My son's basketball team, which I coach, had a bye yesterday, so I trained into the city to watch a friend play baseball. I used to play baseball myself, you might recall, but I took this season off because of the conflict with coaching. It worked out well as we were also scheduled to be in North Melbourne, where I lived for my first eight years in Australia and where the baseball field is, for a friend's birthday dinner that night. I met the rest of my family there later.
I was expecting to watch my friend play and drink beers with him during the second game, but he got hit in the batting helmet with a pitch and actually took himself out of the first game early. That meant we could catch up for the rest of that game, and by the time it was over he was already cancelling his plans for that night. He was fine, just had his bell rung a bit, but I suddenly had more time between the baseball and the dinner than I originally anticipated.
Hello, Barbie.
I got myself over to Cinema Nova in Carlton and experienced a similar onslaught of Barbie fandom as I'd seen Thursday night at the Sun in Yarraville. Lots of pink outfits, lots of tickets sold. Instead of an oversized Barbie toy box to take pictures with, there was a big Barbie cake downstairs, decked out in layers of pink, in the window of the patisserie adjacent to the escalator you grab to get to the cinema.
In fact, there were so many tickets being sold that I actually bought the very last one for the 3:45 show.
This gave me pause for a moment. Do I really want to watch the movie from the worst seat in the house, likely the end of the front row on the side?
But that moment quickly ended when the woman told me they were assigned seats and this one was actually in the back row, on the aisle no less. "You got really lucky with this ticket," she said. Yeah, you know a movie is a phenomenon when the scarcity of tickets and the frequency of turning disappointed people away is an active reality for the cinema workers.
It was a relatively small cinema -- 75 seats, maybe? -- so indeed my seat was going to have a plenty good view. I did have to let people in and out a dozen times in the commotion before the start of the show. I guess I tend to forget what it's like being in a packed theater, where this person always has to leave to get food, or that person has to return from going to the bathroom, or the other person has to leave to talk to people two rows in front of them. Yes, it appeared that parties were separated by the scarcity of assigned seats near one another, and had untold amounts of checking in with each other they had to perform.
When the movie started, though, I was wondering how lucky I really was to have scored this particular seat after all.
The first thing I heard as the first images came on screen were the cries of a baby. "Not where I thought they would go with this material," I thought. Then I realized that this was not part of the movie, but a baby in our auditorium.
A woman quickly walked into the aisle with a maybe four-month-old in her Baby Bjorn, up the steps and out of the theater. I rolled my eyes a bit at this, but at least she had the sense to leave entirely. Too bad she couldn't get more than ten seconds into the movie before she had to leave, but I guess that was her problem.
Then moments later, a man followed -- also wearing a Baby Bjorn and trying to shush a baby of the same age. The twin of the other, I imagined.
Only he didn't leave the auditorium. He bounced his child pretty much right next to my seat.
And then, perhaps emboldened by her partner's unwillingness to miss any of the movie while their child fussed, the woman came back in, so they were both bouncing and lightly shushing.
This story may sound like it has a horror show ending, but it doesn't. Like a miracle, both babies quieted down in less than a minute and were not heard from again. The parents returned to their seats and, presumably, enjoyed the rest of the movie undisturbed.
It was risky, but I suppose by four months, they needed to get out of the house, and this probably aligned with the kids' normal nap time.
The disturbances next to my seat were not over, though.
A man then came in with an usher, trying to locate the elusive last seat in the house that he'd paid for. They spent a few minutes talking quietly and pointing and gesturing to a spot that looked to be in the second row or thereabouts.
But the man didn't move toward that seat. Instead, he continued standing next to my seat after the usher left.
Having someone stand over me, hovering as it were, is potentially even more of a distraction than a crying baby, especially for a person like me. (I hate to be seated while someone is standing over me, unresolved, and I attribute it to the fact that I am tall, so I don't like others to be over me. Look I'm not saying I'm proud of it.)
This story also has a happy ending. The usher returned with a chair, and the man sat down and watched the movie from this chair. As with the babies who were no longer bothering me, I quickly forgot about him too as I got engrossed in the movie.
So I don't know if the movie was actually oversold, or if they just determined the degree of difficulty in getting to the seat after the movie had started was too high. But considering that there were only 75 seats in the theater, it seems like he could have at least made the effort to get to the proper seat, if he'd paid money for it and if there weren't somebody already sitting in it.
In a way, since there were also two babies, you could say Barbie was oversold by three.
It occurs to me before you started reading, you may have though the word "oversold" in the title of this piece meant that its merits as a movie had been overstated. Well I'm glad to tell you that's not the case.
I won't say I loved it, but I really liked it. I might have only laughed at 60 percent of the spots most of the crowd laughed at, but they were good laughs. And occasionally my own chuckle burst out of the silence at something no one else seemed to think was funny. Usually something Ryan Gosling was doing.
So obviously this won't be a discussion of the film in any substantive way, but I can say that I probably slightly prefer Barbie to Oppenheimer. They're both getting four stars from me on Letterboxd, though, which is quite a good outcome indeed of this hyped release date battle.
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