It was a night to remember, by any standards. On impulse I had decided to take abandon work for the afternoon, nay, the rest of the day; I wandered about the food halls of Selfridges and tried checking movie times for V for Vendetta, which I really wanted to watch in a theatre but which the local Odeon was no longer showing. But this was London; somewhere in the city, there must be some theatre still showing it in an upper attic of a multiplex, Screen 12 or something like that, a little room with a screen the size of a bathtowel. I negotiated the complex menus of WAP on my mobile phone, which spat out a surprising result: "BFI Imax 21.00", with a phone number. I called the number, and a voice mumbled, "Booking." "For V for Vendetta this evening?" "Well, there's really no need to book," sounding only slightly more awake, "you've got the theatre to yourself. Just turn up twenty minutes before nine."
I made my way to the Imax theatre on the South Bank by tube. I've decided that I enjoy the London Underground when I don't really have to get anywhere in a hurry, which was the case. I emerged at Waterloo Station and negotiated the draughty tunnels from which I emerged at the doorstep of the great glass cylinder that is the London Imax Cinema. As promised, I was almost alone in the theatre, which was just about the opposite of the tiny room at which I thought I might be able to catch it. This was almost worth seeing it after everyone else: a DMR (digital re-mastering) of the film on the 70mm Imax format. The picture was crystal clear, and so large that I sometimes had to swivel my head from side to side to take in a scene, but I was enjoying myself too much to want to move. Natalie Portman is someone worth seeing in a closeup shot fifty feet high, and though her acting stuttered on occasion, this was the actress I remembered from The Diary of Anne Frank (on Broadway), not the ham of the Star Wars epics. The final scene, the destruction of the Houses of Parliament to the soundtrack of the 1812 Overture, was delivered in appropriately thunderous surround sound.
But perhaps the eeriest thing about the movie was emerging from the theatre and deciding to take a stroll across the river to catch a bus rather than brave the tube past midnight on a Friday; and, lo, the Houses of Parliament appeared before me, respondent, symbolic. It was an odd experience to watch this film in London because, despite being a Hollywood production, they got so many things right about British culture, down to the sans serif typefaces of the signages to the irony that the tube station they filmed at was the abandoned Aldwych Station, right by the offices of the BBC. As I boarded the bus I was more aware than usual of the CCTV systems that would cover every step of my journey home.
