Pixie's Pad

4pm and we were flopped on the sofa contemplating life in an un-air-conditioned bungalow in the middle of a South African summer. Not good. Usually when we’re fed up of the heat we escape to the nearest mall and go to see a movie, but there was absolutely nothing on at our mall here that even remotely piqued our interest, so we decided to drive out to ‘The Big Mall (TM)’ to watch a ‘proper’ movie.

We got to the mall at 5:10pm and Ninja Assassin was starting at 5:15. We rushed over to the cinema, gawked at the queues at the ticket line and hurried to the fast-pay machines that were empty. Picked our movie, swiped the card. ‘Printing Tickets’, it said, and then returned to the start screen.

… No tickets. Hmm. Jaco didn’t get an SMS confirmation of his card having been used, so we assumed the machine was broken and tried another. Picked our movie, swiped the card. ‘Printing Tickets’, it said – and still no tickets when it returned to the start screen, but this time we could see the tickets HAD printed and were stuck behind the loose front panel of the machine. So we called the attendant over, aware that our movie was about to start any minute, and just as I managed to get our second lot of tickets free by prodding at them with an emery board, he had freed our initial pair of tickets from the first machine we tried. We explained to him our double-booking scenario and he assured us that we could get a refund if we took the tickets to the front desk after our movie. Fantastic.

Hurried in to the cinema, found our seats, sat through an inordinate amount of trailers, and our movie started. For those of you who don’t know or haven’t seen Ninja Assassin, it’s one of those movies that has no small supply of blood and gore and gratuitous violence. I mean, it’s about a ninja assassin – what did you expect, right? Even the poster kinda hints that the movie will contain a tad more than a small modicum of blood (see below). One of the very first scenes is a guy getting his head sliced in two horizontally, with lots of brain goo spattering about.

I have come to notice, since moving to SA, that South African movie-goers are rather more… vocal, shall we say, than their UK variants. They don’t seem to realise that being in a movie theatre is akin to being in a library, and TALKING in a movie theatre during the movie is worse than tempting the wrath of any bespectacled, power-bun-haired librarian. It’s just something you don’t do. Ever. But since Ninja Assassin wasn’t a ’serious’ film that we were expecting to ‘get into’, we weren’t too bothered at the prospect of hearing some mumbling around the theater.

But at that first scene of the guy getting his head sliced in two, the outbursts from behind us were a tad more than just ‘cinema mumbling’. There were two young couples sitting behind us, and I don’t know what kind of movie they were expecting from Ninja Assassin, but what they were seeing in front of them clearly wasn’t it. The boys managed to get a grip of themselves and rediscover their apparently tiny scrotums after the first few limbs went flying around the screen, small kudos to them, but the girls were something else. All through the movie we were assaulted with ‘Eeeee!’ and ‘Aaaaargh!’ and ‘Ewwwwww!” and ‘Ohhhhh!’ and ‘Uuuuughhh!’ and ‘Yuuuck!’, couple with disgruntled elbow-nudging and muttering of one telling the other to shut up, and the boys ‘Ssssshhh!’ ing their weak-bellied girlfriends at every outburst. It was kinda amusing. They’re only lucky Ninja Assassin wasn’t taking itself too seriously, and so neither were we, or they’d have had severe talkings to from me.

At the end of the movie when the credits rolled, we stood up to leave and I was on the verge of informing the two girls that perhaps in future they should stick to choosing whatever Disney movie was showing, but as I turned to look at them, the fantastically, stupendously large afros they were both sporting stopped me in my tracks with a moment of gaping silence. They were both typically thin, flat-chested, skin-on-bones female girls who’s necks really shouldn’t have been able to take such a weight, but there they were with two spectacularly oversized afros cocooning their craniums. I could but stare at the marvel, and so they exited free of my snark.

Aaaaaanyway. Jaco dug the two ’spare’ tickets from his pocket and we wandered on up to the ticket sales counter and explained the situation to the ticket lady.

You know you’re in trouble when you ask for a refund and the sales person replies with ‘Oh sweet Jesus…’. She mumbled something about having to check with the manager, exited stage left and we were twiddling our thumbs (or at least, I was – Jaco was looking for things to throw for biggest scene-making impact when she inevitably returned with a ‘no-go’ from the manager) for a good ten minutes before she reappeared. Not quite a no-go; the manager would need proof that we had been charged twice, and the attendant really seemed like she was trying to brush us off. Eventually we were escorted to the manager’s office where we stated our case against their broken machines and the manager spent all of 10 seconds tapping the first four digits of Jaco’s card number into her computer where she found that yes, he had been charged twice. We got our refund. Jaco thinks there’s some situation whereby they have to pay about R250 for every refund they issue, and considering that our tickets were R39 each, you can understand their reluctance – but hey, fix your ticket machines and you won’t have a problem, y’know?

Then we went and had coffee and spent money on stuff like a PSP game and a picnic blanket ready for the impending family visit next week, and all was well with the world.

Amen.