Lotte Cinema and other recent movie-watching debacles...

Lotte Cinema, taking residence on the top floor of Samyeon's enormous Lotte Department Store, has recently become my movie theater of choice in Korea. While it only has 12 theaters, it shows films well into the night, with some showings starting as late as 2:00 in the morning. You don't need to stand on long lines to buy a ticket (and the crowds get damn large if you go on a weekend afternoon or evening), since the cashiers use a number-calling system similar to what you'd see at the DMV. There's an Internet Station right down the hall that you can waste time at while waiting for your movie to start (or if you're going to an earlier time, you can always shop on one of the other floors or dine on some Dunkin Donuts in the food court one level below). No arcade here, but there's a 7-11 on the same floor that keeps the same hours as the cinema, meaning you can purchase a precious Hite Stout/squid chips combo and sneak it in the theater; in fact, I don't even think you need to keep beer-drinkin' a secret here.

Not really a feature that I normally include when judging a theater: the entire place has a cruise ship theme, including tile mosaics of nautical compasses and boat wheels, a fake ocean view seen through the glass elevator as you're approaching the floor, and a fog horn that bellows every couple of minutes. It has a kitschy appeal similar to what Ronnie's has in St. Louis, and when you get to a theater near midnight, the sight of baby blue neon makes your psychology a little more sunny.

Managed to catch "Corpse Bride" (beh) and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (again, but it just opened here) here over the past couple of weeks, and some melodramatic martial arts/art film (a la "Crouching Tiger", "Hero, "House of Flying Daggers", so on and so forth) opens this week, so I'll more than likely catch that and try to interpret the plot on visuals alone. My plan is to make a trip to Lotte Cinema a weekly thing, even if many English-language features aren't on the horizon. Fortunately, that's not the case; we should have the new "Harry Potter" and "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe" to subversively make me Wiccan and Christian respectively, and I can't imagine "King Kong" won't make its way here.

Also, Marie and I have been frequenting DVD Bangs quite a bit lately. I'll get back to that later.