Yangtze - The Old, The Cheesy and The Crazy

Do you know Yangtze Cineplex?

For the uninitiated, next to Outram MRT lies this building that has an ancient cinema in it. Apparently, only old men pay to watch the R21 movies there. Ever since my crazy friend, ZGZ (ZGZ refuses any chance of identification in this scandalous affair) heard about ZGZ's teacher-couple friends who were crazy enough to watch a movie there, we've been joking about watching a cheesy flick there.

Today we did it. It was pretty nerve-wrecking just finding our way through the array of massaging parlours there. When we got to the obscure box office, there were probably three shows to choose from - Temptress, Wildly Available and Lie With Me (shown at main stream cinemas too). From the screen shots, we were kinda scared looking at those from Temptress; a scantily clad lady who's dressed for SM. So we timidly settled for Wildly Available. Tickets were just at $6.50 each (is it the same elsewhere?) and the lady behind the counter even asked for our ICs! Bet no one our age appears there.

For the record, the movie was bad. Other than boobies, the movie was rather sexually tamed. Not that the movie was bad because there were no explicit sex scenes but the audio was bad, the shots were bad, the camera shook every now and then, the story line was one-dimensional, the cuts were sudden, the lighting was awful, the music was horribly cheesy and maybe because the film was old (ZGZ researched and the film was made in 1999!), the focus looked bad and the costume and make-up definitely did not look current. Z-grade. In that screening, there were maybe eight old men + two crazy people in their early 20s. I googled it and to my horror found one of the actresses to be Jane Kaczmarek, of Malcolm In The Middle fame!!!! No wonder I thought she looked familiar! (note to ZGZ: She's the wife in the movie!) Actually Jennifer Sommerfield (another credited actress) sounds vaguely familiar too.

The good thing is, it was quite an experience! That was one different side I saw of our little perfect country. And I told ZGZ that the entire building made a good feature story. I should have done that for my broadcast journalism class two years back. Smuggling the cameras, finding out the reason that keeps the old men returning for more of such movies, questioning the business trends for the massage parlours there... and more importantly, finding out about the cinema's glorious history during its heydays. I'm pretty sure the place has seen better times.

So for those of you who want to experience something different in Singapore, this is a must-try!

I need to stop taking crazy ZGZ seriously.

*IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: This social experience was intended as a reality check on the current status of Yangtze. Seriously.