Rootop Cinema: Where no one yells "Down in front!" Because they're too drunk to care.

Rooftop Cinema Launch
Tuesday 17 December, 2009
Curtin House, Melbourne

Will I never learn? I can’t stress this enough (even to myself, it seems): outdoor cinemas are freezing.

Rooftop Cinema’s Creative Director Barrie Barton told an Age society snapper that their launches are notorious targets for the gods of ill weather: chill, heat, monsoons. He cheered that this year’s launch had the best conditions they’d ever experienced for an opening night.

I still shivered even when the sun was shining. I am a girl (in that women often experience the cold more acutely than men. I do not have breasts).

Of course, it was all my fault. I was wearing shorts and a thin jumper for the bright day and the devil’s curse of a week of scorchers previous.

Then came the plentiful drinks – Jameson whiskey stirred through multiple permutations, pots of imported beer, pints of Bulmer’s cider on the rocks (why is cider so popular? It just reminds me of barfing up Strongbow Whites as a teenager). As you’ll notice, all the drinks were served very cold, as most alcohol is. And to add to the agony, the carpaccio appetisers were scantily strewn on giant platters of shaved ice.

I didn’t spot any other foodstuffs, so baulked after the first sliver of refrigerated steak. It was less like fine dining and more like licking a frozen hotdog. But don’t listen to me, I’m a philistine and an unappreciative one at that. And a big girl. Your esteemed co-editor and my Rooftop meal ticket Mel was more partial to the morgue-like munchables. I’m only mentioning it because she gleefully shared the experience of placing the iced flesh on a slice of breadstick and performing the classic “Have you got the time?” accidental beer tip. And she even initially blamed the trickling liquid on someone else. Sheesh, you can’t take us Enthusiasts anywhere.

The film for the night was a secret, although we got it on good authority from idle chatter that it was Luc Besson’s The Big Blue. As I’m unfamiliar with ’80s European free-diving love-triangle romance biopics, this choice, along with the milling of incorrigible hipsters with adventurous haircuts and my organs shivering, made me start to suspect that tonight might be a complete bust.

Thankfully, we both settled under thick blankets in deckchairs. Problem one solved.  Then they started screening the most inadvertently hilarious film I’ve seen since Swept Away. Problem two solved. Which, in turn, drove away the fashionable freeloaders. Problem three solved. Excellent night.

Available real estate thick with boozers at Rooftop.

I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that Le Grand Bleu is as much of a clumsy romance set on the water as Swept Away. It doesn’t have the added bonus of a Mediterranean man slapping an obnoxious Madonna around (and the creepy wish-fulfilment subtext of Guy Richie as director). But it has Jean Reno as the most comically arrogant diving champion ever to snap Speedos across a Gallic bum. And dolphins. And the line “Science is a cruel mistress” delivered in all seriousness to a guileless Rosanna Arquette.

The Big Blue was the perfect hunk of stinky blue cheese to launch a very knowing program that will hit its target market (inner-city late-20s, early-30s) right between the peepers.

Over the next two and a half months they’ll screen quirky childhood fare (Ghostbusters, The Goonies, Labyrinth), slumber party standards (The Lost Boys, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), topical indulgences (January’s ‘Swayze Sundays’ with Point Break, Road House and Ghost, and an all-vampire week mid-December), film buff essentials (Taxi Driver, Dr Strangelove, Casablanca, A Clockwork Orange, Chinatown) and recent indie faves (Sunshine Cleaning, Adventureland¸ Anvil!).

There’s no doubt you’ll see a worthwhile film if you ever broach the stairs at Rooftop this season. So if you forget to wear long pants, you can be can be warmed by nostalgia or schadenfreude-a-licious laughs or classic cinema’s reflected genius. If all else fails, just buy a beer jacket.