A vacation movie intersecting with my personal film/music history

I didn't know where or when I might see my first film in the theater on this long trip, which is now ten days old as I write this. Realistically, I thought I might just be too busy in both London and Paris, where we are spending only four and three nights, respectively. Taking out two hours to see a film, a thing I can do anywhere, might not be paying some of the most famous cities in the world, each of which I have only visited once previously, their proper due.

Then two things happened:

1) Sunday, our first full day in London, was designated, by unspoken majority opinion, a recovery day. We'd been racing through Scotland after racing around Dubai, and barely made it in by train from Manchester in time to watch the Saturday football match of my son's favorite team, Chelsea, in their iconic Stamford Bridge Stadium. After this, we were pooped for the rest of Saturday, and needed a quiet day on Sunday lest we started to fall apart before we'd really even begun.

2) I learned that there is a new, upscale cinema in the Battersea Power Station, which is just a 20-minute walk from where we're staying. 

Don't know what the Battersea Power Station is? You might not think you do, but you do. 

Here it is:

And here it is also is:

That's right, it's on the cover of an album from one of my top five bands of all time, and that album cover is quoted in one of my top 20 movies of all time, Children of Men.

And now it's an upscale shopping center.

It actually has more of a cinematic history than I realized, which we'll get to in a moment.

So when I saw that the cinema closest to where we're staying just next to Battersea Park was actually in the Battersea Power Station, and Sunday was already a day where people were going to get to do their own thing if they wanted, well, it was basically a fait accompli.

And I even managed to play it so it didn't have to be my idea.

I'd already clocked the cinema in my own research, but then as my wife and I were looking at the little booklet the Air BnB owners left for their guests, it popped up there as a local "to do." And she was the one who spoke its existence out loud, creating a tacit permission for me to go there and see a movie. (She knows I like to do this and she supports me, but my compulsion has caused difficulties now and again in the past, so if the idea can originate externally to me, it makes me feel a lot less guilty.)

The day worked out perfectly in that I did actually do things with the family up until 3 o'clock, at which point, we'd exhausted ourselves again from walking around Battersea Park, and I was in the clear to hoof it down to the station for a 3:45 show of Darren Aronofsky's Caught Stealing. (My review will be up shortly, if you want to check the link to the right, but suffice it to say that while I liked the movie quite a bit, it's not going to make Aronofsky a contender to pick up his third personal #1 for me after The Wrestler and The Whale.)

The next decent-sized bit of this post is going to be photos of both the Battersea Power Station and the cinema itself, so sit back and just do some looking rather than reading for a minute or so.

The pictures describe it far better than my words could, but also, I'm on holiday. I'm trying to keep up appearances on the blog, but I'm also not trying to spend all my time writing. Anyway, you can tell they've done an amazing job with it.

I did want to mention the additional cinema history, beyond the Children of Men reference I've always cherished. 

Before Caught Stealing actually started, the cinema included maybe a minute-long montage of uses of the Battersea Power Station in movies, which date back to the middle of last century, though I didn't immediately recognize some of the older films. I did recognize such films as The Dark Knight (which I thought was shot entirely in Chicago) and one of the Fast & Furious movies, though I have no idea which one. Hilariously, it was also a setting for ... Superman III? Yes, there's a shot of Christopher Reeve flying through the sky and carrying Richard Pryor in this short film. I'll have to look up the rest of the references.

Given that it had been used in films because of its dystopian, bombed out quality -- I believe the power station sat unused for more than 20 years -- is it a bit of a shame that it is now an upscale shopping center?

I suppose it is and I suppose it isn't. Sure, it will never again get to "act" in a film in that way. But now we can all spend time inside of it, and in fact, earlier this very evening, my family went for a drink in a bar called Control Room B, which looks like this:

I love the way they've revitalized an iconic building whose ominous grandeur Pink Floyd immortalized nearly 50 years ago. 

And if we want to see it how it used to be, we'll always have the movies.