::A Geek in Korea::

My wife was hanging out with her aunt, teaching how to make a special bead necklace. Since it’s somewhat repetitive, eye straining sort of work, she was there most of the afternoon. I was hanging out with the dog and doing my Internet-fu when I got a call. Would I be up for seeing a movie with the cousins? Of course I would.

We arranged to meet at the nearby theater, my wife bringing the teen cousins in tow with her. We agreed to see Ratatouille which wasn’t a hard thing to agree to see, as it’s about the only thing good in theaters that none of the people in the group had seen. Process of elimination. (Pixar movies used to be “event” sorts of things to me, but I can’t seem to care about Cars, at all. Need I remind you I hate driving and all things automotive?)

We arrived early, which was good. The movie was only in theaters a week in our city at the most, and it’s already disappeared off all the promotional material in the theater. I thought we’d wait for getting the tickets, but the cousins strolled in declaring they had already purchased the tickets…by phone.

Odd. I didn’t know phones could do that. They pulled out their mother’s phone and explained how they had logged into the movie theater’s website, and through a series of number transfers with the online service, billed the movie to their mother’s phone. It would appear as an item on her phone bill at the end of the month. Pretty cool.

We grabbed our popcorn, peanut butter oil squid, nachos, and drinks, the essentials for a good movie experience. We went down to the area to wait for the movie to begin, but it wasn’t been announced on the big board. When it was time to go in, we approached the ticket agent. She said that there was no movie scheduled at that time in the theater. On closer inspection, it seemed that the phone tickets were for a theater in Seoul, not Daejeon. Oops. Seems that one of the cousins had made a mistake with the booking!

They suggested we go to a computer as quickly as possible to cancel the tickets so we can get a refund. On the second floor of the theater, you can use coin Internet kiosks. We plunked a few bits of change into the machine and the kids surfed their way to the cancellation screen. According to the website, they couldn’t cancel the tickets if it’s 20 minutes before the movie is scheduled to begin.

We talked to the ticket agent, and they called the other theater for us. After a little bit of running around, we got someone to confirm they would cancel the movie, and got tickets for the next showing of the movie in the correct theater the old fashioned way, buying the tickets at the counter.

We had waited an hour to see the movie with all the ticket drama, so we had depleted the popcorn and squid supply drastically. I went and got refills on our drinks, and a second pack of squid for the feature film. The film was great, except for some idiotic kids that arrived five minutes into the film and REALLY wanted to talk about which seat was whose before they finally sat down.

I really liked the movie. It was a lot of fun. It wasn’t exactly quotable or exceptionally humorous, but it was a good family movie with a lot of charm and a good message for children. It’s exciting to see animated Paris, I can’t wait to finally end up going there. I won’t be happy to see any rats cooking my food though.

We waited through ALL the credits, but there was no set of “deleted scenes” or “outtakes” like in other Pixar films. I was disappointed. There was only one other group of people that waited through the lengthy credits to see if there would be something else to watch. The people in my party annoyed by waiting for the credits waiting to end, until I pointed out we waited much longer for the movie to start in the first place.

We took the cousins out for dinner, then sent them back home. It was a fun time out with the family.