Seeing is believing
(A reminisce on cinema trips in the Noughties)
Caroline Carey Finn
If it’s not broken don’t fix it. So why do the big suits in Hollywood insist on producing all the popular children’s films in 3D? If God had meant us to see the world in 3D he’d have, eh… I should know this, but I skipped off with mother to Keith Prowse in London just when, in first year biology, I should have been studying the composition of the eye. Oh well. Nobody likes a know-it-all.
Now, I’m enjoying the luxury of my four-year-old sitting through her movie; following the plot and enjoying it as much as we do. Though ‘enjoy’, on my part, it’s a bit strong. It’s more like I endure children’s films. I wait for the wisecracks that go over the kids’ heads, put there to placate us adults. We are the ones paying after all.
Along comes 3D Shrek. Armed with one size fits all Elvis Costello style glasses at 50 cents a throw, we all sit down to enjoy. These specs keep slipping off her little button nose and I spend half the film pawing the floor aimlessly for them. I sense the guy behind us is waiting for me to grope his leg.
By now she has lost all interest in the film and tunes out, and decided trips to the toilet at 10-minute intervals are far more exciting than any blurred Donkey’s antics. ‘Excuse me, Excuse me, if we can just get past please,’ I whisper as we both jockey past knees. I dribble an empty popcorn box to the end of the row, all the while assuming a Quasimodo pose so as not to block anybody’s view, and send the leg groping man’s wife off my scent.
Even my eight-year-old son can’t be trusted to adhere to the unwritten rule of cinema and would-be mantra of Specsavers: ‘Don’t fiddle with your specs.’ He’s a normal kid, likes to stock up on a Chunky Monkey, a Slushy, a tub of two-tone candy floss and a bag of pick-n-mix. Of course I’m breathing down his neck overriding his choice of quantities. We settle on two cola bottles, one snake, three sour doodies, and pop in two strawberry pig faces for me. (Is it just me or is this an exorbitantly priced cartel of generic E additives priced by kilogram? But that’s another story.)
Shortly into the 3D movie, he whispers in my ear, ‘Mam, my glasses don’t work.’
Don’t work? I say, in the key of D. Fifty cents being fifty cents.
Being mother of this outfit, I hand over – in perfect working order – my pair of Elvis Costello’s finest.
Easy come, easy go, he carries on munching and slurping obliviously, while I debate a spit and tissue overhaul of his sweet-smudged and sticky lenses.
Rummaging for anything in my family sized handbag has its own problems, but in the pitch dark. I settle for a small pair of spare knickers belonging to the four-year-old with the cute button nose.
Tucking in to my pink chocolate pig face, I wipe the lenses, but they are a lost cause.
Oh well. Those pink chocolate pig faces remind me of Pink Panther bars of old. It tastes like the smell of cow dung. Yum.
Are there any entrepreneurs out there, I used to think. If we are to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 3D age, there is a gap in the market for 3D glasses in kid sizes too.
Caroline Carey Finn is a member of Inklings Writing Group, who meets on Tuesdays at 11am and on Wednesdays at 7.30pm in the Annebrook House Hotel, Mullingar. Lovers of 3D and writing welcome.