The Colosseum

Friday night we went to The Colosseum cinema (http://www.oslokino.no/kinofakta/colosseum/) in Majorstuen to see ‘True Grit’.  I hadn’t gotten around to seeing it before leaving Dublin so was really looking forward to this.  The cinema experience unfortunately didn’t compare well to either the IFI (http://www.irishfilm.ie/) or the Lighthouse (http://www.lighthousecinema.ie/index.php), although it did have its own kind of magic…

We had booked our tickets in advance and arrived to a row of automated machines to pick them up.  Unfortunately, the machines were a bit slow to respond to the buttons that we were pressing, and it took a couple of tries, at least five minutes, and a bit of confusion in the queue behind us before our tickets came out.  I swear it was the machines, not us!!

The cinema was like a typical Dublin cinema.  The floor was sticky under our feet. It seemed like someone had deliberately poured litres of coke all over the place – maybe in an attempt to stop popcorn thieves? It also smelled of sugar and popcorn, and it seemed like everybody was carrying buckets of the stuff.  It had some ‘Great Deals’ for popcorn and soft drink combinations.  Clearly the Scandinavians have also succombed to this brash cultural phenomenon (A-hem ;)).

The building itself was quite interesting - sort of like a colosseum (hence the name I suppose) with lots of tunnels winding around between the screens.  Were the floors not so sticky one might have been tempted to explore! 

The screening room we were in was fantastic.  It was absolutely massive and must have had capacity for two hundred people.  It also had a great big screen and pretty good sound, which was not too badly affected by the international community of loud popcorn-munchers.

The film itself was great and probably worth the 100k (c. €13) ticket price. Hailee Steinfeld was amazing as Mattie Ross.  Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon were also good.