The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex

by Mark Kermode

  ‘You can’t take your own water into the cinema. Only drinks purchased in the foyer can be taken into the cinema.’

  ‘Then we don’t want a drink.’

  ‘Yes we do! I want Coke!’

  ‘Regular, medium or …’

  ‘Regular.’

  ‘Diet or …’

  ‘Regular!’ I shouted again. This was getting out of hand; I was losing my grip. People around me were starting to look concerned and a tad irate. No wonder it was taking such a long time to sell tickets if people like me were holding up the line like this. Suddenly it was all becoming my fault. I had to get a grip and move on.

  ‘Just regular,’ I whispered. ‘Very, very regular, OK?’

  ‘Okey dokey,’ replied the attendant with a shrug, and he shuffled off to fill my bulging order of crap, leaving the ticket queue utterly unmanned, like a stationary line of traffic waiting at a red-light signal that has suddenly decided to go for a stroll.

  We all waited.

  We all waited some more.

  We all waited some more more.

  People behind me were starting to get antsy about missing the start of their programme in a manner which seemed indirectly to be pointing the finger of blame at me – in exactly the same way that I was indirectly pointing the finger of blame at the person standing in front of me before I became the person standing in front of me and felt my own finger of blame pointing at me from behind. If you see what I mean.

  After what seemed an eternity my nemesis returned, a medium popcorn in one hand, ‘regular’ Coke in the other, both spilling generously over the floor as he walked. He put them on the counter in front of him, tapped some numbers into the till, then looked up and let me have it.

  ‘Twenty-one pounds fifty.’

  ‘How much?!’

  ‘Twenty-one pounds fifty.’

  ‘For one-and-a-half tickets, a small Coke and a medium popcorn? You’ve got to be kidding!’

  He heaved a resigned sigh. Presumably he’d been here before.

  ‘Fourteen pounds sixty for the tickets, four pounds fifty for the popcorn, two pounds forty for the Coke.’

  I was stunned, although honestly I had no reason to be. A couple of hours earlier I had discovered that ordering one-and-a-half premium seats online would have cost a staggering £17.80 plus a booking charge of 75 pence per ticket, pushing the total price up to £19.30. It was this ‘WTF?’ online revelation that had persuaded me to be a cheapskate and opt for ‘standard’ seating after all; for some strange reason, £14.60 seemed like just a little bit more than a tenner while £19.30 sounded like 70 pence change from a score. But now, the additional purchase of a couple of moderately sized portions of crap (solid and liquid) had moved us into the ballpark of the handsomely attired pony, and I was rapidly turning into Arthur Daley. Where was Dennis Waterman when you needed him?

  The most likely answer was that he was round the back unloading huge cartons of unpopped corn, from which the cinema would ultimately make more profit than the films. As The Times pointed out in 2004, to cook up 145 grams of popcorn at home would cost you 4 pence for the vegetable oil, 19 pence for the popcorn, and 3 pence for the sugar. Chuck in 4 pence for the cost of the gas and the cardboard packaging, and the whole kit and caboodle comes to 30 pence – that’s a profit mark-up of well over 1,000 per cent when sold in the cinema foyer. No wonder the tickets themselves are becoming secondary.

  ‘Cash or credit card?’ asked the attendant, with the merest hint of malice.

  ‘What? Oh, credit card I suppose. Hang on – just assure me that there isn’t an extra charge for paying by card.’

  He smiled, said nothing, took the credit card payment, handed me the tickets, and suddenly we were neither friends nor foe.

  ‘Next.’

  I walked away feeling like I had been mugged, or violated, or defiled in some ill-defined yet essentially unspeakable manner. As I stumbled toward the screening area which housed umpteen small but separate cinemas, I caught sight of a clock which told me that it was now 2.59. Damn! The programme had started 19 minutes ago. Maybe we had missed the beginning of the film after all. We’d better leg it; the trailers could be all done and dusted by now. Zac could be working his magic.

  No such luck …

  We burst into the screening room just in time to see the usually loveable Martin Freeman being a bit embarrassing in yet another of those bloody awful anti-piracy adverts; you know, the ones in which actors who should know better wander round unconvincing movie sets wearing painfully casual ‘everyday’ clothes and thanking us poor schmucks for paying a small fortune in order to endure their self-congatulatory twaddle, thereby ensuring that we all ‘enjoy the real experience’ (as long as we’re not sitting in the standard economy seats) of cinema ‘as it’s meant to be seen’. I hate those adverts almost as much as I hate being frisked for recording devices before going into press screenings of movies which, it is implied, I am likely to record and then upload to the internet for my own extravagant profit and pleasure.

  For the record, if movie companies really wanted to stop people downloading illegal copies of their product, they would simply follow the example of the music industry and make that product available legally in the formats audiences want. Having spent years pursuing the creators of Napster through the courts, the music industry simply adopted the technology themselves, allowing them to generate revenue from music exchanged over the internet. CD sales may have taken a bashing, but money now pours in thanks to everything from online sales of albums to downloads of single tracks and royalties from sites like Spotify. Moreover, the production and distribution costs associated with online sales are a fraction of those incurred by pressing, packaging and shipping CDs. Look at the example of Radiohead; they made their album In Rainbows available online, where customers could pay whatever they liked to download it, and they still made a hefty profit in the process. If people want to go buy a pre-packaged album in a real-life shop (and, despite the march of technology, millions still do) then they can; if, on the other hand, they want to cherry-pick their favourite tracks from the internet and create their own personal portable jukebox, they can do that too. And although the record companies moaned about how the internet was going to strangle the industry (in the same way that they once complained that ‘home taping is killing music’ – ha ha ha) it soon became apparent that the people who downloaded music ended up buying more product than people who didn’t. Far from killing music, the legacy of piracy was to reinvigorate and redefine the manner in which music was distributed and consumed – through legitimate channels.

  In the case of movies, the business paradigm is eerily comparable: allow people to choose how they want to watch movies and then provide them with a service which makes them happy to pay. In an ideal world, movies would be issued day-and-date in theatrical, DVD/Blu-ray, and download or streamable formats. Customers who want the deluxe theatrical experience can pay to see the film projected on to a proper-sized screen in a public auditorium, while those who want to squint at it in bite-sized bits on their mobile phones can do just that. Everyone pays, everyone’s happy and, voilà, the pirates are promptly squeezed out of the marketplace. This is not rocket science; it is GCSE-level economics. Moreover, it means that those who actually want to watch a movie in the cinema are spared the annoyance of being surrounded by people who would rather be fiddling around with their mobile phones, and who would now have no need to trouble the theatrical auditorium.

  Several independent distribution companies in the UK have been experimenting with multi-format day-and-date releases for a couple of years now. On Boxing Day 2009, the low-budget British indie-horror flick Mum & Dad premiered simultaneously in cinemas, on DVD, and on download and TV pay-per-view. In the autumn of 2010, viewers of Mathieu Amalric’s On Tour (which got a very warm reception in Cannes) and Brian Welsh’s award-winning Brit-pic In Our Name were given the choice between watching the movie in their nearest available cinema or live-streaming it on their c
omputer. And in spring 2011, Ken Loach’s controversial Cannes-premiered Iraq War drama Route Irish opened in the UK as a simultaneous multi-platform release. By all accounts, the revenues accrued by these films not only matched but exceeded the profits predicted for more conventional forms of distribution. And (presumably) the pirates didn’t get a look in, because their services were not required.

  As always, the majors are bringing up the rear, with Warner and Fox prompting scandalous ‘End of Cinema as We Know It’ headlines in the UK in May 2011 with news of their proposed ‘on demand’ service which would make movies available for home-viewing two months after their theatrical release. This has prompted a furious response from the multiplex chains, who claim it will damage their takings – as indeed it might. But denting the attendance figures of those faceless warehouses that currently serve up the blandest of movies in the worst possible circumstances at extortionate prices can only benefit the kind of movie houses run by people who actually care about their punters and who strive for excellence in feature presentation. Why pay £8.50 to be treated like cattle in a fast-food multiplex that shows the film in the wrong ratio in a noisy auditorium when you can watch it at home on your TV for a fiver? Alternatively, why watch a film on a postage-stamp-sized screen on your mobile phone when you can see it in all its projected, widescreen glory in a well-run cinema whose patrons respect those around them and whose management thinks that the film deserves to be projected as the director intended? And if you think that such a place doesn’t exist then you’ve clearly never been to the Phoenix in East Finchley.

  Anyway, back to the multiplex and the harsh realities of Screen Seven, which, despite zombie boy’s computer-based protestations to the contrary, was far from full and was handsomely supplied with available last seats on the left (aisle). OK, so the auditorium was tiny, and the seating anywhere but the back two rows was way too close to the screen for anyone over the age of 12 who had grown used to reading the paper at arm’s length. Seats F8 and 9, which, you will remember, I had somehow failed to book online, were indeed available – as was a large section of the ‘premium’ seating, in which the very few other patrons had spread themselves out with glee. Had any of them paid extra for this enhanced vantage point? I certainly hoped not, as I guided my daughter to a premium left-hand aisle seat with nary an usher in sight to stop me. For a brief moment I felt a surging rush of victory; after all that nastiness in the foyer I had actually beaten the bastards. I had paid for a crap, cramped, and crucially ‘trapped’ mid-row standard seat, and now found myself ostentatiously stretching my legs out into the aisle and sinking into the plush opulence of a premium aisle seat that would allow me to watch the movie without straining or craning, or cramping my style. OK, so I had probably paid twice, what with all that online confusion and whatnot, and at some point in the not-too-distant future I would get a Barclaycard bill telling me that I had actually watched the movie from the vantage point of four different seats – a quadrophonic experience indeed. But sod it, for the moment I was where I wanted to be: in the cinema, in a good seat, and in good time to see the entire movie from beginning to end. Like Woody Allen in Annie Hall. Only with better hair.

  But still not a patch on Zac Efron’s hair …

  Have I told you how much I like Zac Efron? How much his screen presence reminds me of a better time, when movie stars learned their craft in vaudeville, earned their spurs tap dancing on stage, and then signed their lives away to movie studios who would put them on a treadmill and micromanage their careers into the grave, bizarrely creating some great works of art in the process? For me, Zac was cut from the same cloth as Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor – hard-working hoofers who put their heart and soul into entertaining their audience, and who tripped across the screen with an elegance and grace that was at once delightful and heartbreaking. Johnny Depp is the same: an anachronistic silent-movie star who seems to have been washed up on the shores of the talkies, a devotee of Buster Keaton who is not afraid to act with his body rather than just his eyes. Oh, don’t get me wrong, he’s absolutely rubbish in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (the worst Anthony Newley impression since David Bowie, even if he insists it’s meant to be Keith Richards) and ironically excruciating in Benny & Joon, in which he effectively plays Buster Keaton with toe-curling results. But take a look at his performance in Jim Jarmusch’s monochrome Western Dead Man and then tell me that Depp is not one of the greatest silent actors of his generation. I once interviewed Neil Young, who did the soundtrack to Dead Man, and he remembered telling Jarmusch that he had made a wonderful silent movie and it would be a shame to spoil it. He went on to record what was effectively a live musical accompaniment, playing his clanging, echoey guitar direct-to-picture as if he were an ad hoc accompanist performing right there in the theatrical auditorium. To this day it baffles me that Dead Man is not more highly regarded or widely seen by fans of Jarmusch, Young and Depp, who must surely amount to tens of millions. If only a tenth of those who shelled out for the Pirates abominations had paid to buy a ticket for Dead Man, then intelligent independent cinema would be in far better financial shape all round. Hey ho.

  As for Zac, while he’s unlikely to tread the offbeat indie path any time soon (although Me and Orson Welles was a step in the right direction), I love the fact that he’s trying to broaden his dramatic palette without alienating the tweenie fanbase who first made him a star, and without whose affections he wouldn’t be where he is today. Many modern stars spend hours whingeing about how hard it is to be shackled to a hyperactively hormonal young audience, but intriguingly they only tend to do so after enthusiastically courting and winning their affections in the first place; you don’t hear them bleating when no one knows them from a hole in the ground, or running around telling everybody how fabulous it is to be an utter failure – an anonymous waffle waiter rather than an overpaid teen idol. The honest truth is that today’s female teenage audiences have, in general, been pretty poorly served by a movie industry that seems to think acne-ridden boys are the only demographic worth targeting. If you’re a 13-year-old girl (and I understand very well that if you’re reading this book then you’re probably not) you have more right to complain about the parlous state of modern cinema than anyone else in the auditorium. Just as the producers of the drive-in horror movies of the fifties and sixties figured that the boys were going to be buying the tickets to the movies which made the girls seek refuge in the safety of their sweaty arms, so today’s studio heads still seem to believe that the viewing market is dominated by young men and hence all movies should be aimed at them, with an occasional ‘something for the ladies’ thrown in to give the appearance of balance. I once heard a cinema manager attempting to tell a potential ticket-buying customer that whilst Transformers was essentially a boys’ flick (big robots hitting each other – you know the drill) it would also appeal to girls because it had ‘some romance’, i.e. the sight of Megan Fox’s arse bending over the bonnet of a car and some jokes about Shia LaBeouf wanking. Apparently, this is what now passes for gender equality in tweenie cinema.

  Back to Zac and Charlie St. Cloud. The film started and almost immediately I was annoyed. Why? Not because the film wasn’t any good (which I already knew it was) but because none of us in the auditorium – whether in standard or premium seating – were seeing the whole picture, thanks to the kind of sloppy projection that has become symptomatic of the modern multiplex experience. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I am completely anal on the subject of correct screen ratios, and not only do I need to see a film from the very beginning to the very end, I also need to see the whole image as it was meant to be projected. And in this particular case, I doubt very much whether director Burr Steers had intended the uppermost part of his frame to be cut off. The problem was simple – the film wasn’t aligned correctly, and therefore the image was spilling over the top of the screen and on to the shabby masking which supposedly marked the upper border of the picture. The solution was equally simple – eit
her rack the picture down a few inches, or move the masking. Or change the lens, or the aperture, or something. Whatever – the projectionist would know what to do, and presumably they were about to do it.

  For various reasons, the first few moments of a movie are often accompanied by a degree of image correction as the projectionist looks out from the soundproofed box and realises that something’s not quite right up there on the screen. Occasionally the problem will be major: the film will be back to front or upside down, having been loaded into the projector the wrong way round, and everything has to be shut down for a few moments in order to reload. At other times the image will be the wrong shape or size, usually because the projector has the wrong lens attached, but again this can be rectified fairly swiftly once the problem has been noted. As for incorrect racking or alignment, this can be tweaked by a deft projectionist who, in an ideal world, will also have control of the black curtains and moveable borders that frame the screen. Ideally, such issues should be sorted out in advance, but as anyone who’s ever worked in a fast-turnaround cinema knows, this isn’t always possible. So it’s generally taken as read that the first few moments of a film may involve a degree of fiddling about which no one is going to complain.

  Or are they?

  Frankly, at £8.50 a ticket (£10 for premium, where the picture problems would be just the same) I figure they ought to have tested the damned thing in advance. But, hey, everyone makes mistakes, and it would only take a moment to fix.

  As soon as the projectionist looked at the screen they’d know it looked wrong.

  Which would be any moment now.

  Any moment now …

  They’d look out of their box and realise that the top of Zac’s head was missing …

  Or at least the top of his hair, which was just as bad …

  Worse, in fact …

  Any moment now …

  Just has to look …

  Look out of their box …