Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Cinema, that plucky heroine, will always survive | Ryan Gilbey

Like TV and DVD before, Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox's online releases can't compete with the movie-going experience

The news that two of Hollywood's major studios, Warner Bros and 20th Century Fox, are planning to make new movies available online only two months after release is being heralded as a harbinger of doom for cinema. We've been through this scaremongering before, with the rise of television, video, DVD, on-demand rental companies such as Netflix and Lovefilm, as well as video iPods. Like the hounded heroine of a stalk'n'slash horror, cinema has throughout its history faced attempts on its life, and moments at which its number seemed to be well and truly up.

Let's get something straight: nothing can compete with cinema, and nothing ever will. Audience numbers and box-office takings will always fluctuate. But suggesting that downloading can ever provide an alternative to cinema is like saying that fast-food chains will kill off restaurants. The experiences are not comparable. It may take people a while to realise that ? they may dip a toe in the studios' on-demand scheme ? but they will soon come to miss the largeness, the inclusivity and the sense of occasion that comes from going to the cinema. When you watch a film on a television or a laptop or, God forbid, an iPod, you haven't seen it as it was intended. Sometimes it's the only option available, especially with old or obscure movies now that the repertory scene is in permanent decline and the double bill has all but died out.

But the idea that audiences for blockbusters are going to spurn the excitement of experiencing at maximum size, say, the latest Pirates of the Caribbean release, or whatever floats your schooner, is ridiculous. Most will know almost without realising it that there is no alternative to the communal, immersive alchemy of cinema-going. Nothing trumps it.

None of which should suggest that cinemas themselves can afford to be complacent or exploitative. While cinema is a social experience, the chains owe it to the ticket-buying public to be more vigilant about those disruptive audience members for whom cinemas are merely alternative venues for mobile phone conversations. And pricing remains an issue. I haven't given any of my custom to the Vue cinema chain for a year now, since it charged me �21 for myself and my 10-year-old daughter to see How to Train Your Dragon at 11am on a Sunday morning several months into the film's release (we had even brought our own 3D glasses).

There are similar complaints in the US. Joe Flint wrote on the subject on the LA Times website last year. His beef was with the pricing structure at Hollywood's otherwise wonderful Arclight cinema, a classy venue that knocks any Vue into a cocked popcorn tub. Extortionate pricing, Flint says, "gives people just one more reason to stay home. At a time when theatre operators are worried about movies popping up sooner on DVD and video-on-demand and thereby undercutting ticket sales, making it costlier to go out to the local multiplex seems ill advised."

I think Flint is right up to a point ? floating voters could be swayed if pricing continues to veer toward the prohibitive. But the shrinking of the window between cinema and on-demand release dates is a consequence of an entire society's tendency towards instant gratification, rather than a knife in the back of one particular cultural experience.

Besides, it isn't just the integrity and authenticity of the films that we would lose in defecting to on-demand; it's the memories that are bound up with them. When I think of my most cherished cinema-going experiences, they rarely revolve around favourite films so much as favourite audiences or atmospheres: the spontaneous wave of applause and cheering that broke out in a cinema in 1981 following the scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark in which a tricksy swordfighter is dispatched with an off-the-cuff bullet; the police chasing a suspect through the auditorium where I was watching Wes Craven's New Nightmare; the metronomic snap of seats that announced one walkout after another during The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover or David Cronenberg's Crash, and seemed only to intensify the pleasure for those of us who stayed the course. Movie memories are made of this. They don't tend to begin with the words: "Remember the time we downloaded that film ?"


guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/04/cinema-warner-bros-20th-century-fox

50 Cent Salma Hayek Justin Bieber Rap Music

No comments:

Post a Comment