Paranoia and other pleasant things

The day when Green Ice came to town

Timi fell in love with Garfield movies. She knows how to play them, rewind to her favorite scenes, restart the cartoon when it’s over - over and over again. When she gets bored, she just selects another cartoon that we downloaded for her and plays it. And I’m thinking about how different it was for me.

As a kid, I grew up during commie Romania’s last decade. No food in stores, no warm water on tap except for 4 hours /day, 2 times/week, no driving with your car on Sunday if it was the wrong Sunday (one Sunday, the cars with plates that ended in odd numbers were allowed ; next week, the ones with even numbers; no, I’m not making this up). There was also a lot more reading, a lot less violence and poverty than now. The two sides of the coin, I guess.

But that’s not what I’ll tell you about today. My story is about a movie.

We had one cinema in Cugir, called Patria. It was a big concrete building, cold in the summer and freezing in the winter. Me and most of Cugir’s kids went there each Sunday morning for an hour or so of cartoons, laughing our asses off at the adventures of Omide, Oache and Scaparici:

and the Russian-speaking wolf that never got the rabbit but made all of us wonder what “nu zaietz pagadi!” meant (apparently, it can be translated as “I’ll get you, $^% rabbit!”)

Other than the cartoons, there were the movies. They were changed once per week and were mostly Romanian war / action movies, old cowboy flicks and Russian/ Chinese/ Czech/ East German socialist fodder. We went to the better Romanian films and to the cowboy stories we saw less than 3 times. Generally, there were very few titles from outside the Iron Curtain, and the vast majority of those were produced before 1960.

One day in 1986, however, when the program for the next month was put in the window, people started gathering in front of it. They looked excited and were talking among themselves. Soon the whole town knew: there was an AMERICAN ACTION MOVIE coming on. A NEW one. Starring OMAR SHARIF, which WE HAVE PREVIOUSLY HEARD OF. People were first in a state of excited disbelief, which quickly turned into anguish over getting or not getting a ticket. Suddenly, the director of the movie theater, the ticket sellers and the cashier were offered bribes, getting phone calls from way up , threatened with bad grades for their kids - all of this for the tickets. They sold out for the whole week on the first day - there were only an insignificant number of tickets left when they were actually put on sale.

On the first day of showing, you couldn’t drop a needle in front of the cinema. There were three times more people than the capacity of the cinema, all hoping to get inside, with or without a ticket. My dad put me on his shoulders, so that I could get air, and navigated with me and my mom inside slowly, protecting mom from the aggressive elbows with one hand while the other made way for us, paddling upwards a tumultuous river. We finally got inside, found our places and watched the movie in a theater so filled with people that women were on the verge of fainting from the lack of air towards the end.
For one and a half hour, we weren’t in the humid, cold room. Under a blinding sun we were chased by Omar Sharif, stealing emeralds, running through the Amazonian jungle, shooting guns, saving the damsel in distress. There was no word said during the film, people were sitting in trance, absorbing the movie through all pores instead of just watching it . When it was finished, nobody felt like exiting for a while, trying to make the images last a tad more.

I looked up the movie a few days ago. It was called Green Ice, and it doesn’t even have a page on the Wikipedia.

It looks now like a B-list clone of Indiana Jones. It was English, not American. It was also shot 5 years before ‘86. It starred Ryan “Love Story” O’Neal as the friggin’ action hero. But then again … who cares? The time when it was shown and the effect it had on that little town will forever sprinkle magic dust on it.

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