It started out as a feeling, which then grew into a hope

Our Director writes:

Diary of a Mature Student: The Inbetween Hours

Let's kick off with a not-so-controversial statement: £11.30 feels like a ridiculous amount to have to pay to see a film.

It's popular to jump upon the anti-3D bandwagon. I don't really want to do that, but there are - obviously - reasons why people wield the hammers of discontent in the direction of the 3D film phenomenon.

Sure, it makes films a new and different experience - temporarily - but at the core of things, it feels oddly Barnum and Bailey, because, thanks to the way things are, cinema is, well, suffering. So why, you might ask, should we begrudge the Film Industry the chance to fight for its' continued existence?

Because, I would say, 3D conversion isn't fighting.

I feel old at the moment. This is just life, really, 'cause everyone feels this every now and then. But right now I feel how I must imagine my grandparents felt on the introduction of Television, or how my parents felt during the shift between eight-track and vinyl to cassettes, to CDs. And let's not be excluding minidiscs, because it ain't nice to exclude.

What it feels like, to myself and probably myself only - and considering nobody reads this blog anyway (I've just found the Stats button, and my all time high was a post on Doctor Who which garnered an impressive 15 pageviews) is that cinema is currently trying to make a shift analogous to the difference between audio cassettes and audio CDs.

For those of you too young to remember - and, unfortunately, I know you exist - cassettes, like their predecessors, were linear in function, i.e. you listened to the songs one, by one, by one, and you had to rewind or fast-forward in (approximately) real time to skip them or listen to them again. Suddenly - well, relatively suddenly - CDs come along, and you can skip from track to track and back and back with merry abandon, in nonlinear time.

Functionally, it's the same principle as the difference between video cassette and DVD - a film on video was linear, in that you had to rewind or fast forward without any particular degree of accuracy. They were bulky, and that was the biggest problem once DVDs came along - you could stop worrying about storage space and upgrade to something half the size or, if you got shot of the case, just the size of a CD.

Now, in theory, you don't have to buy a physical product at all, which is kind of mindblowing for a child of the 1980s.

Of course, we can reparse that last sentence with a reitalicisation, because now you don't have to buy a product at all, physical or not.

Here's a declaration; back in the day, I loved the idea of Napster. Friends used it, and they couldn't stop espousing the virtues of downloading what you wanted, when you wanted it, forever, for free. Napster had a window of approximately thirteen months before it was shut down, but it's not particularly hyperbolic to state that it had a revolutionary impact upon the "illegal transfer of intellectual property" or, to yourself and myself, music.

Now, I have a fairly confused moral stance on torrenting, which may make me unpopular with the current generation, because, basically, I don't do it.

This isn't necessarily because of the whole "illegal" part - although that's certainly a part of it, wacky square that I am - but more a choice, albeit one that's certainly not the popular way of doing things in this, our modern world.

For me, it comes down to the issue of access. Napster was revolutionary not because of the 'music for free' part but because of the sheer amount of things you could access. In the end, it was oddly fatiguing; those I knew who used it would end up running out of things to search for long before they'd accessed even a percent of what was there.

As a teenager, music meant listening to the limited choice of radio stations - in the hope they'd play something from the last year, and not the last forty - or going to that mythical place, the Record Shop, and actually having the money to buy something.

At my computer now, I can access Spotify - which will find anything they have in their server cloud, and stream it to me (albeit at the price of occasional advertising). Alternatively, people upload songs to Youtube so I can find anything I particularly want there as well. If I want to pay for it, I can download the MP3 via Spotify or Amazon or iTunes.

I know that if you're under, say, 25, none of this is news or even remotely novel to you, but that's the joy of youth, I guess. If you are young and reading this - two rarely co-inciding dynamics, I suspect - then try and imagine that mythical land before 2000 where there were only four, then five television channels, where the internet streamed at 56k down the phone line, and when information that wanted - as the hacker dictum goes - to be free, wasn't.

And now it is.

So here's the thing. Even though information - in the form of songs, books, films, whatever - is now free, it hasn't stopped the information being produced. Breaking down the dam hasn't stopped the river flowing - it just means that the average netizen is flooded with choices and methods and ways and means.

If I were part of the bricks-and-mortar information industry - the music companies, the publishing companies, the film industry as a whole - I would, obviously, be very worried about the money aspect.

Having been to the cinema today, it feels like - in the film industry, at least - that worry is starting to manifest itself in undignified ways.

I'll give you an analogy. I drive a reliable car. For two years, the service costs were reasonable, what you'd expect. The year the mechanic servicing my car decided to retire, the cost of servicing was three times the previous years. This would be understandable if anything more than previous years had been wrong, but it seemed, at the time, as if the mechanic was just charging as he liked because, hell, he wouldn't have to do it again, see me again, or care what I thought.

Today, at the cinema, I was five minutes late. This meant I only had to sit through thirty-five minutes of commercials.

Unfortunately, once the trailers and adverts were done, there was some of the most blatant shilling I can honestly say I have ever seen.

Let's talk about Paul.



I like Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, because of Shaun of the Dead and, to a slightly lesser extent, Hot Fuzz. (I liked Spaced for a time, too, and maybe even Hyperdrive.) I like watching Simon Pegg's career go from little fish in a tiny pond - i.e. the British film industry - to little fish in a bigger pond, to a growing fish - supporting roles in MI:3, Star Trek and, of all things, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It's nice to see homegrown talent doing well.

It's not nice to see homegrown talent desperately shilling for business.

Once the trailers had finished, but before the film, Pegg and Frost appeared. At first it was to give the whole "Thanks for actually coming to the cinema!" thing, which is getting a bit tedious in itself - it feels like you're being thanked for making the goddamn effort to drag yourself into town and concurrently being patronised for paying eleven! pounds! thirty! (plus £1 for the 3D glasses). In communicative terms, it doesn't make sense - once the audience have paid, there's no real need to thank them for doing so, you've already got them - and it's also odd to be, functionally, thanked for not being a pirate. 

So far, so usual - but then because they were willing to do their bit, the trailer for Paul followed, which is, technically, fair enough. 

After this, Pegg and Frost joke for a minute about how you should see their film, then try to sell you the Odeon Loyalty Card. 

Wait, what?

In effect, it was like paying to be advertised to, as if you have to put up with the adverts for the right - nay, the privilege - to see the film in the first place. 

This is where I can kind of understand the attraction of torrenting and downloading - you're not suffering a constancy of advertisement just to see what you've paid to see. 

Another example; I went out and bought Scott Pilgrim vs. The World on DVD last week, being a huge, nerdy SP fan. 

Before playing, there are six - skippable, thankfully - trailers on the DVD for not just films, but enticing you to buy the next generation of DVD player, to visit the Universal Studios park on the other side of the goddamn world - and how does that work, really? "Oh, honey, we've seen the film, now let's fly to LA! - before the film comes on. 

At least now the trailers are unskippable, for I recall a dark time when some DVDs came with unskippable adverts for things like Maltesers. 

So. Let's bring in the standard cliché; the Film Industry stands at a crossroads, right now. it's a cliché because it's true. 

On one hand you have crackdowns and ISPs getting stricter on downloads, prosecuting the users and shutting down the torrents, which is scary and, given the proliferation of technology, unrealistic. In some ways, it leads to a future where all downloading via legal ISPs will be monitored in realtime. 

On the other hand, you have the choice of finding a new way to entice people. Forget 3D, because yes, it's pretty, but it's also going to be a long time before it's perfect and the glasses don't induce a headache. 3D feels like an attempt to buy time and get the last generation of cinema-goers to retain their interest. Instead, you have to find a way to stop talking at people - mandatory advertising, high costs, new gimmicks - and actually establish some sort of dialogue to find out what your audience actually wants, because, frankly, it's not forty minutes of 3D commercials followed by shilling for a loyalty card that only exists because people over 25 still go to cinemas. 

In some respects, it's basically, to call back to my analogy earlier, time to find a new mechanic. 

Of course, I'm buggered if I know that would look like...