The cinema in Broome is unique in a number of respects, as you will see with the pictures I'm including below in the post. But I'll list them here as well:
1) It's old as f**k. Sun Picture Gardens was opened in December of 1916, and has been operated continuously since then. It was converted for sound in 1933. Apparently it was regularly flooded under, which did not stop them from showing movies. Legend was that you could catch fish during a movie.
2) It's partially inside, partially outside. About half the seats are outdoors while the other half are under the protection of the beams above. This unique exposed situation must mean that you can hear the movie from the neighboring businesses, which doesn't really matter because most businesses in town close before the 6 p.m. start time of the first movie. Yes this area is dead as dead can be at night. Something about the layout of the place reminded me of a makeshift cinema for troops serving in Vietnam or something like that. In addition to playing during floods, the movie plays rain or shine.
3) It is basically directly under the landing strip for the nearby airport, so planes fly over during the movie. Unlike most major cities -- and Broome only qualifies as such by the local standards of the northern part of Western Australia -- the airport is basically right next to downtown. When planes land, they fly over the town's main street just before landing, a sight which never ceases to be awesome. Because Broome is not a common destination for travellers, these planes are only landing at most every 30 minutes by this time of the night, but several did land during the movie, a truly enthralling spectacle.
A friend of mine told me he'd seen Jungle Cruise in this theater when he and his wife travelled around Australia in 2021. That seemed especially appropriate, given what I've already said about the theater reminding me of a ramshackle Vietnam War cinema. Their friend, my friend told me, had seen Dunkirk here, and the planes landing made for a mind-blowing three-dimensional experience for that particular film.
Both great choices. Ours was not as great, on the surface. You may recall I posted last week that I hoped The Blue Beetle would be playing, but had already determined that it was not. I guess I didn't look enough further to determine that an equally satisfactory kid-friendly option, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, was playing during school holidays instead. Not thematically fortuitous, perhaps, but a movie my kids could see that I also was curious about. From what I had seen of the trailers, the animation reminded me of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, always a good thing.
As it turns out, only one of the two kids wanted to go. The older one would have watched literally any other movie playing there -- which included Barbie, Oppenheimer, The Meg 2 and The Equalizer 3 -- so much is he over "baby things" like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So he opted not to go at all. Same was true for my wife.
But the nine-year-old and his auntie both were thrilled by the idea of watching a movie here, and the best of two TMNT showings while we were in town -- the other being programmed for the later, rather than the earlier, of two nightly time slots -- was that very evening, Wednesday evening.
The experience was great, all the more so because the movie was really fun. It is a bit Into the Turtle-Verse, but to be honest, it was pleasantly uncluttered when compared to this year's Spider-Man sequel. And there's some really respectable talent behind the camera, so to speak, including writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, and composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Plus a great array of vocal talent, from the unknowns who played the four turtles to stalwarts among recognizable names, particularly Ice Cube as the villain, Superfly.
In short, see the damn movie. It's way better than you might expect.
And there was even an appropriate thematic element. No jungle setting, no planes flying through the movie to play off the air traffic overhead, but early on in the movie, the turtles do go see a movie screening outdoors in their New York neighborhood. (They watch Ferris Bueller's Day Off, one of only a few parts of the movie that isn't animated.)
The experience of watching the movie was a real vibe, too, to quote my absent older son. There were plenty of kids there, some of whom were twirling around down front, with only a little bit of running up the aisles, minimal enough to come off as charming rather than annoying. They were able to drag down big beanbag chairs to sit in the front if they so chose. (One group was a camp, we found out while the group leader was buying tickets in front of us, and sent her colleague off to get 22 cans of soda from the snack bar.)
A pair of less-TMNT-enthused adults in the row in front of us considered the setting informal enough to start chatting at normal volume near the climax of the movie, which threatened to really annoy me. In such situations I'm only willing to make increasingly louder "shhh" noises, but still quiet enough that the hope is they don't identify where exactly the shushing originated, and would get it almost subliminally. My sister-in-law had no such concerns. She basically openly told them to shut up, and to their credit, they did.
It was a beautiful night and easily one of the most memorable experiences on the trip. I think my sister-in-law and I even liked the movie more than the nine-year-old.
Oh, here are the pictures I promised:
Please note the plane landing in the upper right-hand corner of this next shot. This was the better of two attempts to capture how close the planes are as they are landing.
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