Four Unique Places to Watch a Movie
From a forest-themed theater in Seoul to a corrugated metal and tarp cinema in Nairobi, these four unique spots around the world perfectly capture the magic of cinema.
Sure, you can stream a movie from the comfort of your couch, but nothing replaces the wondrous feeling of watching a film in the company of strangers. Here are four wacky and wonderful destinations to add to your movie-going bucket list.
Catch a Flick from the Forest Floor at Seoul’s Immersive New Theater
When I step into Cine & Forêt, a new forest-themed movie theater in eastern Seoul, I’m hit with grassy notes, some floral undertones — like I’ve entered a deep, dark wood and not a multiplex with concession stands outside. As a correspondent for the Hollywood Reporter, I spend a lot of time in theaters. But this is the first time I’ve smelled fresh magnolia when retrieving my ticket.
It’s among the latest additions to South Korea’s cinema scene, which is a vibrant and fervently patriotic one: In addition to boasting one of the world’s highest rates of moviegoing, it’s one of the few markets in the world where domestic films outperform Hollywood imports. This attachment to film started after the Korean War, when, though its citizens were some of the poorest in the world, the country’s first president helped kick-start the local film industry with tax exemptions. Soon, Korea was rolling out more than 100 titles per year.
Today, conglomerates spend big bucks on ritzy theaters featuring Tempur-Pedic reclining beds, three-course dinners, and even a giant, 55-square-meter screen that broke the Guinness World Record in 2017. Cine & Forêt claims an oxygen concentration level mimicking that found in an actual forest, and if you listen closely, you’ll hear leaves subtly brushing together.
I settle down in a beanbag chair on a sloped grass carpet, the ambient starry night sky above. Before the opening credits start, I feel, for a split second, like I might be taking a break from a moonlit hike in the Korean countryside. — Lee Hyo-Won
Pull Up to One of the Last Remaining Drive-Ins
The lady at the ticket booth always gives my dog a Milk-Bone biscuit when we arrive at the two-screen outdoor theater that shows blockbusters, rain or shine, in upstate New York, from the first buds of spring to November. The audience is a curious mix of military families from a nearby base, vacationers in their RVs, middle-aged motorcyclists, and dairy farmers. Families park their pickups backward on the grassy knolls for best viewing, the air smelling of insect repellent and concession stand nachos. Kids run loose with flashlights, battling black flies or mosquitoes, occasionally illuminating a wayward bat.
The first drive-in theater in America opened on June 6, 1933, and at the height of their popularity, in the 1950s, more than 4,000 operated around the country. Back when portable speaker units were hooked to the car window, my parents bundled my siblings and me into our footsie pajamas to watch first-run movies in our VW Beetle convertible — The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!, The Love Bug, Blackbeard’s Ghost. I developed a lifelong crush on actor Kurt Russell.
These days, a little more than 300 American drive-ins survive, usually in places where multiplexes are few and far between, like the remote U.S.-Canadian border town closest to my summer cottage. After cleaning my windshield and settling the dog in the back seat, I tune to the low-frequency radio station that broadcasts coming attraction trailers as twilight fades and the stars come out. Not all of them are on the screen. — Shane Mitchell
Witness DJ Mike Man Work His Movie Magic
On the streets of Mathare, one of the dense, sprawling, informal settlements around Nairobi, everyone knows the voice of DJ Mike Man. I’d seen his name splashed across pirated DVDs sold on the streets, but people in the know said I had to see him perform live, and so I meet him a few minutes before his noon show at Heshima Entertainment — a film hall patched together with corrugated metal sheets and tarp, big enough for 50 people packed shoulder to shoulder. Outside, locals get their hair done at salons and sidewalk vendors grill corn. Inside, for 15 shillings, patrons get much more than a two-hour escape from the searing equatorial sun and tough reality of their everydays.
Few films are officially subtitled or dubbed into Swahili, so since the days of film reel, small movie halls have been popping up in rural areas and in the slums, where not everyone owns a television or speaks fluent English. As another DJ told me, “I am like a teacher — I translate, and also teach.”
DJ Mike Man settles into an old office chair next to the flat-screen TV bolted into the front of the room and, like a sports commentator, begins a play-by-play translation of an English-language thriller, Prey, In Cold Blood. Like other DJs, he deftly renames characters common Kenyan names like Kamau and Onyango, calls any on-screen food ugali, and finds a way to bridge the cultural divide. One audience member occasionally punctuates his licks of a five-shilling orange ice pop to laugh or gasp, rapt and miles away from home. — Cynthia Leonor Garza
Watch “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” 44 Years and Counting
“Do we have any virgins in the audience tonight? Any virgins?” asked the sinewy man wearing red lipstick and thigh-high fishnet stockings. I was 13 years old. I didn’t know any better. I raised a hand and was instantly onstage in a cloud of glitter, encircled by singing, jazz-handsing wolves in sequined tuxedos and maid uniforms. I was hooked.
When Richard O’Brien’s campy sci-fi/comedy/horror/musical film The Rocky Horror Picture Show debuted in 1975, it was largely slammed by critics. But over the next 44 years, the B-movie parody earned a cult following, thanks in large part to international “shadow casts,” raucous midnight movie screenings where amateur performers dress up like characters and lip-synch lines.
For Max Mayhem, founder of shadow casts in L.A. and Berlin, the German audiences are “the most wild and crazy.” His summer shows, in an outdoor amphitheater, draw up to 2,000 spectators; they’ll throw props and leave 10-foot-tall mountains of toilet paper next to the theater exits.
Since losing my own “virginity” on that fateful night in 1994, I’ve seen the movie shadow-casted half a dozen times in half a dozen cities, and no matter where I am, there’s the same feeling of outcast-community bonding. For Mayhem, it’s even more acute. He was a homeless teenager when he first discovered the show. “You see Rocky and you’re like, Okay! I’m blending in with enough other freaks!” he says. “It gave me a family of people I could rely on.” — Ashlea Halpern
