Reasons to despair of modern life paired with reasons to rejoice over it:

Despair

1. Multiplex Cinemas. 

You've been waiting ages but finally Three men and a baby vs Predator has come to the big screen.  You pay the same amount for a ticket that would buy you a Stanley Kubrick collection on DVD and then you and your companion/s are swallowed into the belly of the dream beast.

In a murky auditorium that smells of sick you are held captive and forced to watch a succession of banal adverts, much as Alex in Clockwork orange is re-programmed, his eyes pinned open, his head fixed toward the screen.

As the latest Orange phones Cinema advert plays, you sit silently, baffled, surrounded by an hysterically laughing mass. You feel achingly alienated from the rest of humanity.

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Trailers for films fly by.  They look amazing. They aren't. An amazing trailer is the reason you came to see this film. It is rubbish.  Made solely because the studio thought they could milk money from you in the same way ants milk slave aphids.

Finally, the film starts.

You watch the film, accompanied by the sounds of two hundred people asking each other if that isn't whatsisface from that thing with the robot while they fiddle with sweet packets and chomp endlessly on pop-corn.

Popcorn.  In a cinema.  What half-wit came up with that.  And how come no-one has since questioned this half-wit's idea.  Was it the Queen?

Halfway through choking back the nourishment free swill of the film, you can no longer hold it back, you need the toilet. You bump across the row of people you mutter 'sorry' and 'excuse me'.  They wish you were dead. You come back and bump past them again, and find you have missed an essential plot twist, you annoy the people around you asking your friend what happened.  You find it hard to lose yourself in the immersive narrative because some kids are texting continuously throughout the film and the light from their phones is just in the range of your vision.

You ask them to stop and they stab you to death.

The assembled masses cheer through mouthfuls of popcorn.

Rejoice

You don't have to go to the cinema anymore to see a film, you don't even have to go to Blockbuster, that miserable box where couples in the mundane stages of their relationship try to decide between 'action' or 'romance'.  You can order films off the internet using hire sites like Lovefilm or Sofacinema.  You can even download them for free using torrent sites like the infamous Piratebay.  That could be illegal, and I wouldn't advocate it.  But there are plenty of legal torrents and this is how to get them.

Last update : 12-06-2009 11:08