Confession: when we first set ourselves firmly on this journey to living in Rome, I worried that I would not be able to enjoy going to the movies.
In all of my visits to this fascinating city, I never thought about movie-going. I never noticed a single cinema. From all of my visits here, I remembered exactly zero theaters. Why would I have done that when the art and architecture held me in full sway?
But I love going to the movies. Love. I always have. It probably stems from growing up in a valley in the Blue Ridge mountains where, let's face it, there were not a thousand things to do.
What did I do there for recreation, if I wasn't going to movies?
As a kid, if you were lucky, you knew someone with a pool or you went to a public one. Two lakes - one natural and one man-made - were available if you could get to them.
And, I have to admit, as a child of the seventies, there was roller skating. A lot of it. If not in rinks, then in home basements. With the requisite white booted skates with colored wheels, and striped tube socks pulled up to just below the knees.
Don't worry - I will not be showing any pictures of that.
And there was this, too. No, none of the corporate amusement parks nearer to Richmond or the eastern side of Virginia. No, this was in my hometown.
Lots of mostly tame rides run by surly teenagers who couldn't get work anywhere else, or didn't want to work too hard anywhere else. They had hot jobs, but they weren't hard jobs. The Umbrellas ride was for cooling off between other attractions, since the Skyway didn't move fast enough to push the air around you. And a strange, large slide - enameled with some infernally dark color so that it became burn-the-back-of-your-thighs hot from the sun, with those nasty pieces of carpeting intended to assist your ride down to the bottom, but inevitably so trashed that they bunched up, got stuck somewhere in the grooves and ultimately left you screeching your way to the end. The combination scorch from hot metal sticking to your skin and that herky-jerky, last third of the trip down was a special kind of pain. And the roller coaster was o.k. (watch the linked video only if you don't have an issue with heights or motion sickness), but it was - as many people fondly recall - a bit rickety.
A small town legend. Now gone, sadly. I'm not sure it could be more trite than this: the whole place was replaced by a large strip mall with a grocery store.
In my teen and college years (yep, I was one of those commuters when commuting wasn't nearly as cool as it is now), you went out to eat at one of a very small number of privately owned restaurants, or far more easily, you went to some corporate/chain place. If it was Burger King, then you went next door with your french fries and fed the ducks. Maybe we fed too many then, too, but I don't remember having the same problem then that exists now. Ew.
In the valley, you could go shopping at one of three small malls (and the largest of them didn't exist until I was a high school graduate). One day, I'll have to ask that friend to reminisce with me about the time I had an allergic reaction to something in one of the malls. I sneezed, coughed, swelled up like a tomato and wound up in the emergency room - where my father came to rescue me, but walked past my exam room because my new Tweety-bird lips and swollen eyes made me completely unrecognizable. Good times.
Of course you could go to area high school football games. If you were into other sports, you went to minor league baseball games.
You could pretend to be a tourist in your hometown by going here.
It used to be that the Roanoke star was turned entirely red whenever there was a traffic fatality. Now, it is perennially lit red, white and blue. Among some longstanding friends of mine, this is THE place where you take your forever love to see your home from above, and to share at least one kiss.
I suppose that you could have a few of those - loves AND kisses.
And when I was a teen, we did a lot of this. I teamed up with friends to do it to other friends (one in particular carried the supply - sssshhhh! don't tell her parents! - because she had a Corvair with a giant front trunk that could easily hold an industrial size case of, um, supplies) and once, one lovely evening, those same friends did it to me. They waited until I came home from my date, kissed him on the front porch and went inside. I awoke the next morning to my front yard festooned with billowing loops of white, an excited mother (yay - your friends must like you!) and a grumpy father (now, who's going to clean this mess up?). I knew people who had perfected the roll toss so well that the resulting effect was truly an artform. I can still hear one of them, giggling in the dark, softly saying "I like for it to be all ...swoopy."
We extended this practice to ridding the local Wendy's of its sporks, tying ribbons around each one, and inserting them upright into the lawn of a friend. It was Christmas time. His mother was completely charmed.
Raise your hand if you came from a town where 'cruising' was a popular thing to do. We rode in that same Corvair down Williamson Road, looping a length through the Pancake House parking lot. We affectionately termed it 'The Great Pancake Turnaround.' I remember laughing with girlfriends. I remember lame, poorly formed conversations with guys in passing cars. In retrospect: frankly boring.
All this to say, quite simply: there just wasn't that much to do.
So movies were a major outlet for me. I remember seeing the debut of Star Wars. I remember bad 3D glasses and some appallingly bad special effects in slasher films. I remember going to see this in an historic theater downtown, and being pelted by toast.
I recall seeing Dangerous Liaisons as a young college student and thinking that I had never heard dialogue like that before. I wondered if I wasn't cut out for it, until about a third of the way through, when I began to understand it. And love it.
I love the dark, the cool air, the popcorn and holding hands with someone while thoroughly escaping for 1.5 to 2 hours.
And I knew that even when I was in a remarkable city like Rome, with all kinds of things to do and see, I would still want to go to the movies.
So, let's address the obvious: this is where Italians go to the movies, which should be understandable to Italians. Sure, they make their own (this is the home of Fellini, let's not forget), but they also import American ones. Lots of them. And they are dubbed in the primary language of the country.
How's your Italian? you might ask. Very limited. I start language lessons next week!
In all of my visits to this fascinating city, I never thought about movie-going. I never noticed a single cinema. From all of my visits here, I remembered exactly zero theaters. Why would I have done that when the art and architecture held me in full sway?
But I love going to the movies. Love. I always have. It probably stems from growing up in a valley in the Blue Ridge mountains where, let's face it, there were not a thousand things to do.
What did I do there for recreation, if I wasn't going to movies?
As a kid, if you were lucky, you knew someone with a pool or you went to a public one. Two lakes - one natural and one man-made - were available if you could get to them.
And, I have to admit, as a child of the seventies, there was roller skating. A lot of it. If not in rinks, then in home basements. With the requisite white booted skates with colored wheels, and striped tube socks pulled up to just below the knees.
Don't worry - I will not be showing any pictures of that.
And there was this, too. No, none of the corporate amusement parks nearer to Richmond or the eastern side of Virginia. No, this was in my hometown.
Lots of mostly tame rides run by surly teenagers who couldn't get work anywhere else, or didn't want to work too hard anywhere else. They had hot jobs, but they weren't hard jobs. The Umbrellas ride was for cooling off between other attractions, since the Skyway didn't move fast enough to push the air around you. And a strange, large slide - enameled with some infernally dark color so that it became burn-the-back-of-your-thighs hot from the sun, with those nasty pieces of carpeting intended to assist your ride down to the bottom, but inevitably so trashed that they bunched up, got stuck somewhere in the grooves and ultimately left you screeching your way to the end. The combination scorch from hot metal sticking to your skin and that herky-jerky, last third of the trip down was a special kind of pain. And the roller coaster was o.k. (watch the linked video only if you don't have an issue with heights or motion sickness), but it was - as many people fondly recall - a bit rickety.
A small town legend. Now gone, sadly. I'm not sure it could be more trite than this: the whole place was replaced by a large strip mall with a grocery store.
In my teen and college years (yep, I was one of those commuters when commuting wasn't nearly as cool as it is now), you went out to eat at one of a very small number of privately owned restaurants, or far more easily, you went to some corporate/chain place. If it was Burger King, then you went next door with your french fries and fed the ducks. Maybe we fed too many then, too, but I don't remember having the same problem then that exists now. Ew.
In the valley, you could go shopping at one of three small malls (and the largest of them didn't exist until I was a high school graduate). One day, I'll have to ask that friend to reminisce with me about the time I had an allergic reaction to something in one of the malls. I sneezed, coughed, swelled up like a tomato and wound up in the emergency room - where my father came to rescue me, but walked past my exam room because my new Tweety-bird lips and swollen eyes made me completely unrecognizable. Good times.
Of course you could go to area high school football games. If you were into other sports, you went to minor league baseball games.
You could pretend to be a tourist in your hometown by going here.
It used to be that the Roanoke star was turned entirely red whenever there was a traffic fatality. Now, it is perennially lit red, white and blue. Among some longstanding friends of mine, this is THE place where you take your forever love to see your home from above, and to share at least one kiss.
I suppose that you could have a few of those - loves AND kisses.
And when I was a teen, we did a lot of this. I teamed up with friends to do it to other friends (one in particular carried the supply - sssshhhh! don't tell her parents! - because she had a Corvair with a giant front trunk that could easily hold an industrial size case of, um, supplies) and once, one lovely evening, those same friends did it to me. They waited until I came home from my date, kissed him on the front porch and went inside. I awoke the next morning to my front yard festooned with billowing loops of white, an excited mother (yay - your friends must like you!) and a grumpy father (now, who's going to clean this mess up?). I knew people who had perfected the roll toss so well that the resulting effect was truly an artform. I can still hear one of them, giggling in the dark, softly saying "I like for it to be all ...swoopy."
We extended this practice to ridding the local Wendy's of its sporks, tying ribbons around each one, and inserting them upright into the lawn of a friend. It was Christmas time. His mother was completely charmed.
Raise your hand if you came from a town where 'cruising' was a popular thing to do. We rode in that same Corvair down Williamson Road, looping a length through the Pancake House parking lot. We affectionately termed it 'The Great Pancake Turnaround.' I remember laughing with girlfriends. I remember lame, poorly formed conversations with guys in passing cars. In retrospect: frankly boring.
All this to say, quite simply: there just wasn't that much to do.
So movies were a major outlet for me. I remember seeing the debut of Star Wars. I remember bad 3D glasses and some appallingly bad special effects in slasher films. I remember going to see this in an historic theater downtown, and being pelted by toast.
I recall seeing Dangerous Liaisons as a young college student and thinking that I had never heard dialogue like that before. I wondered if I wasn't cut out for it, until about a third of the way through, when I began to understand it. And love it.
I love the dark, the cool air, the popcorn and holding hands with someone while thoroughly escaping for 1.5 to 2 hours.
And I knew that even when I was in a remarkable city like Rome, with all kinds of things to do and see, I would still want to go to the movies.
So, let's address the obvious: this is where Italians go to the movies, which should be understandable to Italians. Sure, they make their own (this is the home of Fellini, let's not forget), but they also import American ones. Lots of them. And they are dubbed in the primary language of the country.
How's your Italian? you might ask. Very limited. I start language lessons next week!
 |
| Why, look at that: they advertise colleges as 'previews' in Italian theaters, too. |
So what will this mean for the person who likes to see dialogue-rich films in, at least for the time being, their native language, which is NOT Italian?
What? This is coming to theaters in just a few days?
Before solving that future problem, we elected to go see an American movie that was dubbed in Italian. No subtitles.
We saw the recent Star Trek. (click that link for a slice of what it was like to watch it in another language - there are two trailers, by the way).
I was beyond excited.
And the experience was...unique.
Tickets cost less than in the States. So do the items you can get at the concession stand - until you remember that portion sizes of things like sodas and popcorn are radically different. My sweet Spouse, who rarely judges cultural differences, finally had a moment that afternoon: this is medium? he asked, as he held up his 12 oz container...of Coca-Cola, with....no ice. We Americans are so accustomed to medium being massive. Not so, here.
Although when you consider how much ice comes in that medium, it's more understandable.
And my popcorn came with no butter. There was no option to ask for it either.
But I didn't care. I didn't care!
We ascended three escalators to get to our theater in this multi-sala cinema.
Everything in the place was so clean. No sticky floors. No overused, gross chairbacks or armrests.
We sat in our European-sized seats (hey, how about those middle-aged hips?) and watched a film that both of us admitted later to understanding all of about 5-10% of the dialogue.
But the thing is, with a film like that, you can still easily follow the story.
And if the acting is good (and I would maintain that this cycle of prequel Star Treks has a great team of actors), then you can even follow the humor.
And by the end, the good guys are still going to win.
One oddity to report, though:
At the exact halfway point in the film, mid-action scene, the film stopped.
The lights came on, and a guy with a box of concession stand offerings appeared.
For a 122 minute film, there was an intervallo.
Cute.
And at the end, in the actors' chorus of voices:
"Spazio, l'ultima frontiera."
(you need to read this in a gravely serious voice)
So after that experience, we started to get a little more picky. If we wanted to see a film that involved dialogue we wanted to understand, then we were going to have to determine that possibility.
My nice vegetable vendor advises me to look things up online by saying 'Googliama.'
Googliama helps me find a website that lists films shown in 'originale' - in their original dialogue!
Hallelujah!
They don't run all the time, and sometimes there's only one showing per day that is not dubbed, but we are willing to work with this.
So we've now seen Suicide Squad and The Family Fang in English, but with Italian subtitles.
.
Side benefit: subtitles enable you to pick up some of the language. Although with some films, what you learn most are the expletives.
Tutorials are tutorials, regardless, right?
Every theater here is, so far, different.
2 of the 3 we've visited had concession stands. The 3rd expected you to bring your own - but no glass containers.
So when that next Woody Allen film comes to town, I'll be packing the popcorn, a plastic bottle of water, and a notebook, for recording neurotic commentary in Italian.
Love this! I remember my teenage summer in Paris and going to the cinema every day at 1pm to watch Monthy Python's The Meaning Of Life because it was the only movie in English that I could find, and I needed and English 'fix' because I don't speak French. They also had the interval, where girls that looked like cigarette sellers from 1930s nightclub's with their basket of ice cream, candy and CIGARETTES! I realized quickly that Paris was not Kansas :)
ReplyDeleteLove your posts!
Bxxx