Bring Down the Curtain on This One

The Motherland naturally fixated on England vs. Sweden on Tuesday night, so it seemed appealing to see it live at the neighborhood cinema, which shows all 64 World Cup matches.

If you’d like to mar your notion of the cinema as escapist haven, then by all means go to the cinema for a live sporting event.

You know how sometimes you’re at a stadium and you’ve bought pricey tickets and you’re all anticipatory but you have to spend the whole nine innings or four quarters listening to some lout with an inflated concept of his own insight on the proceedings?

Well, next time, give thanks. At least you’re in a stadium, with open air.

A cinema has walls.

Close walls.

Those English stadium songs, with their familiar tunes and cleverly rewritten lyrics, have provided some of my finer sporting goose bumps. In an enclosed area, however, they become grating enough that you can start wishing Frank Lampard would stop making plays so they’d stop singing about Frank Lampard. The claustrophobia of a packed cinema reveals that all those fans who croon so movingly in stadiums cannot necessarily, you know, sing.

Not only that, but next to the concession area, the Odeon Covent Garden cinema contains a little area you might best characterize as a pub, seeing as how it has a beer tap, a bartender and a crowd. England vs. Sweden definitely had the highest collective blood-alcohol level of any cinema audience I’ve joined, and young adults continually brought in trays of plastic beer glasses so the place started to feel like Friday night at Kappa Sig.

Further, I haven’t seen a halftime at a cinema since my mother dragged me at 13 to “Gone With the Wind,” where a beer might’ve really helped.

There are pluses.

The idea that audiences can bark occasional criticisms at the screen might be advisable for movies. At one point in a 2-2 draw that wound up helping both teams, a nervous fan screamed at England’s David Beckham, “Stay wide, Beckham!” It made you think it wouldn’t hurt now and then if somebody at a movie could yell, “You’re not convincing, Cruise!”

There’s the glory of High Definition: The colors of the World Cup seemed more vivid. You could watch Wayne Rooney writ large on a long-ball play in the first half, a big-screen view of sheer genius. The Swedish England Coach Sven-Goran Eriksson, who always looks so gloomy, looked gloomy but bigger.

It’s nice, in a cinema, to stand for a national anthem, “God Save The Queen” (not the Sex Pistols’ version).

And there’s a certain cinema etiquette, so even when Sweden scored in the 90th -- 90th! -- minute, nobody threw cups at the screen, even if that might’ve owed to the fact England needed only a draw to get Ecuador, and not host Germany, in the round of 16.

Had that goal made the score 2-1, Sweden, who knows, the idea of the cinema as escapist haven might have been destroyed forever.