My Harry Potter Adventure

I've decided to blog about my lovely adventure to the Grand Canyon mall to see the premiere of the newest Harry Potter movie. I know Kat already beat me to the punch on this one, but it was so ridiculous it deserves to be recorded on two separate blogs.

Here we have Kat and I enjoying a "large" Coke from McD's. Looking at this drink, is it just me, or is everything ludicrously oversized in North America? (Funnily enough, Kat couldn't even finish this one, so I helped.)

A whole slew of Baha'is ended up descending upon the movie theatre for the premiere. Fortunately most of us had gotten someone to pick up the tickets well in advance, so the seats were not too bad. Yeah, there are assigned seats in the movie theatres here, it's weird.



I was expecting the movie to start around 9:30 pm, but when we arrived we found out that our show wasn't until 10:30 pm. Well, that was ok because the mall was still open, so Kat and I ended up browsing some of the awesome stores there. Finally we went back to the theatre to get into the auditorium, but the crowd was enormous. We were a surging sea of bodies pressed together uncomfortably in a rather tiny lobby, waiting for the doors to open. 10:30 came and went, and we realised that we were only going to be able to get IN the theatre at that point, the movie was going to start much later. Hoo boy...



So we made it into the theatre and clambered down to the front looking for our seats. Kat and I got to our row, only to find a couple of young boys sitting in our seats. One of them was supposed to be sitting farther forward, but had wanted to sit with his friend. I think the conversation was something like this:



Kat: Excuse me, I think you're in one of our seats.

Boy: It's ok, don't tell anyone. Shhhh.

Kat: Ok, but that's not very truthful. You need to be truthful.

Boy: ....?

(Ok, I'm paraphrasing here, but you get the gist of it. I was quite amused by the interchange.)

Here we are in our seats, giddy with anticipation. Yay for Harry Potter!

So the movie ended up starting at 11:00 pm. When the credits started rolling, the audience erupted in screams and clapping. Holy cow, it was funny. (I can't understand how that many kids could stay awake that long.) Anyhoo, the movie was awesome until about midnight, when it abruptly cut off in the middle of a conversation between the characters. Nobody else in the audience seemed perturbed, and it soon occurred to us that this was an intermission - an intermission slicing the middle of a scene. Well planned. Apparently that's the way it goes here; after an hour there's an intermission whether it makes sense or not.

So we sat around for a while, watching the crowd and trying not to fall asleep. During that time, the young boys sitting next to us kept trying to flirt with Kat and take surreptitious pictures of the two of us with their cell phone. Silly kids. Anyhoo, the movie started up again close to 12:30 am, so that was fine. Until about fifteen minutes later when the film burned. BURNED. I thought that was something that only happened IN the movies, but you could actually see the film bubble and then melt away to a white screen. I nearly had a heart attack! I was sitting there thinking, "Do they usually have backup reels set up for just such an emergency?" Turns out they were able to splice the movie together again, but it took another fifteen minutes. During that time I swear I thought a riot was going to break out between some of the kids. I could only imagine the headline: "Numerous people injured in Harry Potter theatre riot" Ha ha ha.

The movie started again, and TEN MINUTES LATER the screen went black. At that point, most of the theatre started screaming English obscenities at the screen. It was sort of hilarious, especially when the two small kids beside us started yelling profanity to the general public - I don't even think they knew what the words meant, they just knew they were swearing.

FINALLY, around 1:30 am the movie finished and we were able to file out of the theatre. We were shunted through a sketchy tunnel that ran along the back area of the mall. It led back out into the food court, not fifty feet from the entrance where we had gone into the theatre in the first place. Why they couldn't just let us out through the lobby back into the food court is beyond me...

Then came the wait for taxis. There were none waiting, probably because the movie let out almost an hour later than it was supposed to have finished. And when there are dozens of people all trying to get a taxi, you can well imagine we had to wait quite a while and call the taxi company a couple of times.

All in all, quite the memorable experience. Perhaps my first and only trip to the movies here? We shall have to wait and see...

By the way, props to John for this little gem of wisdom, "You know it's a bad sign when you have to ask the person next to you four times to wake you up when the movie starts again."