The Living Deadbeat

I love movies, and I love seeing movies at the cinema with the sound and the ambience and the giant screen, but lately I’ve very seriously fallen out of love the whole experience because cinema owners seem determined to ruin the cinema for everyone. I’m thinking specifically of one cinema here, the Omniplex in Mahon Point, which is quite good in many respects but falls down badly in terms of overall experience because:

1) The projection equipment is not focused properly in many (possibly most) of the screens.

2) The ads. This is real issue that drove me to blog. If I’m going to be charged through the nose to watch a movie that’s free on the internet then I had better not be forced to sit through 10 minutes of mind-numbingly stupid advertisements before the film starts. Are cinemas really so hard up for cash that they have to whore out their screens to Coco-Cola and Caburys for a full 10 minutes before every single goddamn screening of a film? I wouldn’t mind so much if the ads weren’t so bloody awful (like that fucking stupid one with the two dolls – I can’t remember what it’s for, which is a good thing for the company responsible), or if they were changed every few weeks, but no, instead the audience is forced to watch the same dumb ads for the same crap products again and again and again.

What makes the whole ordeal even worse for me is that the rest of the audience doesn’t seem to mind. Once the sound comes on and the lights dim a hush descends over the room, and everyone stops talking, as if it would be disrespectful to continue their conversations while the ads are on. The ads aren’t part of the film; it’s okay to talk through them! I can understand people remaining silent during trailers, and I don’t mind sitting through a few of those (even if I’ve seen them before), but to obsequiously shut up and gape at the screen while some vacuous commercial sloganeering washes across it is just downright appalling.

While it’s not exactly an ad, the cinema’s ‘viewer’s guidelines’ cartoon at the Omniplex is also wholly without merit. In case you’ve never seen it, it’s a silly cartoon with anthropomorphized confectionary items acting out the same scene over and over. It’s meant to illustrate why the basic rules of the cinema must be upheld, but a simple still with bullet pointed rules would be equally sufficient and would shave about 50 monotonous seconds of drudgery out of the pre-film cinematic experience. Of course, the cinema manager would probably fill those 50 seconds with chocolate advertisements if he didn’t believe in the supreme importance of the singing confectionary, so maybe I shouldn’t complain too much about it.

Someone will suggest, not unreasonably, that maybe I should just turn up at the cinema 10 minutes after the film is scheduled to start and dodge all those nasty adverts in the process, but this measure is inadequate for three reasons, namely:

1) Unless timed absolutely perfectly (which is impossible without inside information, given the vagaries of cinema procedures), I’ll end up either missing the start of the film or catching the end of the ads.

2) Unless the cinema is almost empty, I’ll get a lousy seat if I show up 10 minutes late.

3) Dr. Deadbeat likes to watch the trailers, and more often than not I see films with him.

So really, there’s no solution.

This all might seem like the neurotic ranting of a film fan pushed over the edge by witless Toblerone ads, but I’ve had enough of this nonsense and abuse. There are ways around paying €9 to see a film and I’m going to start availing of them sharpish unless this policy of showing ads at the cinema ends.

Come on film fans, rise up against this tyranny!