Around Aberdeen: Batman @ The Belmont

I was on the verge of going up to Shetland during the last weekend of March, and ended up delaying until Monday the first because of a really cool event that took place in Aberdeen on Sunday: a marathon viewing of The Dark Knight Trilogy. I enjoyed all three of Christopher Nolan's Batman films, and I loved the finale. As I was doing some errands during the last week of March, I happened to see a poster out of the corner of my eye, and decided that it was worth delaying my trip for.

Aberdeen - or, at least, the Aberdeen City Center ("Centre"), has three movie theaters - "cinemas" in that British vernacular. (It's always really amusing to see when American accented characters, like the M&M characters, saying "cinemas" when they should actually be saying "theaters".) The biggest is (probably?) the Cineworld at the Union Square mall, where I've gone for most of the movies I've seen in Aberdeen. Next is the Vue, which is where I went with CN Sister, CN Warden, and a couple of CN Warden's friends to see Les Misérables (against my better judgment!). Finally, there's the local semi-independent/art house (which is to say, recently purchased by Cineworld from what I hear) cinema, The Belmont Picture House, or "The Belmont" for short. It was The Belmont that hosted this event, and they nailed it. It was a fantastic way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

The staff were all dressed in costumes from the franchise, and I got my picture taken with a few of them. (If I'd been able to get a hold of a Tom Hardy-esque Bane mask, I would have participated in the costume contest for the attendees. I didn't start snapping pictures until right before the third movie started, so I didn't get my own pictures of several of the employees in costume, but The Belmont has a Facebook page, and they've got pictures of the whole staff here. They got pretty creative with their costuming, and I have to say that it was really impressive. Another highlight was that the employee playing Batman - who did a great job of co-hosting alongside the Joker - was spotted from Union Terrace Gardens, photographed having a cigarette behind the theater, and it was posted to Twitter with this caption:

Batman spotted nipping out the back for a fag
Another highlight was that CN Constable, who hasn't been mentioned yet but will be mentioned in the next Dramatis Personnae update, texted me right before the second film. He'd seen that I'd posted about the event on Facebook, and was tending bar down the street, so he invited me into the pub for a pint. I took him up on his offer during the second intermission, and discovered that a pub I'd walked past a number of times is actually a really cool little venue called The Tippling House. I intend to drag the other Strategists in there the next time we hold a pub crawl.

Back at The Belmont, they had a number of promotions, such as the aforementioned costume contest and a Batman-themed quiz in which the contestants won fabulous prizes, except for someone who won the booby prize - a copy of Batman and Robin! Everyone who made it through to the end received a little gift bag with some promotional materials (mainly just advertisements for future events at The Belmont, as well as a certificate congratulating participants in making it all the way through. You'd better believe that the certificate will make it back to the States with me as a souvenir of one of the coolest events I've attended during my time in Aberdeen.