Saturday night found Chu, Maya and me leaving the house just a bit after 10:00 to head for Greenbelt. And our mission? To watch Mission Impossible 3. We were expecting to get into the 11:20pm show or if not, the 11:59 shows. Greenbelt 3 was showing MI3 in 4 out of 5 cinemas. Surely, we thought, we’d get into one that wasn’t full.
Well, we thought wrong. When we got there the ticket lady showed us on the screen that all the sureseats were already booked. However, there were a few reserved seats that could still open up 45 minutes before the start of the movie if the people who reserved them didn’t show up.
So we stayed at the counter waiting for just that when suddenly she announced that they were opening up another timeslot, just for us. Well not just us, but all the people like us who couldn’t get into the fully booked slots. Yey! Hurriedly we chose some good seats and paid for our tickets. Amazing how Tom Cruise can be such a hype.
Then since there was more than an hour to kill, we hung out in Fruzion, where Chu had ordered his dinner. We gals bought some shakes and chilled out on their comfy couch-type japanese style eating area.
I was glad that I had brought along Drew’s copy of The Rule of Four along with me, because now I had something to read. Earlier on, Chu had raised an eyebrow at me when I snagged the book off the coffee table and stashed it in my bag. After all, we were going to a movie, what was the book for? Rule number one: trust your intuition. Hehehe.
Maya was really sleepy and was afraid she’d fall asleep during the movie again, the way she did with the last two movies we watched. So I suggested getting some iced mocha at The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, since our tickets gave us stubs entitling us to a buy one take one deal. So we grabbed 4 iced mochas (for the price of two! yey!) downstairs right before entering the movie house.
Some stories start slow, then pick up momentum somewhere in the middle, like the book I was reading, The Rule of Four. But not MI3. It was fast-paced and action-packed from start to finish, and I doubt Maya would’ve been able to fall asleep even if she hadn’t slurped up coffee before watching.
If you love breathtaking stunts and special effects, I’d recommend you watch this movie in the cinema, where it will have more impact.
The story, however, is not as mind-boggling as Minority Report, also a Tom Cruise starrer which is one of my favorite movies of all time. Still, MI3 did not disappoint.
But then again I didn’t see the two prequels, so maybe the people who have seen them have something else to say. But if you ask me, it was a movie worth going home at 3am for.
Funny things that happened to us during the movie, though — when Chu and Maya went out for a bit to take a bladder break, they went into the wrong cinema upon coming back. Our cinema had the movie Aquamarine on the door because the 1:15 show was only a special accommodation, so they missed it. Only upon realizing that there were no empty seats in the wrong cinema did they realize their mistake, upon which they made a hasty retreat.
Later, when it was my turn to give in to nature’s call, I took the wrong alley and ended up in front of the men’s room. Since I couldn’t find the women’s room and I was in a hurry because I didn’t want to miss too much of the movie and there weren’t any men inside, I decided to take a risk and used the little men’s room. A good thing, too, because when I got back to the cinema I was just in time to watch Tom Cruise leap off a very tall building which culminated in one heck of a stunt.
A confession, though – that was my third time in the men’s room.
Of course I’m no pervert and it’s no hobby of mine, let’s just say that desperate times call for desperate measures.
The first time was an accident. We were having lunch in Tagaytay, Yen and I needed to relieve ourselves and entered what we thought was the ladies room. While I was inside the cubicle and she was in front of the mirror, Yen noticed the men’s urinals. Whoops.
The next time we were in Starbucks Baguio. There was a one-room comfort room for each gender. But the kid and her yaya using the women’s room were taking forever (I suspect the kid was taking more than just a leak), and since there were no men in line, I went into the other door. I’m not proud of it, and I don’t wanna do it again, but if I really have to, then I will.
Call it my own mission impossible.