No amount of carpet cleaner or air-freshener can quite disguise a dead smell in a cinema. By dead I mean the rat that dragged its sorry carcass into the ventilation system of the cinema and curled up to die where we could all smell, but no-one could find it.
The worried-looking cleaners, nonchalantly hovering at the doorway should have warned me.
The faint miasma of overcooked cabbage at the threshold should have set off alarm bells.
The way my forehead tightened once I reached my seat was my sinuses alerting me: been there and done that, no need to do this again.
Way back in the day, when I actually worked at a cinema one of the worst experiences ever was the day we couldn't find that stupid mouse, rat or whatever it actually was, that had literally died in one of the vents.
For days an almost overpowering smell of dead animal hung over the biggest cinema in the complex.
The poor projectionists spent every spare moment they had poking about in any and all outlets going into the cinema.
And though we snuck into screenings every half an hour to practically empty a bottle of air freshener, people still complained. Rightly so, because the cinema reeked. It honked. It stank. And it probably turned some people off the entire cinematic experience altogether.
Yet, when I and a couple of other Cape Town reviewers sat down earlier this week in a ponging Cape Town cinema, we only went as far as to make comments about "fighting the funky smell" because we were watching a film called Fighting.
Why didn't we complain? Why didn't we leave? And if we, who are a pretty finicky bunch didn't leave, what are regular folk who are paying good money doing?
If there's one thing local cinema audiences have never learned to do, it's complain, whether with our voices or feet. We take what comes our way, whether it's bad service, stale popcorn or a crappy movie selection, and we lump it.
The Durban International Film Festival, which opened on Wednesday night with the premier of Madoda Ncayiyana's IZulu Lami (My Secret Sky) will screen 72 feature films, most of which will never be screened locally on the big screen.
This is but a small indication of the possibilities out there when it comes to what's really available, not just what is offered to us through the regular channels.
While the festival has been going for 30 years now, it still just a Durban thing, and we don't have anything on the same scale anywhere else in the country.
So, the other side of the argument - do we pitch up when there is something worth watching and make a noise if it impresses us? That remains to be seen.
Starting on the local circuit Friday July 24:
Fighting: Terrence Howard turns Channing Tatum into a street fighter in director Dito Montiel's second film set in his hometown New York.
Montiel's first film was the autobiographical A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, which starred Robert Downey Jnr, Shia LaBoeuf and Diane Wiest.
Though made in 2006, it never released here. Tatum was in that film too, but here he has a bigger role, showing off not only his moves, but his charisma and acting chops.
In one week:
Deepa Mehta's Heaven on Earth is currently playing at the Durban International Film Festival, but will receive a cinematic release locally. Shot mostly with a hand-held camera, the film incorporates symbolism and mythology to tell a story that's universal, yet uniquely Indian at the same time.
One month:
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who co-starred with Channing Tatum in Stop-Loss persuaded Tatum to get dressed in a GI Joe suits for GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Riding on the wave created by Transformers, the film is an action sci-fi which promises great sfx, and hopefully, considering the skill of leads, a credible storyline too.
Some time later, though the way local distributors play, probably never:
Ponyo: Japanese master filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki is putting in a rare appearance Stateside for this year's Comic-Con currently running in San Diego. He is promoting his latest film, which is set under water. He's taken on Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid, made the main character a goldfish yearning to be human and put his own stamp on it, complete with ecological warning and fantastical organic structures, creatures and machinery.
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