Premiere Time!

But first, I’d just like to share the fact that I am now 3/8 done with my semester here. That is, work wise. 150% of the 400% of my grade (100% for each class, of course) has been turned in. That may not seem like much. But consider, if you will, that that means that I am completely done with one class: Ancient Egypt in London. I can’t say very much (not too much, Mom and Dad) about the quality of my final paper, but needless to say, there is nothing more that is graded for that class. Still two weeks of lectures, which is sort of odd, but I can pay even less attention than before, which is awesome. More time to focus on the three remaining papers I have to do before the 27th.

So, there is something else that tends to follow me wherever I go, although with slightly less regularity (that is, it has now happened twice). And that something else is Pete Postlethwaite. Besides having a last name which is incredibly satisfying to say, he is also a very good actor. He’s one of those guys that everyone recognizes but no one can put a finger on what movies he’s been in (Brassed Off and James and the Giant Peach are two, for starters. In any case, he’s awesome. And I saw him in a play in New Zealand, starting at 8 when we got into Wellington at 730, having rushed to the theatre to find no available seats but oh wait look! Someone cancelled! Here you go for free! Um so that was pretty cool. The play was Scaramouche Jones about a kid who grows up in a gypsy carnival and then goes off to lead his own life. Mostly storytelling, kinda, but it was a one-man show of Pete Postlethwaite, and very cool.

But, that wasn’t yesterday. Yesterday was the premiere of a movie called The Age of Stupid (which, consistently, every time I type or even think about it I first think of “I’m with stupid”), which is a semi-fiction movie about climate change. I say semi-fiction because it’s from teh point of view of the future. Postlethwaite is an archivist who is trying to figure out why we didn’t save ourselves when we had the chance. But it’s primarily footage from now, documentaries, interviews, news, etc. It sounds pretty awesome, although I have not yet seen it (it comes into general release on the 20th).

The premiere itself was cool. The screening was held in a solar-powered cinema tent, and everything there (literally everything; they’re doing an audit) was either recycled, carbon-neutral, renewable, etc., etc. There were coffee bags acting as fences, a green carpet (which may have been recycled astroturf, I’m not sure) and lots of bikes and electric cars. Indeed, all of the celebrities arrived either on bikes or cars powered by biodiesel (from fish and chip shops) or electricity.

Celebrities? Like whom? You might ask. Well, one, of course, was Pete Postlethwaite, who arrived on bike, fairly unnanounced. He was circling around on our side of the fence before he went on through. He had a beard this time, which is new.

Then there was this guy who came in a really nice looking electric Lotus. A lot of people were saying he was Ben Kingsley, but personally I don’t think he was. Still, maybe I can get some more opinions on this…

Finally, there was Gillian Anderson. Who I know actually was herself (corroborated by the fact that someone behind me said something similar to “Ohhhh, she’s the one that was on, you know, X-Factor!” Which is the British version of American Idol. Close, but no cigar) Sadly, I didn’t get a good picture because my camera was being finicky.

And that was about it. There were a bunch of other (weird-looking) people who were clearly some sort of celebrity, but since I didn’t know them I didn’t really care… I wandered back after the screening actually started, and meant to watch the live streaming video of the question and answer session afterwards, but totally forgot. Incidentally, this is hopefully going to be the largest premiere ever, since it was put on simultaneously at 64 different theatres. 15000 person capacity all in all. Pretty impressive. Hopefully it’ll have some sort of impact when it gets into general release. Like a new Inconvenient Truth… except more effective.

Finally, when I was walking back, I saw a group of kids, one of whom had a faded fake-antique Superman shirt, and another a faded fake-antique Batman shirt. I thought this was funny.