People and noise

Harry Potter and the Hmnff Burphh Mnnsh

Going to the cinema is a decent way to break up the week. On Tuesdays there’s a special half-price offer, meaning tickets are approximately 70p, which the irrepressible tightarse within me finds almost impossible to resist. Add to this the fact that when watching a film in a foreign language even the most mindnumbingly stupid piece of cinematic trash can become a challenging educational experience, and it seems like you’re on to a winner. I even found “Hotel For Dogs” tolerable. Plus, imagine my joy at finding a situation in which Helen, normally vehemently against the concept, will agree to watch a science-fiction action movie (Star Trek).

Taking all this to account, you can almost forgive the cinema in Iquitos for being quite so incredibly rubbish. It’s not the fact that the seats are uncomfortable (they’re not great, but they’re not that bad), that they always turn the lights up before the end titles, that they sometimes forget to change the reels until the crowd gets bored of watching a blank screen and starts shouting at the projectionist (I haven’t seen this happen, but think that Helen has). I can even forgive the presumably long-suffering audience for taking calls on their mobiles throughout the film, reading subtitles out loud, and shouting out what they think is about to happen in moments of suspense. What really grates, though, are the occasions when the quality of the picture or sound is so bad that you can barely make out what’s going on.

Watching Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince last night, I got a strong sense of what it might be like to watch a film underwater. The visuals were grainy and occasionally blurry, with regular flashes of green appearing at random (in a film about magic you might be able to imagine how distracting this might be). Compared to the sound, however, they were almost perfect.

Understanding Harry was just about possible. That Horace fella, whose second name I never made out, was occasionally comprehensible. Dumbledore’s mysticism was not benefitted by his sounding like he had eaten an entire packet of Werthers at the beginning of each scene. Each of the female characters appeared to have been dubbed into Spanish by the cast of Morph.

We emerged a little over two hours later with only a vague idea of what had happened, and were relieved to be reassured that it wasn’t because of our inadequate Spanish. Our Peruvian friend had barely understood anything either.

Will we be going back to the cinema? Definitely. We don’t have a TV so, with download speeds too slow to watch anything online, cinema’s become a pretty irreplaceable fix of culture for us. Plus there’s a film about a team of special agent guinea pigs that’s just come out, and Peruvians seem inordinately excited about the prospect of seeing one of their favourite pets and main courses starring on the big screen. I want to get involved in that experience.

We might avoid watching it in screen four though.

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