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!

I saw two films in the last two days. One was a multimillion dollar non-event featuring Christian Bale acting all pissed off and grumpy about having to contend an absolute mutt of a script, and the other was shot with only a basic hand-held camera, a very limited budget and a talented band of unknown actors, one of whom is the amazing/beautiful/awesome/zOMG-I-LOVE-HER Manuela Velasco.

[●REC] follows the basic formula of horror/action POV films such as The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield in that the film starts out as a mundane documentary of something inconsequential and then camera crew suddenly find themselves thrust into something unexpected and unwelcome. In [●REC], Velasco and her cameramen are shooting a documentary of a disappointingly boring local fire department when a report comes in of an old woman trapped in her apartment. Starved of anything better to do, the two reporters accompany a team of firefighters to the building and wind up desperately trying to fend off…

For once I’m going to be discreet in a film review, because I really think that people ought to see this movie. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, sure, but as these films go it’s exceptionally well-made. The camera style is employed creatively and is never abused by the director, and the film feels incredibly real, especially in the middle section when Velasco and her cameraman spend their time interviewing residents and recording the disputes and the general confusion surrounding them. Then, when [●REC] finally ratchets up the anxiety for the finale, it’s pretty much no-holds-barred brutal. I usually hate films that rely on suspense, and the final 15 minutes of this are as stressful as anything I’ve seen (bar The Blair Witch Project, which is so effective it almost made me sick the first time I saw it), but the tension is mingled with a possibility (hope?) that maybe Velasco will escape her predicament.

She really is magnetic (and not just because she’s in almost every shot, since her cameramen is tracking her). I would have watched her spend 74 minutes dragging out a documentary of a sleeping fire department, in Spanish subs. The rest of the cast is good too (the bald fireman who looks like Dan Andriano from Alkaline Trio deserves particular mention), but she’s really the beating heart of this gem of a film, and you all should make an effort to see it.

Rotten Tomatoes likes it too.

It looks like a small step up from the Wii. That’s about all I’ll say for it without having first tried it out. Basically, I’m highly sceptical that motion sensing control systems will ever be used in anything other than gimmicky, short-lifespan games. It sounds counter-intuitive, but I don’t think these kind of control systems are more immersive than traditional control pads. Maybe it’s just me, but I like being somebody else, be it Marcus Fenix or Sonic the Hedgehog, when I play video games, and controlling a character onscreen via a control pad is a perfectly fine way of doing that. Experienced gamers don’t need to look at the buttons. We don’t think “crumbs, here comes a grenade, what button do I press to roll out of the way?”; we see a grenade and we roll away. Yes, it happens through the controller, but it doesn’t feel like that’s how it’s happening. Maybe this is due to a paucity of imagination on my part, but I just can’t see how Gears of War 2 or any similarly spectacular game could operate via motion sensing.

If anything, motion sensing control systems are a step backwards. Traditional control pads streamline your command options in an intuitive, localised space. Motion sensing does almost exactly the opposite, making you jump and move and wave your arms like a fool. I can see how this could be fun for simple party games, but I’ll be highly surprised if this technology ever leads to even one genuinely great game. Until there’s a brain sensing device that you wear on your head and control your character with, controllers are, and will remain, exactly where it’s at.

The site where I found this didn’t care too much for it, but I’m rather fond of it.

The UN says that containment is impossible as the virus is confirmed in various European countries, the US, New Zealand and Israel. I would feel pretty smug about my underground zombie bunker right now, but it’s not built yet so I’m starting to worry.

Remember: they stay dead if you shoot them in the head!

A chilling glimpse of what’s to come.

Or undead, at any rate. Once this site is fully up-and-running it will be a place for two zombie-enthusiasts to knock ideas around, publish their idle speculations on the living dead, and display artwork (maybe – I can’t draw, but my friend is pretty good at it). It might be a forum for other things too, we haven’t really hammered out the finer details yet.

Check back here in a few days and there’ll probably be more to see, including a vastly superior theme. This is just the best one I managed dig up for the time being.