The Artist & Cat has a whinge about cinemas

I went to see The Artist a few nights ago with my fiancé, we went to a cinema called The Watershed in Bristol, which I had never been to before.

I typically really dislike going to the cinema. I talked to Owain about it on the ride home in the car. Your usual cinema, the likes of Vue, Cineworld and Showcase, are all really really terrible. They're just money pits that the general public keep voluntarily chucking their money into, for reasons I can't understand.

The cinema has always been a place that people go to as a treat. That, I'm on board with. I can see how going to the cinema is a treat, a luxury. Or, maybe I'm confusing it with the cinema of twenty, maybe thirty or forty years ago. A time when people actually treated themselves, because they had far less money than we do today. I can see how to someone with little money, the cinema is and has been a great way to spend your hard earned cash. But recently, in the last ten or so years (maybe longer) the cinema has been taking advantage of people's 'hard earned cash'. Have you noticed how there's new films out practically every single day? And have you noticed how they all seem to follow the same basic plots? They're churning out new cinematic bile all the time.

There's an unhealthy amount of crap films being shown these days. Films that claim to be "rom coms" but are about as romantic as a hernia and as funny as one too. They're actually using the same genre name as Bridget Jones. Now, you may not be a fan of Bridget Jones, but I for one am. Bridget Jones is actually funny, and has actual moments where it dabbles in the romantic. I can understand why you may not like it, but if you dislike Bridget Jones, then quite honestly, I don't think you'll like many 'rom coms', as it's arguably one of the best.

Side note: I watched Annie Hall the other day on DVD, supposedly the first 'rom com' ever made. It's a Woody Allen film, so I approached it with hesitation, I'm not a Woody Allen fan. It wasn't as good as Bridget Jones.

Anyway, my point is that the cinema see's a film do well, then copies it as many times as it can until people get bored. And that isn't entertainment, unless you're really really reeeaallly thick, or you have an unhealthy interest in rom coms, or, more likely, Hugh Grant. If that is the case, there's people you can talk to, you shouldn't go through that on your own.

It's the same with other genres. Action, Comedy, Action, Horror. They just seem to be mass producing vast amounts of crap for the public to be entertained by, and in turn, mass producing a crap load of money for themselves.

I've had a problem with main stream cinema for a while now. I discovered independent films, and I fell in love. Independent films are typically low budget films, starring people you haven't heard of, with fantastic sound tracks. Why are they so good? Well, think about it, if you've received funding somehow to shoot your own (and probably first) film, you are not going to mess it up. This may be the only chance you get to make a film, so you're going to be a perfectionist about every single aspect of it. And it shows, the independent films that I've seen are far better than the majority of absolute drivel that I see in the cinema. I say majority, because I'm a fan of Quentin Tarentino's, and his films get shown in main stream cinemas, and there's a few other's that I loved too, like Submarine by Richard Ayoade (2011). But you can see the love and attention that has gone into independent films, they're just well made and beautifully shot and interesting.

It's probably a personal thing. I'm sure there's people who can't stand independent films, and adore the copy-cat, loud, star studded, uninteresting stuff that you can pay obscene amounts of money to watch at mainstream cinemas. And that's fine.

BACK TO MY ORIGINAL POINT

I saw The Artist at The Watershed in Bristol. It was fantastic. I've never watched a silent film before, I was worried that it might be too silent (silly thing to think, I know). But there was a fantastic soundtrack playing, depicting tensions and emotions and hinting at actual noises corresponding to the scenes. I'd very much like to see more modern silent films.

I found this image off google, this is The Watershed.

It was funny, but not too funny. It was sophisticated. It was well shot. Some of the camera angles and shots were fantastic. Maybe you notice these things more when it's almost entirely a visual experience, or maybe they made a special effort to make it more visually engaging. Either way, I remember thinking to myself on several occasions when watching it "wow, that's a really great shot".

I also noticed afterwards how fast paced it was. When you can't rely on people talking, it's amazing how quickly you're able to get an entire conversation between two people out the way in a matter of seconds. You don't want two people miming at each other for minutes on end, do you? I hadn't thought about it when watching it, but walking back to the car and talking about it with Owain, we realised how much plot the film had covered. Loads of stuff happened. But it didn't seem rushed, and it wasn't. It was perfect.

It also has some absolutely fantastic typography from the era in lots of scenes, which I happily admired.



I really advise people to go see it. It wasn't showing at any mainstream cinemas around my area, I'm not sure why, but that's good because I got to go to the Watershed, which I discovered is an absolute gem of a cinema. Small, cosy, no ill-mannered people sitting at the back talking to their mates on their phones, and you're allowed to bring in your own sweets, because they don't sell any (fyi, eating sweets during The Artist became a bit of a game for me, I called it; "how quietly can I get the malteser out of the bag and then eat it?"). Brilliant! And it cost about the same as going to one of the big name cinemas, maybe slightly less, I can't really remember.