“The Amazing Spider-Man” showed in 3D in Pristina. Curiosity got the better of me. The first time I went, every seat was already sold out, which only made me more determined not to miss it. I went back the very next chance I had, worried something interesting would slip past me if I waited.
The theater was packed again on the second attempt. I was genuinely glad to see a cinema pulling people out to watch films the old, proper way, new releases paired with new technology, especially as someone who, like most of my generation, has a personal archive well past 3TB of illegally downloaded films and shows sitting on a hard drive somewhere.
Because we’ve grown so used to watching pirated, low-quality copies at home, a lot of us never picked up the basic culture of how to actually behave in a movie theater. What I watched play out: kids too young to read subtitles and without much English, talking and rustling chip bags through the whole thing; teenagers nearby too busy nudging each other to notice they were sitting in a room full of other paying customers.
Eventually I settled into my seat, made peace with the inevitable tall stranger sitting directly in front of me and tried to just enjoy the film. Then, about twenty minutes in, during a kiss scene, half the theater let out a loud “aaoooouuuuu.” Fine, understandable. Then came the distinctly American beat of the film, a spider-man dressed in the colors of the flag, helped by New Yorkers showing off that famous only-in-America spirit of pulling together. What a wonderful people, helping each other out, wow.
The ending topped it. Maybe it was the size of the crowd, or just something in how we watch things here, but the moment felt like landing on a plane bound for Kosovo: the second the good guy won and kissed the girl, the whole room broke into applause.
After the clapping died down, a few conclusions. The technology this particular cinema (KinemaABC) is using is solid. The film itself was current and well-anticipated. There was real audience appetite, “mashallah,” and the only real note is to keep that same pace of new releases coming.
A few suggestions for the cinema itself: sell popcorn in paper cups or tubs instead of crinkly plastic bags. Be more careful about seat numbers, since the first five minutes of every screening go to people squeezing past each other trying to find their row, or just lock the doors at the scheduled time and stop letting people in late. And someone should actually enforce basic quiet in the room, teach the younger crowd how to sit through a film properly, up to and including removing anyone who flatly refuses to follow the rules. That would be the ideal version of this.
Enjoy your 3D films.
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