4D Cinema – because sometimes three dimensions is simply not enough!

I don’t go to movies often. They are just too long and you just sit there and can’t move and you can’t stop it to take a wiz. And it costs too much anyway. So why don’t we all just stay home and watch some more Mad Men?
It’s a question that can only have one answer. Yes, we should just stay home.
And this newfangled 3D thing that’s supposed to save the film industry? Pltth. I went to a 3D movie when I was 12. There was one where a car was zipping around the cliffs of southern France and then braked suddenly on the edge of the aforementioned cliff… and I shit myself! I’m sorry but seeing a computer-generated tiger just doesn’t cut it for me.
But 4D? Well that’s just …. (insert compulsory dimension joke here)
After a bit of research here, where I was rather taken by the promise of “a high-powered bloody zombie that looks like a giant mutant foetus into a cathedral, where it races towards a crucifix the way a hungry dog runs after a flesh-covered bone. Jesus hangs motionless on a cross. The zombie reaches it, climbs up his body, and punches Jesus in the face.”
So clearly I had to go.
I asked the kid behind the counter for the movie with the zombie punching Jesus. He said he didn’t have it. He was probably just hiding it from his elderly Chinese mother, whose job it was hobble in front of us and show us the way to a table fulled with bright yellow 3D glasses so that we could engage in everyone’s life-long fantasy of dressing up like Devo.
For A$15 you get two ten-minutes movies. And in addition to the possibly imaginary zombie-Jesus movies, they also had a selection of dinosaur movies. A whole lot of rollercoaster themed movies. And a bunch of horror movies. We chose “Adventure In A Dinosaur Valley” and “Flying Through Icebergs”, the latter of which didn’t only involve icebergs but a strange sub-plot where you fly through tunnels getting squished by factory machinery. And then decided to go again the next day for “Blood Road” and the sequel “Blood Road 2”, which mostly involved us laughing at a badly CGI-ed zombie-like creature waving a sharp knife in our face. Whilst the bubble machine blew out a couple of bubbles. Because I know what special effect I most associate with having my life threatened by a raving lunatic.
So there was a bubble machine… but what else did they offer to make it “4D”?
Well the seats move around in a far more jolty manner than you might think appropriate for the action on the screen. And just above your head is a fire sprinkler for when you’re going under a waterfall, and one in front of you for when you are getting licked by a Diplodocus. And just a bit behind your head is another sprinkler blowing out soap suds… if you squint you can just make up that it is supposed to look like snow.
So it doesn’t really win any prizes for being hi-tech. It’s endearingly lo-tech. The movies aren’t particularly hi-tech either. I wouldn’t be surprised if they just downloaded them from the Internet. It’s the kind of home-spun futurism that you might expect from a family run business with an adorable old lady. You could say it’s kitschy, but the thing is, I don’t think this family would agree with you. I think they actually believe in the power of low budget 4D. And that’s an attitude that is worth supporting.

Rating: 8/10
Would I Do It Again: Yes

Challenge: Hillsong Easter Sunday Service or “Jesus is the Only One that can Unscramble a Scrambled Egg”

It’s not like I haven’t dabbled in Christianity before. I went to Anglican Church services as a child, although all the services were in community halls and recreation centres, with borrowed tables and plastic chairs. My first Sunday school was in a shed.

As an adult I have stayed out of Christian churches although they are curiously still in my life. The first flat I lived in when I moved out of home was across the road from a cute little Catholic church called St. Patrick’s, and even now the apartment I live in is next door to St. Brigid’s Cathedral, which is the second largest Catholic Church in Sydney. I popped in on Good Friday and was amazed to see Cardinal George Pell give an address in Italian.

I decided to go to a Hillsong Easter service today (Easter Sunday). Hillsong is a big evangelical conglomerate that normally has multiple services in locations all over Sydney but on Easter Sundays they only have one service at the Sydney Entertainment Centre. Going there was an overwhelming experience. There was a lot of Hillsong paraphernalia on the walls, and even on toilet doors. It felt like their venue even though they rarely use it in this way. The ushers and people working the mobile coffee carts were Hillsong people. There was a Hillsong crèche area. And boy they needed it because the place was heaving with people and not everyone could get a seat. The capacity of the venue is 13,250.

The point of their Sunday night services is to have a “loud celebration of Jesus” and yes, it would’ve seemed like a rock concert to someone who didn’t understand English. There was a lot of singing and people shouting and swaying. The lighting people did a great job. The songs were suitably uplifting and Dan says he saw someone crying during a song. I hated the songs, but was impressed when they paraded two camels, a sheep, a cow, an alpaca and two horses (!!) during one of them.

I don’t like using the word cult because perhaps that’s a bit mean, but that’s what it felt like most to me. Every second sentence seemed to have the word Jesus in it and curiously, there were only a handful of mentions of God. Is this what separates the older Christian denominations from these new evangelical ones? Hillsong’s messages are very simple. Basically they say – believe in Jesus and you will be saved and you never have to worry about your sins ever again and your life will be so much better. For a religion based on the Bible they appear to use very little of it in their teachings, preferring instead to spread their message through songs and occasionally very sleekly produced videos and little group performances.

The supposed highlight was the guest preacher from Germany called Reinhard Bonnke. The scrambled egg quote above is from him. He was full of strange metaphors like that. He kept talking about Jesus’s blood having the capacity to cleanse EVERYONE’S sins. He talked a bit about how the horizontal beam of the Cross is a minus sign representing humanity that is full of sin but Jesus came down from Heaven and died for us creating a vertical beam – a plus sign. He said that atheists were “intellectual vandals” that kept saying “God is dead”. His answer to that is, “Where is God’s body so you can bury him?” He was kind of entertaining in the way that people speaking metaphors in a second language can be, but not when he was trying to get everyone to buy either of his books.

How would I rate this experience? 5/10, if only to confirm my beliefs as an intellectual vandal. Would I do this again? No, feeling this uncomfortable should only be a one-time event.