can usually just ask the participants to quiet down, and they will. Some will even be quite embarrassed. Occasionally, however, you'll run into someone who glares at you, then talks even louder. Then you've got to decide whether to escalate your counterattack, or just live with it. If you choose the former, I suggest throwing some ice water -- look at how it improved Leonardo's performance in Titantic!