A Trip to the Local "映画館"

So I went to the local movie theater with my host family last night. We saw Dreamgirls (English with Japanese subtitles). This was a very interesting experience for a few reasons...
1) Movie theaters in Japan are wicked expensive. a ticket costs between 20 and 30 dollars. If you go to the first or last show of a day, you get half off though, so we went late and it was only 10 bucks.
2) The tickets you get are assigned seats. This has its plus and minuses. If you got tickets to an opening night movie early, youd' get bitchin seats. BUT who deserves it more? The person who shows up two hours early or the person who buys them online fastest? Tricky, tricky.
3) I'd occasionally glance at the subtitles in Japanese and would be kind of weirded out at how different the translation was...then I realized that I was the only American in the whole theater, while some of the other people may have known English, I'm pretty sure I was only person who actually fully understood the movie.
4) It was the best sounding theater I'd ever been to in my entire life. It was kind of crazy.

My host-family pretty much had no idea what happened in that movie. The plot, in my mind, was pretty simple too. The movie was more about the music (which was pretty badass) than the plot. In the car ride home my host mom kept thinking that everyone in the movie was related. Eventually this problem was solved when I explained that "brother" doesn't always mean a male sibling. For those of you who have not seen the movie, it doesn't ruin anything to say that there's a lot of broken love relationships in it. My host fathers response to this translates to "American human relationships are very difficult to understand. I just liked music, and I really liked the sound of the drums." My host family wants to see "Babel" next, we'll see...

Countdown to the Naked Man Festival: 11 Days