Tonight Jen and I went to see the movie "The Seeker - The Dark is Rising", which is based on a book by the same title by Susan Cooper. You would think that such a simple task as going to the movies wouldn't warrant a blog entry, but you'd be wrong!
I guess it all started when we tried to find a movie theatre that was playing the movie. The theatres here don't go by helpful names such as "Cineplex" or "Famous Players" (I was actually more than a little surprised to find that these two movie mega-companies hadn't made it to Australia yet). Seems that all the theatres around Melbourne are independent. It's also been impossible to spot the theatres that we know must be in the downtown core somewhere - again, unlike in Canada, what megaplex theatres there are don't appear to be in the city centre. There are no huge billboards or movie posters visible in the downtown at all - so at this point, if there's a theatre in the city centre, I have no idea where it is.
Jen spent about an hour on the internet doing various searches, trying to find theatres that were relatively close to us. Melbourne is a HUGE city with about eight zillion little suburbs, so this proved to be quite the challenge. Then it turned out that all the theatres even remotely close to us weren't showing the movie, so she had to search further afield. Finally she found the movie playing at a place called Highpoint Mall. Then the next challenge was trying to figure out how to get there. In Toronto, we have this handy map of the entire city that shows ALL the TTC bus, streetcar and subway routes - all on one piece of paper - so you can figure out (a) where you are, (b) where you need to go, and (c) visualize how to get there. There is no such thing here in Melbourne. We have a "Melways" book which has a ton of maps for Melbourne, but there is no single transit map for the city. You can get a map of the trams OR the trains, and NOT the buses at all. Suffice it to say this can make planning a cross-town trip rather challenging.
The next stop was to the Metlink website, which has this handy trip planning feature. The idea is you type in your starting address and your destination, and the website plots out for you exactly what combinations of buses/trams/trains will take you where you need to go. I would like to point out that the Metlink website is not always accurate, as Jen found out earlier this week when it gave her the wrong directions to get to a school she was working at. But what other choice did we have? We dutifully wrote down the directions, and headed off.
Things went well at first. We caught the #19 tram on Sydney (this is the tram we seem to take a lot, as it heads straight downtown) and took it to Melbourne Central Station, where we had to transfer onto a train. Got down onto the right train platform to find out that there was a delay, and the train was running late. No problem except that about eight hundred thousand other people were also gathering on the platform waiting for the train, and it was getting uncomfortably crowded. Once the train finally arrived we got all packed in like sardines. I was glad we only had to go two stops, since the guy holding onto the pole with me had pretty darn bad BO and there wasn't exactly anywhere either of us could escape to. Like I think I mentioned yesterday, there are times here where I really do miss my car.
Stumbled off the train at Footscray Station and had to find the #223 bus. The instructions we had were to exit onto Irving Street and get on the bus. There were NO SIGNS to Irving Street! We wandered all around the neighbourhood, reading the numbers on the innumerable bus stops - no #223. Finally we ended up RIGHT BACK IN FRONT of the train station to discover that yes, we had been on Irving Street all along, just walking in the wrong direction. We finally found the right bus stop and as luck would have it, the 223 pulled up almost immediately. Our luck was changing, or so we hoped!
Nope.
We sat on the bus for 7-8 minutes, watching the neighbourhood slide by (I've decided that all of Melbourne except the actual downtown core is made up of junky bargain shops, random teeny cafes, and cheesy clothing stores), when the bus driver pulls over at a stop and announces that this was the last stop on the route. Jen and I look at each other - the bus route was supposed to end at the mall, and we were in a random suburban neighbourhood with houses and a McDonalds but definitely no mall! We told the driver we were trying to get to Highpoint Mall and he told us we had to get off the bus and wait for the next bus on the route to come and get us, and that it would take us to the mall. What choice did we have? Off we got.
While waiting for the next bus, we consulted the mini area map that was at the bus stop. To our horror we discovered that we'd gone the wrong way on the bus route! Essentially, where we had picked up the bus outside the train station was in the middle of the route, the mall we needed was at one end, and we were now waaaay at the other end of the route! Let me be perfectly clear here. There was NO INDICATION about this AT ALL at the bus stop by the train station. As far as we could tell there was only ONE stop for the #223 at the train station. Apparently there were two - we somehow missed the one we were supposed to be at. At any rate, there was nothing we could do about it now, so we waited, fuming, for another 10 minutes or so until the next bus picked us up and finally, FINALLY took us to the mall.
We were now officially late for the movie, so we had to book it to get into the theatre. Highpoint Mall is the first North-American style mall that we've seen at all on our travels here so far - you know, with big glamorous signs, flashy lighting, and a nice big parking lot totally surrounding the building. The one thing that was missing was any exterior indication of where the movie theatre might actually be in the mall. The rest of the stores were closed for the night, but the building itself was open, so we went inside and tried to find the cinema. All the information bulletin boards in the mall were electronic and had also been shut off for the night, so no help there. Eventually we flagged down a mall security guy, who told us we needed to go down to level one to find the theatre. We were on level three - we managed to get down an escalator to level two, but all the escalators to level one were blocked off. Gah! Then we were directed to a lift (elevator) - and there was a set of stairs by the lift. Not wanting to waste time, we went down the stairs - to find them also blocked off at the bottom (why the HECK they weren't also blocked off at the top is beyond me!!). Back up the stairs we went, into the lift, back down again, and we were finally, FINALLY at the theatre. We arrived just at the end of the trailers and hadn't missed a thing.
And would you believe, after all that, that it was a terrible, TERRIBLE movie??
If you've read Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising" series, do NOT go and see this movie. Heck, even if you haven't read the books, don't waste your time on the movie. It's been a while since I read the books, but even I knew that the plot was totally off. Jen was absolutely HOPPING MAD by the end. Let me give you a brief rundown of some of the issues we had with the movie:
- Will did not have a lost twin brother.
- The bad guy (the Rider) was not scary in the least.
- The side plot with Will's dad having done research into the nature of Dark and Light - where the heck did THAT come from?
- The entire movie seemed to be made of slow 'spooky' shots which were nothing of the sort.
- The way in which Will found out about his powers and how to use them were completely wrong.
- The way Will found the different Signs was completely wrong.
- There was a girl character in the movie whose job was to betray Will to the Rider; she is not in the books AT ALL.
I could go on and on and on! We ranted about the movie the entire way home.
Oh, the way home...
Another one of the many joys of the Metlink system here is the inconsistency with which the various buses/trains/trams run. So in order for us to get home at a reasonable hour, Jen and I had to take a completely different set of trams and buses than we had to get out to the mall in the first place. We walked out from the mall about two blocks to Rosmond Street to pick up the #57 tram back towards the city centre. We had to run to catch it, but catch it we did! (Jen remarking while we ran that she shouldn't have worn her flip-flops, hee hee!) Our instructions from the Metlink website told us to get off at stop #35 and catch the #472 bus at Mirriam Street. (There's a logical thing - all the tram stops on a given route have a stop number printed up in nice big bold numbers so they're easy to see - so even if you can't find the street signs to guide you, you know where you are on the route by the stop numbers.) Well we got off the tram at stop #35, and the tram pulled away - and there was no Mirriam Street to be found. At all. We looked up and down this dark and creepy stretch of road and there were no obvious cross streets. What to do now?
What we ended up doing was sticking our heads into a late-night pizza place and asked for directions. The guy behind the counter told us that Mirriam was two blocks down the street, so we thanked him and headed on down. About this point I found myself thinking, why did we need to get off the tram where we did? Where we were heading was likely at least one more tram stop away. And why would the Metlink system have us get off the tram to catch a bus at a place where there was no cross street?
I think by now you can guess that the road two blocks down was not Mirriam. Nope. In fact we walked another six blocks or so and still no Mirriam. We were still following the tram tracks at this point, so we decided we'd just hop back on the tram and ride it all the way downtown, and catch our trusty #19 home from there. And that is what we ended up doing. In total we spent 3 1/2 hours in transit, and only about 100 minutes actually in the movie. Definitely not the most productively spent evening! We've decided that we can't trust the Metlink website ever again; we'll still use it to help us trip plan, but we'll be checking all its recommendations against the Melways map book - even if it is a pain!
From Jen: And the movie was really, really bad. I cannot stress this enough. It was horrible. I had to go online and read if Susan Cooper had sanctionned the changes or if I would have to write a strongly worded letter. She doesn't like the adaptation to her book so she will escape, this time.
From me: I like what Jen said at the end of the movie even better: "Watching this movie makes me feel like my soul threw up just a little."
