Some of the things I write here, you will have gathered, are not 100% true. The following is an exact account of something that actually happened; On Saturday I was looking for something to do with my soon to be six-year-old son. We checked what kids movies were on and the only one he hadn't seen was one we hadn't heard of called Boonie Bears. Looked fine, he liked the trailer, I booked tickets and we went to the Prince Charles Cinema.
We arrive and everyone else is Chinese. Everyone. A lady outside the cinema is excited to see us - "How did you find out about this?!". She hands my son a couple of cuddly bears, puts him in front of a promotional thing and tries to take a picture - I ask her not to but take one myself. She takes our tickets and says they're going into the 'prize draw'. We go to our seats and I explain to my son that a prize draw means that if they read out our seat number we might win something but we probably won't - we didn't, that's not the story. A lady with a microphone gets up and I realise Boonie Bears is a huge Chinese franchise and that this is the World Premiere of the English version of the latest installment. Three different women get up and talk, in broken English, about the movie, mainly covering the distribution rights. They then have a Q and A and my son shouts out "when are you saying the seat numbers?", I try to shhh him but the woman excitedly points the microphone in his face and he repeats his question - “WHEN ARE YOU SAYING THE SEAT NUMBERS?”. She has no idea what he's talking about. There's a couple more questions - "What inspired them to make this film?". The lady replies "I don't know".
Then the prize draw happens. The first prize - £300 worth of vouchers for a Chinese restaurant - is given to a seven year old girl. I like to think that she redeemed those vouchers in one long solo meal sitting that evening. Second prize went to a fifty something year old man. If I understood the very business like master of ceremonies correctly it was £200 to spend on his Visa. Now might be a good time to remind you that I simply wanted to take my son to the cinema so that he could watch a film and I could maybe get a little nap and some of his sweets. Now I am watching a divorced looking man get a Visa credit.
Eventually the film starts. It's a big budget blockbuster that, to me at least, looks as good as any Dreamworks film but the story is odd. 95% of the movie is sad. My son is crying and I keep telling him it will end happily whilst losing confidence that it will. Here’s the story as I remember it - two bears are trying to find their mother, then find her but discover she was a robot all along because they don't have a mother, then she leaves them and dies in an explosion, then in the last two minutes someone makes them a new robot mother.
We leave and someone hands my son a balloon on a stick that deflates immediately. He gets a replacement but, thirty seconds after leaving, that one deflates too. My son starts crying loudly and inconsolably, somehow managing to make Leicester Square an even more unpleasant place to be. We’re in front of Shake Shack, a place I’ve never been but in a moment of panicked parenting I shout “do you want a milkshake?”. He says “yes” but we’re now in the Shake Shack and he’s still very upset and can’t decide on a flavour and, to cut a long story short, I pay £14 for a total of six sips and 2200 calories between us.
Genuinely quite a nice day though. Twenty years in the entertainment industry and I got to go to my first Leicester Square movie premiere.
"a divorced looking man“ :-)