Last night I attended a preview screening of Danny Boyle's Sunshine at the Melbourne Central Hoyts with a q & a featuring director and actor Rose Byrne following. What a fucking travesty!! Never in all my years have I seen a cinema fuck up a screening so badly. We were maybe a third of the way through as we cut to what I thought was an overly obtuse dream sequence: Capa the ship's physicist played by Cillian Murphy (that man has crazy blues eyes) dreaming his death in reverse, ambient music playing all through as you watched the final moments of the mission. It dragged on. And on. And on. Boyle what are you doing I asked myself? Sure Kubrick set a high standard in sci-fi incomprehensibility but this makes no sense. It's as if the film is playing backwards. Fuck it is playing backwards!I looked to my left and right searching for my friends' expressions: Mike to my left leaning in towards his boyfriend and Darren passively watching the screen. Am I not arty enough, it that it? Is this doubt a sign that I am missing the point, not getting it? No seriously the film is playing backwards, they're fucking ruining the film as I watch characters dying as the end game plays out or in or something. Whispers grew to open protests as the lights come up and there are apologies as apparently the reel was wound backwards but everything would be up and running in say five or ten, so take a toilet break or grab a snack at the candy bar or some shit.
A fucking hour we waited before they offered us the choice to watch the rest of the film or leave with a full refund. A few opted out but the vast majority stuck around to watch the rest of Doyle's much anticipated space adventure to the sun. It was three years in the making and it has been hailed by April's Empire magazine as breathing new life into a tired and banal genre of sci-fi cinema that had suffered so much after years of brainless blockbusters offered up to us by hollywood a la Armageddon. Well yes... and Hoyts fucked it up or someone did, maybe the distributor I don't know and I don't care. Call me a purist but I think a film should be watched first time straight through in its entirety and the right way round and maybe I'm a traditionalist jump-cut Jean Luc Goddard shaking your head at me but fuck you I don't care.
The film came back on without the sound and not from where we left off, missing who knows how much. I had finally settled in and began to absorb myself in the story again when they stopped the film. Apparently the reels were mislabelled and out of order and it was impossible to continue.... fuck.
The q & a continued anyway with Boyle and Byrne perfectly apologetic and friendly but it's really difficult to discuss a film that the audience hasn't seen and while they'll be mailing us out replacement tickets to see it at some later date they've destroyed the magic. And I know it sounds trite but I think there is something sacred about the movie going experience. There's something deeply freudianly mirror-stage (thanks Roland Barthes) about sitting there in the dark losing yourself in other worlds and when you consider the premium price of tickets and the five-fifty I paid for M&Ms what I lost isn't made up for by a replacement voucher.
2 comments:
Man they dicked you. They dicked you so fuckin' bad. That's bullshit. A ruined night and a movie forever tainted in your mind. Death to their daughters!!
perhaps death is a little severe dack davros however i wouldn't be adverse to a public flogging.
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