Love Cinema? Hate Piracy?

...but maybe hate overpriced, technically inept cinema chains too


Last week, before the film started at the Odeon cinema, we were treated to the Film Distributors' Association's one-minute public information film in which a run-down 'last cinema on earth' is shown with its customers gradually fading away. Apparently this dystopian future is not caused by zombie virus, nuclear apocalypse or global warming but by film piracy.


I do not condone film piracy, or indeed any form of theft. But that is not the debate here.


It is not film piracy that will stop me from returning to that cinema. The Odeon has lost my business due to extortionate pricing and being technically clueless. Perhaps someone could make a companion public information film in which a cinemagoer from ancient times (maybe the 1980s) falls through a portal and arrives in the Odeon in the year 2012. He'd be clamouring to get back before the minute was up.


From the top...

• Buying tickets from the food counter behind a long queue of people buying, er, food. To be fair, this is a minor improvement on making people queue outside to buy tickets.

• Ticket prices. When I can buy my own copy of a film for less than the price of two tickets, the visit to the cinema has to be particularly enticing. I'm not convinced the Odeon chain is taking this approach.

• Allocated seating without any staff or floor lighting. It is difficult to find row G in darkness. Some cinema chains have discrete lights on row letters. Not this cinema. At least mobile phone screens act as effective torches – glad I hadn't turned it off. But I could have ignored those points if it hadn't been for...

• Dark, grotty picture with sides of screen unused. Friends who had previously seen the same film in a better cinema agreed that it was too dark. Not just a bit too dark – much too dark. Apparently the Vue cinema managed a brighter and sharper 3D picture. (Yes, the film was in 3D but I do not wish to discuss the evils, pointlessness and general rubbishness of 3D here.)
  And, the squarer, not widescreen, picture suggested that we might have been watching an IMAX print – on a standard screen.
  
  All that work by a veritable army of skilled professionals – the overpriced cast and director, the writers, the artists who created the digital special effects, the model makers, the hair-stylists, the parking coordinators – ruined at the last moment by an inability to project it correctly. People have been projecting films for over a hundred years – how has the Odeon chain managed to lose the knowledge? If the director had seen his film made this ugly, he may well have come over all Russell Crowe.

• Bright floodlighting suddenly turned on 20 seconds into end credits. That was a bit surprising. It was the lighting equivalent of shouting at everyone to get out or you'll set the dogs on them.

At the very beginning of the film, I complained to a cinema employee about the lousy picture. I was polite. He was polite. He came in to the cinema and looked at the picture. He said something I couldn't catch into a walkie-talkie. He told me that he had notified whoever it was he was supposed to notify. And nothing changed.


If cinemas are to become history, I don't think this Odeon will be the last cinema on earth. I think it'll be one of the first to go.