Moving Memories of Movies

I was rereading some of my previous blog posts, while wolfing down my lunch of sandwich, soup and coffee here at O'Brien's, Subang Jaya--another one of my many favourite places to park myself for hours with my laptop.  In my blog post, The Cenobites of Consumption, I briefly alluded to my golden age of cinema-going. Today, I've decided to indulge in some bitter-sweet nostalgia and write about movie-going experience over the decades of my existence.

Before VHS, VCD, laser discs, DVDs and Netflix came into existence, the movie-theatre was the only where feature films were consumed. The cinemas of old were live performance venues for large audiences with ornately draped curtains that either slide apart or pulled upwards to reveal a white screen, where the  magic of movies was projected. I remember the cinemas that were in existence in my hometown: Cathay, Lido and Lyceum and--even their names aspire to some bygone grandeur. Today, not a single one is still standing. And that's a bit sad. 

The cinemas of old certainly had a certain charm which the current plushly-carpeted cineplexes tucked in the attic floors of shopping malls lack. I watched the first Bruce Lee movie--The Big Boss--at the Cathay cinema back home. What a massive box-office hit that was. In those days, people actually had to climb over each other (no,  queueing wasn't in vogue then), with fistfuls of cash to grab a ticket from an actual "box office" outside the theatre. 

I watched all the old James Bond movies at the Lido. Like what HBO likes to do every time there's a new Bond movie, the cinemas would play all the old ones on consecutive days. It was at the same cinema too, when I was much older, I caught a movie that I thought then was ground-breaking and felt completely different from all the movies that I had seen in the past--Ridley Scott' Blade Runner. I was completely blown away by the cinematography and music soundtrack by Vangelis. It made me see movies as an art-form in itself, on par with music, painting and literature. 

Fast forward to my days in PJ and KL, where I also had the opportunity to have many good cinema-going experiences which I still cherish. I remember watching Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now at Rex, in Jalan Sultan. That was another ground-breaking movie to me. I remember being awed by the battle sequence of the helicopter attack on a Vietcong village, staged to the soundtrack of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries.

PJ was a happy cinema-going place for me. I watched Hitchcock's Frenzy at Paramount as a kid, before I knew anything about this master of suspense, nor his masterpiece, Psycho. Only much later did I find out that it was his penultimate feature film.  

I first got acquainted with the magic of Wong Kar Wai in Days of Being Wild at the Majestic in PJ Old Town. Again, I did not know anything about the director, but his style captivated me. I was so taken by the movie that I went back to the same cinema to watch the same movie three times on three consecutive days! 

People today know Pavillion as a shopping mall on Jalan Bukit Bintang. But not many would remember that there was a cinema called Pavillion further down the road. It was one of the two cinemas at Bukit Bintang, the other being the iconic Cathay. It was at Cathay that I first saw Oliver Stone's Wall Street--another all-time favourite of mine.  But alas, all these beautiful cinemas of old--Majestic, Cathay, Pavillion have been demolished. At least Rex at Jalan Sultan has been converted to a beautiful bookstore--BookExcess Rex KL, a fitting tribute to an icon of the cinema-going era.

When I was working in Singapore, I went to the movies frequently too. I remember watching The Unbearable Lightness of Being, starring Daniel Day Lewis and Lena Olin. That got me interested in the book, which also made me a fan of Milan Kundera's writings. And I ended up reading almost everything that he had written.

On a business trip to Hong Kong, I chanced upon a movie called Pulp Fiction, which I vaguely knew was all the rage then but I was totally unprepared by what I was to see. That was my first introduction to the world of Quentin Tarantino and have since enjoyed every single movie of his. 

On a lazy afternoon at the office, during my short stint in Menlo Park, US, I sneaked out to watch Bitter Moon, a Roman Polanski movie starring Hugh Grant, Peter Coyote, Kristin Scott Thomas and Emmanuelle Seiger. This was another intriguing and entertaining movie, one which you have no idea where it was supposed to go.

I have also written about my movie-going experiences in Jakarta, with Eliana, Eliana among the movies that I had enjoyed most during my stay there.  But I since I came back Malaysia, I have lost that habit of going to the movies. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because life is so different these days and I've moved on. 

Hopefully someday I would regain that enthusiasm of old, when going to the movies at the cinema was an immersive and magical experience. Imagine, going to the movies, and be moved by them.