A night at the cinema

On Sunday night my flatmate and I made our first trip to a Turkish cinema to see 'The Hobbit'. We managed to get in on student tickets, and, blessing our youthful looks and the Turkish disregard of ID checks, we made our way into the auditorium. It was probably about a quater of the size of the average cinema salon in England, and I get the impression that this is one of the bigger ones in Istanbul.

Instead of the half-hour run in period of trailers and phone adverts that we have become accostomed to back at home, there was only a two-minute advert for a Turkish rom-com that conveniently involved a hoard of gorgeous girls in bikinis. Without further ado, they went straight into the film, remembering to turn the house-lights down a few minutes later. Then of course there were the late-comers, so the film was paused to allow them to make their way to their seats. Naturally.

In Turkish cinemas they have an interval about half-way through. Now, you might think that they would wait until the end of a scene to pause, but no, it was not quite so well thought-out. Instead, Lord Elrond was cut-off more or less mid sentence with his face frozen into a slightly unnatural expression. Very undignified for an elf of his standing.

Come the end of the film, everyone clamoured to get out of the auditorium as quickly as possible, nobody hanging back to watch the end-credits, which were stopped after about 20 seconds anyway. It was all brilliantly unceremonious.