L'enfer, C'est Les Autres … Again

Maria posted a splendid piece today, rightly bemoaning overheated bookshops and under-heated cinemas and giving some justifiable reasons why the modern cinematic experience sucks such huge and hairy wide-screen arse.

As I turn fifty this year there will probably be a plethora of posts about how much nicer things were back "in the good old days"; that golden age of Cold War, cold houses, outside toilets and creepy old men stalking schools with canes in their hands.

This is one of those.

Let's follow Maria and start with "going to the pictures".
Back in the olden days, my small town boasted a magnificent, art deco cinema called The Regal; a monstrous cavern of a place that doubled as a proper theatre, with an orchestra pit and full stage.
It also had toilet facilities stuck out at either side, accessed directly off the auditorium, with convenient fire-escape doors so that every gang of kids only had to send one paying kid in through the front doors while the rest waited for him to nip to the toilets as soon as the lights went down and to open the fire doors. We would then all hide in the cubicles and sneak in to the cinema two or three at a time during the ads before the first feature.
Each eternally sunny and wonderful Saturday afternoon during my youth, every parent in town would send their kids to The Regal for the matinee performance; it was the only opportunity grown-ups ever got to have sex.
And we loved it. A whole afternoon's worth of glorious, huge-screen entertainment for nine-pence (a little under 4 pence after decimalisation).
At tea time, the doors would burst open and the streets would be full of joyful, shrieking children armed with pretend swords or pretend guns, depending on whether we had seen Errol Flynn or John Wayne, re-enacting the past few hours of swash and buckle, and making their way home to their strangely smiling parents.
It was bliss.
Really!
Of course all kids walked (or ran) back then; right across town to school or the cinema or the surrounding fields with all of our mates. There were no monstrous four-wheel-drive behemoths blocking the streets, or pathetic "people-carriers" each containing one idiot parent and one small child who never gets exposed to the outside air.
Today's children are rapidly evolving into gross globs of fat who will soon lose the use of their legs due to being ferried every-fucking-where by over-protective, drooling imbecile parents. Most of them have already developed allergies, asthma and diabetes from lack of exposure to fresh air and to other kids' germs and are drowning in their own fat from a diet of deep-fried "recovered" gristle.
Fuck 'em. They deserve to die horribly and so they will.

I digress (as usual).
Back in the world of "the pictures", things suddenly went very wrong …
The first I knew of it was when we went to Norwich to the ABC cinema, only to find the big auditorium had disappeared and had been replaced by five tiny little boxes with paltry, home-movie-sized screens.
They called it a "multiplex".
Yeah, right.

Suddenly all the joy had been sucked out of the cinema.
We started going to the Odeon instead (The Regal had already died and been tragically resurrected - zombie fashion - as a bingo hall), but a year later, the Odeon too succumbed to being chopped into small, crappy pieces.
Then they closed the ABC altogether, re-opening the building as an amusement arcade (for fuck's sake)! The ABC was eventually replaced with what was promised to be a fabulous, custom built cinema "complex" but turned out - inevitably - to be a bunch of industrial tin-sheds with some neon lights on the front, each containing ever smaller screens, like a Russian doll, and all showing the same fucking "blockbusters" as everywhere else.

I rarely go to the pictures these days, except to Norwich's wonderful alternative cinemas at Cinema City and The Noverre, where I can sit amongst quiet, like-minded people and watch black and white movies or subtitled foreign films on a single big screen.
The "multiplex experience" these days involves paying an exorbitant amount of money, walking down a dingy corridor and into what would have (in the olden days) been called a private viewing room, which - as Maria points out - is invariably freezing; finding my shoes sticking to the filthy floor and being surrounded by noisy, inconsiderate dolts who bellow and shriek throughout the film and invariably include (always sitting really close to me) a pair of twats eating popcorn with their mouths open, making the most disgusting noise imaginable.

Popcorn …
Why?
What fucking idiot thought it would be a good idea to sell huge buckets of fat-covered crunchy stuff in a room where a film is being shown?
If it's not popcorn it's fucking crinkly wrappers.
These places have become the equivalent of the "anti-gym", where fat fucking retards congregate to slurp, crunch and loudly masticate their way through gallons of wet sugar and buckets of greasy cholesterol.
How the fuck am I supposed to hear the film? It sounds like feeding time at the hyena enclosure.

These days, if I want to watch a "blockbuster", I stay home with a DVD.
I have a big screen Mac, a comfy chair, a non-sticky floor, a phone with a mute on the ringer, a glass of scotch and most importantly of all, no fucking people.