Fantasia ROCKS!!!

EDIT: Jon tells me there are seats for 1000 people, so you might wanna double the awesomeness depicted by this entry.

I was sitting in this massive lecture hall/theatre with some 500 (or more!) other folks. Every single seat was taken, yes, every single seat, it was that packed. Imagine something like the Carelia Hall, except with a huge screen in the front of the hall, and you'll get some sort of idea what it was like.

This was all normal. However, I got the first taste of something a bit abnormal when one of the staff members came into the hall and all of a sudden everyone started applauding like mad, screaming, cheering, yelling and chanting 'Daniel! Daniel! Daniel! Daniel!' or something. I was like 'what thee...?'. It was then when I realized it's gonna be a little different from your average movie experience.

It was like everyone was soooooooo into it. When the movie started, everyone cheered and there was a massive round of applause. The movie was Ip Man 2, a Hong-Kong martial arts flick, which was probably only mediocre/good(ish) or so on its own merits, but the huge crowd in the theatre made it just incredibly awesome. Whenever something funny/weird/cool happened on screen, the whole crowd of 500+ people reacted to it. If someone had a stupidly bad line, there was a massive roar of laughter. If a bad guy attempted to pick a fight with the hero (awesome Donnie Yen btw) everyone just went 'ooooooooooo...' in a rising/falling tone as in 'ok you just messed with the wrong guy'. Whenever something spectacular happened during a fight scene, maybe a nice slow motion kick or something, everyone went 'ooooooh!' or 'aaaaah!'. When a famous actor (like Sammo Hung) appeared for the first time in the film, there was a massive round of applause and eveyrone was cheering and going wooooooo!

There was this particularly obnoxious and/or vicious British boxer beating up all the nice Chinese gentlemen, so after the UK brute had just finished off some more Chinese folks and given our hero a bit of a beating, someone in the audience just stood up and shouted 'KILL THE WHITE DEVIL!' and everyone totally cracked up and applauded and cheered. If you didn't know, white devil is the derogatory name Chinese folks often used to use for westerners who came to China to do... well... all kinds of business. And yeah, of course the British chap got his butt kicked, but instead of killing him (like the Brit had done to others) the gentle Chinese hero decided to spare his life and instead proceeded to give a nice little lecture on peace and understanding, during which the whole audience held their stomachs in laughter of course :D

Oh man was it awesome! Just an incredible experience. I can't believe how lucky you Montrealers are for having stuff like this every summer.