Marius had instructed me on what to say and how much to proffer but my pronunciation failed me and the surly driver seemed to be getting increasingly frustrated. I managed to cough out something that sounded like "Slooshet" (Listen!), quickly dialed Marius and passed the phone to the driver. A few hundred 'Da's' later and we were on our way.
Now I'm no scholar of Russian language but even I can read the Russian word for "October" and where we ended up weren't it. That is, we weren't at the right Kino Teatr, not the Oktobr. But I got out of the cab anyway and loitered in front of the theater.
Even though 'Elizabeth' was also playing here, it wasn't playing in English -- which it was at the Octobr. I loitered. I considered the nearby Metro station...
I ambled to the underground/under-road passage...
Music vibrated from within so I descended to have a look. The streets here are often very wide, a result of good Soviet urban planning. So these underground passages are common. In this one, a band had set up kit like in any of a hundred subways.
People danced.
Eventually, Marius called and said he was standing in front of the theater. But then so was I and there definitely was no Marius. So I hopped in another cab and sped down the street to the Octobr.
Many of the theaters here have metal detectors. In spite of their insistence that I was concealing something, the guards let me in. The single auditorium reserved for English language films is ghettoed way in the back. You have to walk -- quite literally through the cafe' kitchen, through a hallway lined with employee lockers and mop pails, and finally into a long corridor off of which is the auditorium.
As for the movie, I said I wasn't going to review it here. And I won't. But here are the credits...
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