CINEMAS


LUV - Cinemas! Dark theatres of the imagination! Sensory deprivation caves for thrilling mind-pictures! You know what I like best about cinemas? The bigness. The way that, if someone walks across a room on an IMAX screen, the audience has to run from one end of the auditorium to the other just to watch them. The way that Katie Holmes - who it seems never wears a bra on a chilly day - has nipples that are bigger than my head.


Cinemas are wonderful. If they weren’t, no one would have gone to see The Return of the King which, with a running time of 203 minutes, is the natural enemy of the human bladder. They would have sat on their comfortable sofas, in front of their 42” HD plasma TVs with surround-sound, and waited for that shit to come out on DVD. But no. They took their BO and their loud whispers and their open-mouthed chewing and their chronic sinusitis and their fucking Gandalf hats to the cinema, and they sat in front of me.

Which is testament to the sense of occasion that cinemas still represent even though, thanks to some big-hearted, shaky-handed Russian pirate, you can now watch a poor-quality copy of a film the week it comes on on your phone. Fucking annoying but, you know, testament.


Also, you need to be strategic about cinema. You don’t go there to see any old thing. Does it have explosions? Watch it in the cinema. Is it French? Watch it on DVD. Pixar? Cinema. Dreamworks? DVD. Is Jason Statham in it? See it in the cinema. Anne Hathaway? DVD. Jake Gyllenhaal? Tricky. Does he have his muscles out? Cinema. Is he being sensitive and quirky? DVD. Vin Diesel? Probably skip it altogether.


When you go is key, too. I’ve not quite cracked this. Going to the cinema on the weekend is like going to the cinema on a commuter train - all sticky floors, disaffected staff, kicked chair-backs and playing elbow-jockey with arseholes on the armrests. Whereas 11am on a Tuesday at a suburban multiplex, say, is mutant-day-release central, and also when scary-looking men like to loudly describe every second of the film to their girlfriends who, it turns out, aren’t blind.


But I will find the ideal time. I will. I will sit unmolested in the darkness with a bucket of diet fizz and a ton of jelly sweets and watch someone else’s imagination unfold gloriously before me. And if I have to go to a 2am showing somewhere in Inverness during the summer solstice when the moon is in the seventh house or whatever, then so be it. So fucking be it.
- Robyn Wilder


HAT - Now, I’m not the greatest fan of pirated movies - not since the time I tried to watch a version of Elektra that was dubbed into Russian, subtitled into Spanish and had been recorded onto the world’s worst mobile phone by what I can only assume was a practising epileptic who happened to be riding a knackered goat up and down a cobbled hill at the time. In general, it’s fair to say that watching a pirated movie is much worse than going to the cinema.


But that’s it. Nothing else is worse than going to the cinema. Nothing else in the world. Having a nosebleed is better than going to the cinema. Falling down the stairs is better than going to the cinema. Catching a sexually transmitted disease from a zoo animal, then drinking a pint of someone else’s sick and then taking a naked tour of a wasp factory while a crying pensioner describes the last ten minutes of Requiem For a Dream to you in graphic detail is better than going to the cinema. The subtext of this paragraph is that I don’t really like going to the cinema very much.


It’s hard to know what the worst part of going to the cinema is. Maybe it’s forking over about a third of your annual salary just to get a ticket. Maybe it’s the unwritten social rule that makes you buy a bucket-sized container of liquid diabetes right before the film starts. Maybe it’s the way that all the seats will be ripped and covered in chewing gum, and the rest of the cinema will be full of disinterested 14-year-olds who alternate between shrieking abuse at their friends and texting ‘I JUST WELL SHRIEKED ABUSE AT KEVIN LOL’ at their friends, and you have to sit through half an hour of badly-targeted tourism adverts and a bunch of trailers that you’ve already seen six times online and another one of those poxy fucking Orange adverts before the film even begins, and then the film turns out to be a shitty waste of everyone’s precious time anyway. Maybe it’s that. Maybe that’s it.


Well I’ve had enough. No more cinemas for me, buster. Nuh-uh. From now on I’m staging my own productions of popular films in the comfort of my own house. In fact, next week I’m putting on a showing of Avatar. I say ‘putting on a screening’. In actual fact I’m paying an idiot five pounds to paint himself blue, dance around like a fanny for much longer than I want him to and then look sad when I kick his pot plant over. You’re all welcome to come along. Tickets are £35 each.
- Stuart Heritage