LET'S MAKE CINEMAS INTO ABSOLUTE CESSPITS OF IDIOCY

The other day Variety published some sort of opinion piece so howling-at-the-moon boneheaded that one can barely conceive it the work of a sentient lifeform, let alone an actual functioning human, let alone an actual contributor to the most famous trade paper in the "entertainment" world. Headed Four Radical Ideas For Bringing New Audiences To Movie Theaters [sic], it could scarcely be more anti-cinema if it was advocating every multiplex be bulldozed and turned into poison gas factories.

We can dispense fairly quickly with Bright Idea #4 on the list: increased accessibility, because it's not an idea. Really, it's hardly a radical suggestion that the wheelchair-bound, hard of hearing should be welcome in cinemas. Many cinemas do this anyway. Subtitled and autistic-friendly screenings are part of the schedules: possibly not enough but they are regular inclusions. Audio descriptions through headsets are common and most auditoria have some spaces for wheelchairs and lifts to upper levels. (Indeed, planning regulations probably insist on it.)

Bright Idea #3 is also neither radical nor unknown: sports, theatre, concerts and retro anniversary screenings happen all the time. Indeed the Vue chain's pre-film ident emphasised that this wasn't just a cinema: it was a rock festival, a football stadium, the Old Vic, the Royal Opera House, even the BBC for a season finale. Maybe things are different in the US, but we mere plebs in the UK have had ballet and theatre presentations going on for years. Idea #3 also moots the possibility of singalong screenings: again, this is nothing new over here. The Prince Charles has regularly run audience participation shows of Rocky Horror and The Sound Of Music: people dress up and have a great time. But it should be restricted to special interactive screenings and should not be acceptable outside of them. Assuming for the sake of argument that I had gone to see Wicked (in reality, there is no chance): I've paid to hear Cynthia Arivo and Ariane Grande, not a couple of yawpers on a night out who couldn't carry a tune in a shopping trolley and couldn't hit a note with an assault rifle.

Bright Idea #2, however, is where I reach for my pitchfork: what's wrong with letting people use their phones in the cinema? And the answer is actually nothing, if you're the airhead dunce who cannot put his/her shiny toy away for two hours: who cannot engage with the film they've just overpaid to see without periodically scrolling through any number of brightly lit apps full of flashing yellow emojis. But the answer is absolutely everything if you're the person sat behind them trying to watch the film while a series of moronic tiktoks and Facebook reels play smack in your field of vision. Now there may be an argument for special screenings for iPhone addicts, but it's a terrible argument. Honestly this kind of aberrant behaviour should not be normalised.

And Bright Idea #1? Selling weed. Really? That's just beyond stupid. If only for the fact that the whole place is going to stink of it before the next show, unless you're dedicating Screen 12 solely to pot-assisted screenings. I've been in more than one cinema where people were high on something or other, I've been in cinemas where people have been absolutely hammered to vomiting point. You thought someone two rows away with a tray of super spicy taco things was annoying?

So two of these things already happen - it's arguable whether they happen enough but certainly they're neither new nor radical ideas. The other two are imbecilic that should in any civilised country have earned the writer the mother of all slaps: they pander to idiots' sense of entitlement and encourage them to behave in public as though they're in their own front room/basement. I love my cinema experience but drugs and iPads are not the way to enhance it. 

If you want better ideas, more reasonable ideas, and ideas that quite clearly haven't been tried yet, here are a few.

[1] No Phones.

It's not enough to appeal to morons' sense of decency. They haven't got any. Throw them physically out of the building. No refunds. No apologies. Call them a jerk or a dumbass while you do it. Anything other than zero tolerance is just letting it happen. Hell, build the cinemas like some kind of Faraday cage so the wifi doesn't work in there. All that is required is the will to do it. The fact is, if you really are incapable of switching it off for two hours then there's something psychologically wrong with you and you need medical help. Or you're just an ignorant yob and you need a serious kicking. Either way, the cinema should not be accepting this kind of conduct and the people who actually want to watch the film itself certainly shouldn't be accepting it.

[2] Improve The Actual Viewing Experience.

Turn the house lights out. Not down a bit, but Out. There's enough reflected light off the screen for you to find your way to the aisle if you need it. I've been in cinemas where you could read the Financial Times by the ceiling lights alone. If there has to be some kind of illumination for some ridiculous health and safety nonsense, then put up a shield so none of it spills onto the screen, washing out the image. And while we're at it: turn the brightness up a bit. If you've watched any recent horror movie in a cinema recently, you'll know that the frequent scenes of semi-darkness are reduced to an unfathomable grey murk where you have no idea what you're supposed to be looking at: is it a demon? Is it a nun? Is it former Environment Secretary John Selwyn Gummer? Fix your gauging so the image fits the screen width (or height). That was the norm for decades pre-digital. And wash the screens once in a while to get rid of the thrown Coke stains. Get the projectors focussed properly. Again, none of this is massively difficult.

[3] Stop Spending Stupid Money

This is more for studios: stop wasting so much money on these things. A quick google suggests that the new Avengers movie is going to cost around four hundred and fifty million dollars; the new Captain America cost around $350 million. Last year's Red One, which was on Prime just weeks later, cost a quarter of a billion dollars; the new Avatar movie is similarly expensive. The new Mission Impossible comes in at $400 million, while Netflix's recent The Electric State apparently cost a mere $275 million and went straight to streaming. It's obscene: even if they're good, even if they're masterpieces (and we all know they're not and they were never going to be), these are insane amounts of money to be spending on them. The trouble is that they become such massive event movies that everything else stops: no other movie gets a chance because these behemoths need all the available screening slots to even begin to earn its budget back, meaning there's less choice to the filmgoer: Batman and Jurassic are hogging all the screens so there's no room for anything else. Frankly I don't understand how the studios can stay in business sustaining such absurd costs and losses. I'd really like a few more of these mammoths to completely tank and force producers to slash budgets to a more rational level.

[4] Make Better Movies

Or at least stop making absolutely terrible ones. Make more interesting, medium-budget films: a variety of genres and scales. The mid-range thrillers, comedies and action movies are all but dead now. Stop with reboots and sequels and flogging "intellectual" properties to death, stop making movies for 80s nostalgics and start making movies that people are going to be nostalgic for in 2065. (Specifically, stop making Ghostbusters movies. They're atrocious.) Invent new bogeymen rather than wheeling out tired old franchises yet again. Another I Know What You Did Last Summer. Another Scream. Another Terrifier (which isn't even that old but thus far has been offensively bad even by gutter trash movie standards). Another Final Destination. I know it's easy money but be honest: most of these films are utterly terrible and tarnish the legacies of the originals.

Or, don't. Just leave the lights half on, point the projector vaguely at the blank space on the wall and fill the room with stoners and texters who neither know nor care what's going on. Yeah, that'll work.

IS IT REALLY THAT BAD? #1: THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES

There are a number of reasons to give a film a bad review. [1] It is genuinely terrible and the public need to be warned. [2] End of list. Anything else is just part of your standup routine, or a look-at-me thinkpiece designed for clicks and retweets: Ten Things Wrong With Die Hard, Why Jaws Isn't The Masterpiece You Think It Is, Everyone Who Likes Titanic Is A Hopeless Idiot And Should Be Horsewhipped. Somewhere a line has been crossed between film reviewing and sheer contrariness: somewhere it stopped being about the film and started being about the reviewer's follower count.

Certainly there is great fun to be had when trained and experienced professional critics are gifted a Cats or a Battlefield Earth, and we mere mortals are in turn gifted five hundred words of finely crafted invective. And the democratisation of the internet has meant that any blowharding halfwit with a blogger account and a spellchecker can join in the frenzy and get a few solid kicks in as well. (Exhibit A: you're looking at it.) But sometimes there's more interest in Ten Great Things About Hudson Hawk or Why Jaws 2 Is Actually Better Than You Think It Is. Sometimes it's better to re-evaluate the old failures rather than piss on the old classics, to find something good about a much-derided film rather than something bad about a much-loved one.

So let's mount some kind of Case For The Defence. Let's see if some of those disasters were actually that terrible.

#1: THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (1990)

I saw this in Screen One at the Cannon Cinema in Portsmouth sometime in April 1991. Back then it wasn't unusual for the UK to get films several months after their US release, so we were already aware that it had not been well received by critics or audiences. I hadn't read the book - I still haven't and it's extremely unlikely I ever will - so I was at least able to go into it with a relatively open mind, judging it as a film on its own terms and not comparing it to the source material. Fidelity to the original text is, for me, irrelevant: if you want the book, read the book. The film of Moonraker goes from California to Venice to Rio to outer space; Ian Fleming's novel never leaves the South Coast of England and retains precisely one character name outside of the regulars. If Moonraker has faults (and it absolutely does), straying from the book isn't one of them.

I remember enjoying the film enough at the time: it was okay, though probably not much more than that. I haven't revisited it since, until the other night. And.... that's where the Case For The Defence falls down. Because, in answer to the question Is It Really That Bad?, the answer is pretty much Yes. It's not a good film, it isn't funny (which is a major problem with comedy), and too many of the characters are grotesques, caricatures and straight up monsters. Specifically this refers to the two main female characters, in whom it is utterly implausible that our supposed hero (Tom Hanks) would show the slightest sliver of interest: Kim Cattrall as his frankly horrible wife and Melanie Griffith as his frankly horrible mistress. Others are overdone: F Murray Abraham's mayor, John Hancock's reverend. Meanwhile our supposed hero is underdone: he's supposed to be one of those Wall Street "Masters Of The Universe" types trading multi-million dollar stocks and bonds and cheating on his wife... but they need us to feel a measure of engagement with him, so it's that nice Tom Hanks. Which is fine, because everybody likes Tom Hanks, but this doesn't feel like a character who should be soft and cuddly: he should be a bastard and a scumbag.

Obviously I knew this was a Brian De Palma film, and I knew it was not in his thriller mode which I loved so much: Dressed To Kill, Blow Out, Body Double. But this isn't a glossy erotic thriller: this is a social satire and a black comedy, which require a completely different eye. This and the gangster knockabout Wise Guys are the only overt comedies in the BDP filmography (apart from, supposedly, the early weird ones like Greetings); possibly the director was as miscast as some of the actors?

So what's to like? Well, there are still a few touches of premium De Palma in there: those gorgeous technical signatures such as split diopter shots and unnecessarily long takes. There's a pleasantly jaunty theme by Dave Grusin, even if the rest of the score isn't that memorable (I listened to the soundtrack album again and outside of the Main and End Titles there's really not much in there). And it's always good to see reliables like Morgan Freeman, Kevin Dunn, Donald Moffatt. Actually, if you ignore the fact that the character in the novel is English rather than American, Bruce Willis is particularly enjoyable, very much in flip Moonlighting mode rather than Die Hard. Sadly, he's also narrating and frankly it sounds like he's reading straight from the book.

Overall, though, the verdict has to be Yes, It Really Is That Bad. The rewatch the other night - the first since its release 35 years ago - actually felt worse than it did back at the Cannon Portsmouth. It's a pity: there are a handful of positives, but they're vastly outweighed.