Recognizing my ever-shortening time remaining here, I've begun to compile a mental list of things I want to do before I leave. Tasks include: climb the mountain near my town, ride my bike to/from Fianarantsoa, and to see the town at the end of the road called Ikalamavony. One thing on my list, though, required a little less physical exertion and so tonight I crossed a major to-do off my list: watch a movie at the generator-run cinema in town.
What's always stopped my before is that they seem to play only the worst of the worst movies imaginable. These aren't straight-to-DVD films, these are straight-to-the-third-world-bargain-bins. Think Street Fighter 7, Fists of Steel, and movies Chuck Norris would be ashamed to list on his resume. This afternoon I walked by and checked out the marquee (a chalkboard hanging outside the room) and saw they were featuring a true American classic at 5PM. Part two of a trilogy that I think Ebert put on his 'Great Movies" list (don't fact check that): Evil Dead II, starring the squarest jaw in the lower 48, Bruce Cambell, and directed by Sam Raimi (who later went on to direct the new Spiderman movies).
I strolled by at 5, and the door was closed. At 5:30 they told me to wait until 6. At 6, they told me the guy who runs hadn't finished eating his rice yet and to come back at 6:30. Finally, the door to the mud hut Showcase was opened, and I sat in the room with only 3 other people (a mother and two children) for about 40 minutes watching the 'previews'--Malagasy music videos. The room was smaller than my bedroom, had a 19-inch TV up front, and featured, impressively, stadium seating. This means that the first 5 wooden benches were at the ground level, and then got progressively higher up until the back wall. I'm still blown away by that.
Slowly, people started to trickle in and the movie began. The audience was comprised of mostly 2-7 year olds, and the rest adult males. The first Evil Dead movie was a straight-forward, low-budget horror film, however the sequel adds a lot of satire and slapstick humor. So, you see, it was only overwhelmingly inappropriate for 4 year olds, rather than completely inappropriate. Tomorrow they're playing the third in the series, which gave up on horror altogether.
The film had been dubbed into French, meaning that I, understanding about 20% of the dialogue, had the most idea of what was going on. Not that stop-motion, claymation puppet violence needs much in the way of explanation. This means that there were no qualms about having full-length conversations across the room throughout the movie because, hey, we don't have a clue what they're saying anyway. There was also the ubiquitous "that guy" in the room, telling the main character not to open certain doors and the like.
My favorite moment of the night was when an old man, during a scene in which a severed hand is crawling around the room and attacking its former owner, turned around and asked me with a straight face: "is this real?" I looked back at him seriously and nodded my head really slowly. "Oh, absolutely." Who am I do crush his ideas of normal American day-to-day life. Eat, work, destroy your beheaded girlfriend, sleep. In fact, the next day my student asked me, while we had a conversation about movies we had seen, asked "are there dragons in America?" Well, no. They actually aren't real. He thought about this for a while and tried again. "Wait, so where do they live?
