Pleinbioscoop

In the second half of August, the Museumplein, the large empty square between the Boijmans Art Museum and the Erasmus Medical Centre, is turned into an open air cinema. The 2013 Pleinbioscoop closed tonight and I decided to brave the relatively cool evening to check it out at last. Since I’d already seen tonight’s film earlier in the summer, I thought I could hardly be disappointed if the sound was bad, the picture quality poor, or the audience annoying… However, I was pleased to find that the audio was excellent, the screen huge and clear, and the audience fairly civilized (points off for smoking). In other words, it was nothing like the drive-in movie theaters that still existed in rural Pennsylvania when I went to live there years ago.

I snapped these photos with my iPod Touch before it got dark, so it looks like hardly anyone came, but the place was packed by nine.

The film? Oh Boy, shot in Berlin, with a great jazz sound track by The Major Minors. One one level, the plot describes 24 hours in the life of Niko Fischer; on another level it’s about getting a coffee in Berlin. In between, the film touches on several forms of modern malaise (lack of direction, eating disorders, bullying), teens dealing in drugs, the Nazis and Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver. All done with understated comic timing. Highly recommended.