Let’s all go to the lobby….
Going to the movies in Switzerland is different from the US. Your ticket (which costs around 17 francs) is for an assigned seat, which I like because it means you don’t have to arrive early to get a good spot (assuming you planned ahead and got your tickets online). Before the movie you will be subjected to several commercials (many of which are played at ridiculously loud volume, just like on TV) and then a couple previews. If the movie is originally in English, it will have both German and French subtitles. And at some arbitrary point during the film, it will stop for a 10-minute intermission, during which everyone in the theater will go to the lobby, smoke 10 cigarettes, and buy a packaged ice cream of some variety. Luckily Swiss theaters are also air-conditioned, although not quite as cold as US theaters tend to be.
Yesterday I went to see 2 Days in Paris, a movie about a French-American couple who live in New York. It did a fabulous and humorous job of capturing that this-culture-is-crazy feeling that foreign countries can give you, although it did rely heavily on stereotypes of both sides to get some of the point across. Surely American tourists don’t actually wear Bush Cheney ’04 t-shirts to Paris. Right? Please tell me they don’t.
