Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

The force is not with me

I got home from work half an hour ago to find a parcel from my online DVD retailer of choice, containing - gasp! - my pre-ordered copy of... The Star Wars Trilogy.

Hands shaking (well, okay, at least slightly), I opened the Jiffy bag from Sendit, unwrapped the box inside, took the disc for A New Hope out of the box and popped it into my Mac.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the menus came up for Return of the Jedi. Odd, I thought, but played the movie anyway.

And yes. The disc which was silkscreened as A New Hope turned out to be Return of the Jedi. Empire does contain Empire, the special features disc is the special features disc, but inspecting the barcodes burned into the two other discs they're definitely the same - only one is mislabelled.

Either this is a rare one-off, or there are going to be one hell of a lot of unhappy campers as pre-ordered copies arrive over the next couple of days and the shops start selling'em on Tuesday.

Hollywood Will Eat Itself

While at a recently-opened multiplex cinema run by a well-known national chain some time ago, I was sitting in my seat waiting for the film to start. The scheduled start time passed without even a hint of the auditorium darkening and the irritating adverts beginning. A few more minutes passed, so i ambled to the door and asked if the film was going to start at some point. Yes, said the person on the door. The film will start at 5:30. Uh, but this is the 5:10 screening, I said. Yes, but the film itself will start at around 5:30. Yes, but there's NOTHING THERE AT ALL! Not even adverts! Someone needs to start the screening off, even if it's just to get the irritating adverts and annoying trailers out of the way!

After a bit of to-and-froing along these lines, another chap wandered up to see what all the fuss was about. This time he grasped the issue at hand and sent someone off to give the projection booth a kick, and while this was happening we had a little chat about the amount of adverts and trailers which are screened before the main film starts these days - usually at least 20 minutes at the start of the screening is taken up in this way.

The reason for this, I was informed, is that when a punter buys a ticket the full sale price of that ticket basically goes straight to the distributor to pay for the right to screen the movie. The full ticket price - so for every adult sitting in that cinema the distributor is getting, say, around six quid. Most of this goes straight on to the studio.

Where the cinema makes its money (and those giant multiplexes don't pay for themselves) is in retail, which explains why popcorn costs three quid and you need to take out a mortgage to buy a hot dog. Where they also make money is.. you guessed it.. trailer and advert reels. These are supplied as complete programmes which can simply be spliced onto the beginning of the main feature, ready-to-go packages of advertisements and excessively-long trailers for forthcoming films, and showing them is an important part of the cinema's revenue model. I have noticed that for some exceptionally popular films there sometimes isn't an advert reel, which is presumably explained by the greater retail income the cinema can generate through managing to squeeze in another couple of full-house screenings per day. (Incidentally, the centrally-produced nature of modern advert reels probably helps to explain why the number of cheesy "After the show, why not come to the Taj Mahal Indian Restaurant?" local adverts seems to have dropped enormously in favour of major brands.)

All of this contributes - as anyone who's been to a big cinema recently will know - to the essentially miserable experience of modern moviegoing. It's easy to lose yourself in the magic of cinema once the main feature starts (provided it doesn't suck, that is), but the entire process of going to the cinema seems to be deliberately designed to put the viewer in as bad a mood as possible by the time the film starts.

Firstly, there's the feeling of being reamed twice - once for the outlandish ticket prices and again if you want to even think about getting something to eat or drink. Then there's the stagger through always-identical, garishly-decorated corridors to find Screen 25 or whichever one it is. The seats are better than they used to be, that's for sure, but when you're in your seat and the lights dim it's not time for entertainment yet, ah no. It's time to pay your dues and help the cinema's income by sitting through a pile of adverts and trailers for films you don't want to see. Once the film actually starts you're usually sick and tired of the whole thing.

This "we get the whole of the pie" approach to divvying up ticket revenue helps to explain why every major blockbuster movie that comes out seems to break all-time box office records. The flipside of that, however, is that blockbuster movies are so expensive to make today that the kind of revenues the multiplex system can generate are necessary to keep making them. Firstly, you need a big star, who will need to be paid something that makes Premiership footballers look like they're on the breadline. With the recent news that Tom Cruise looks set to pocket up to $200 million (a 10% share of the profits plus a share of merchandising profits) for a forthcoming trilogy of The War Of The World, this obscene overpayment doesn't look likely to disappear in a hurry.

Secondly, you need goshwow special effects, and heaven help you if they're not state of the art. I, Robot, which caused little more than a blip in the British summer season, cost an estimated $105 million. This is an awful lot of money in anyone's books, although even Will Smith is a lot cheaper than Tom Cruise. What this leads to is a kind of film budget arms race, as costs escalate and ticket prices have to escalate to keep paying for the costs. And then there's the profits which have to be made..

It's also happening far too often that relatively small producers with relatively small budgets are coming out of nowhere and eating the big guys' lunch. They are doing this, quite simply, by actually paying attention to trivia such as plot, dialogue and the quality of the film itself rather than the goshwow factor. Without allowing for inflation, Four Weddings And A Funeral cost $6 million to make and grossed $244 million worldwide, a profit of - well, you work it out. Hollywood doesn't see things this way, though - the next blockbuster has to be bigger and better and blockbustier than the one before, so costs are going to keep rising and the experience of going to the cinema is going to keep getting more and more miserable as the money has to be screwed out of people to keep paying for these vast-budget behemoths.

In the end, it seems more or less inevitable that the whole system will collapse as the market economy takes effect - when tickets are too expensive people won't go to the cinema, when refreshments are too expensive people won't buy them (I'm at that stage already), and when that happens where will the money come from to pay for the films? What's the point in making gazillion-dollar blockbusters if nobody's willing to pay to see them any more?

The future, I conclude, has to be with the independents and with the low-budget filmmakers. The Cohn Brothers made Fargo for an estimated $7 million. The Shawshank Redemption, one of the greatest movies of our time, cost a relatively generous $25 million (and only just broke even in box office receipts). Spider-Man 2 cost $200 million. I think I know which of these three is the better movie, but if you're thinking "Ha, he's just being a movie snob and deriding Spider-Man 2 for being popular!", I hasten to add that the example of Four Weddings shows that a billion-dollar budget isn't necessary for an extremely popular box-office smash.

I rest my case. Something big has got to change in the culture of the cinema, or the cinema-going experience for the average viewer is just going to keep getting worse. I don't think the solution's in boycotting anyone or downloading movies off the Internet (let's face it, that's a crappy alternative to seeing them on the big screen). The solution is for people to try and send a message by choosing to see films based on quality rather than budget, in the hope of being able to reclaim the cinema as something for everyone, not just for those who can afford the ticket prices at their local multiplex.

More films than you can shake a stick at

As someone who buys too many DVDs, I decided that for the twin reasons of not having any shelf space left and wanting to spent at least some of my money on things other than recorded media and geek toys I'd give one of the online DVD rental places a whirl. These services are quite nifty - you pay a fixed amount each month and can then watch as many DVDs as you want. When you send one back, the next one in your rental queue is dispatched by return of post. The advantage from my point of view is that I always forget to take things back to the local Blockbuster and have to pay extra for the late returns. Oh, and their selection is limited, to say the least.

The one I chose was LOVEFiLM - cheesy name, but great service. As I watch too many films I got the Gold subscription, which lets me keep 4 discs at any one time for £19.99 per month, or just over the retail price of one film on DVD. The discs arrive in neat little mailers rather than in the original boxes - keep them as long as you want (or for as short a time as you want), then just drop them back in the mailer, seal it and drop in a postbox. (Psst - if you want a trial subscription, enter promotion code FR25 and my email address (mpk@uffish.net), and you'll get four weeks trial instead of the regular two. Oh, and I get a free month, but that's beside the point.)

The best thing is that you're freed from wondering whether renting or buying a particular disc would be worth the money or not - as the subscription's fixed anyway it doesn't make any difference, so you're at leisure to watch all kinds of stuff just because it looks faintly interesting. Over the last few days I've discovered that School Of Rock is tongue-in-cheek enough to be very much worth watching if you appreciate classic heavy rock (it's worth it for the scene in which the bemused classical guitar-playing kid is put through a crash course in metal riffs - Iron Man, Smoke On The Water and Highway To Hell). I've also discovered that Lost In Translation isn't as bad as I thought it would be, and is in fact a searing portrait of the ephemerality of life, the alienation of the individual in modern society and the difficulty of finding a place in which one is truly comfortable, or something. I've also been reminded that Citizen Kane is still one of history's great movies.

Most interestingly, though, I've discovered that Akira Kurosawa really is all that, and not just one of those names film buffs like to drop to demonstrate how knowledgable they are about world cinema. The Seven Samurai (true film buffs will put on a snotty voice and say "You mean Shichi-nin no samurai?" at this point) is a truly fantastic film. Yes, it lasts three hours and it's in Japanese with subtitles. But those three hours are paced so the film doesn't drag, the atmosphere and action sequences are quite fantastic, the character and plot development is second to none, and as a bonus it singlehandedly spawned the "group of people assembled to fix a problem" genre. This is mirrored most obviously in the American remake The Magnificent Seven, but echoes of Samurai can be seen as far afield as The A-Team (who have recently been cleared of all charges against them). It's a splendid film, and after seeing it I've put a few more of Kurosawa's films on my Lovefilm queue. Indeed, it has the rare distinction for a three-hour film of being remarkably difficult for me to tear myself away from to go to the shops to get something to eat - usually after an hour and a half or so I'm ready for a break, but this time I'd have been happy to dine on spaghetti hoops and toast (all there was in the cupboard) in order to keep going. Common sense fortunately prevailed, however.

In short, it's an excellent service and well worth a try if you rent or buy more than one or two films a month. Next up for me is a bunch of old Dr Who episodes, part of Simon Schama's Complete History Of Britain and that Spiderman movie everyone made such a fuss about a while back.

Fahrenheit 9/11, again

After having finally seen Bowling For Columbine last week I was looking forward more than I thought I would to seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 when it opened in the UK this weekend. It's being shown on a surprisingly large number of screens, so off I trooped to the Kingston Odeon this evening. The cinema was full but not packed (the small front block where I always try and sit was more or less empty) with a mixture of people who were probably, like me, there to see what all the fuss was about.

It's easy for Europeans to go into a film like this with that unpleasantly patronising "Ha! Let's see what those stupid Americans have been up to now!" attitude rather than with an open mind. People who do will be disappointed to find that this film does little to reinforce their prejudices about the USA in general. There are no mentions of freedom fries, SUVs or the Second Amendment - Moore's focus is entirely on the Bush Administration, its agenda and financial connections and how this contrasts with the human stories of the people whose lives they put on the line in the singleminded and obsessive pursuit of an invasion of Iraq at all costs.

Yes, Moore is an unashamedly political animal himself, but this film wasn't made by the BBC so doesn't have to be totally impartial. I'm not going to write a full review as I'm not very good at doing that anyway, and besides there are about a bazillion reviews out there already, but it's obvious that Moore does have an agenda and he never attempts to conceal this. Everyone knows that, so it shouldn't come as a surprise to people. Neither, however, is Moore anti-American, regardless of the willingness of the right to use that tag as many times as they can in the hope that it'll stick. Both F9/11 and Columbine portray Moore himself as loving his country but bemused and angry at what's happening to it rather than as some kind of raving America-hating obsessive.

Ultimately, anyone's opinion of this film is going to be at least partially determined by their political views. That said, I don't see how anyone with a gram of conscience in their body would be anything other than outraged at one grotesque contrast which really leaped out at me. On one side, America's corporate leaders holding a conference to gloat about how much money can be made from government contracts in Iraq. On the other side, mothers and fathers and siblings in the depressed towns of America which those same corporate leaders largely helped to destroy through the closure of local industries mourn their children, killed in Iraq after joining the armed forces as one of the only options available to them other than unemployment.

It's a good movie, in short. Go and see it and you'll have done more than a lot of the folk out there who seem to consider themselves qualified to comment on it. Do, however, keep an open and questioning mind - which is a good thing to have anyway, right?

And yes, just about the whole cinema applauded at the end.