About Time

It’s been more than 9 months since I went to the movies, and even longer since I last went with my family, so yes, I’d say it’s…

… we went to the movies :D

It’s a rom-com, light and enjoyable to watch if you don’t delve into the details (butterfly effect of time travel, etc).

I found the female lead very familiar and realized that Rachel McAdams also played the female lead in another time travel movie, “The Time Traveler’s Wife”.

The male lead, I’ve never seen before, but deeply reminds me of Ron Weasley. Yeah, almost definitely because of the red hair.

Later I found out he IS related to Ron after all! He played Bill Weasley in one of the Harry Potter movies!

Fu and I used to watch movies now and then when we were in Singapore, but somehow we don’t go to the movies AT ALL after moving to Japan.

I think one reason is the cost of tickets. We are just not used to paying twice the prices in Japan. It’s about 1,800 yen (~SGD 24) for an adult movie ticket in Japan. There are discounts on certain days during certain time periods, but we never bothered trying to catch those discounts.

I’ll get smacked for saying this, but I think another reason might be because there are many other fun things to do in Japan LOL. It’s true, right? Sometimes people go to the movies because they cannot think of any other things to do?

Talking about watching movies in Japan, I did watch a couple of movies in Japan (first was in 2007!) and it was a very different experience when compared to Singapore.

NOBODY LAUGHS AT THE FUNNY PARTS.

I don’t know if they didn’t catch the jokes (it was Pirates of the Carribean with Japanese subtitles), if the jokes were badly translated, or that they were just keeping to their usual ways of not posing as an inconvenience to others (laugh loudly disturb other people mah), but seriously. Nobody laughed. Or even made a squeak. Throughout the entire movie.

The first time the both of us burst out laughing in the quite-full theatre, I was so embarrassed. Later it became just plain torturous.

I had to guffaw noiselessly while shaking with the force of suppressed laughter into my hands that were clamped over my mouth. Ridiculous.

NOBODY LEAVES THEIR SEAT AFTER THE MOVIE ENDS.

We stood up when the credits started rolling for a bit, as people usually do in Singapore, but found that we were the only ones who even moved.

Everyone else sat in their seats, unbudging, looking as comfortable as if they were all catching the next movie or something.

We sat back down, confused, and were educated by our more Japan-savvy companion that Japanese sit till the end of the credits as a mark of respect to all the people who produced the movie.

And it’s true! Everyone sat there, watching the credits like it was part of the movie, all the way till the very end!

I remembered seeing a guy leave the theatre halfway and I thought, “Ha! So rude!” but I think he went to the toilet because he actually came back a while after and took his seat o_o

So yeah! It was a very interesting experience. Sometimes I feel like I should watch a movie in every country I visit just to experience things like these. For example, I heard that in Thailand (?), the national anthem is played before every movie screens?

I wonder what other different things people in other countries do!