Cinema rules from Mark and Simon

The Cinema Code of Conduct states:

• No Eating... ...of anything harder than a soft roll with no filling. No one wants to hear you crunch, chew or masticate in any way. Nachos cause special offence and are of the devil.
• No Slurping... ...of drinks. You've already drunk a 5 litre flagon of pop, you really don't need the melting ice too. You are not six years old.
• No Rustling... ...of super high density, rustle-o-matic, extra rustle bags. No foraging of any kind, if you're going to need it during the film, get it out before hand.
• No Irresponsible Parenting' Your five-year-old does not want to come to see the latest 12A certificate: you are using the cinema as a babysitter. Your child's moaning, whinging and crying is your fault and a profound annoyance to everyone else. Your interrupted sleep caused by your child's nightmares is also your fault and serves you right.
• No Hobbies This includes knitting, drug dealing, model aeroplane assembly, fighting, having sex and updating Facebook.
• No Talking You’re in a cinema – you have come here to watch, not to discuss. Or ‘engage’, or ‘participate’, or ‘explain’ or whatever. More importantly, no-one in the cinema has paid £8.50 to hear your director’s commentary on the movie. Just sit down and shut up.
• No Mobile Phone Usage At all. Not even on ‘flight mode’. This isn’t an aeroplane, it’s a cinema. Even if you’re not yapping, you’re still creating light pollution. Put your thumbs away. NB: includes BlackBerries, PalmPilots, iPads – whatever.
• No Kicking of Seats The area of floor directly in front of your seat is yours, and is there to put your legs in. The back of the seat in front of you belongs to someone else; do not touch, interfere with, or otherwise invade their space with your feet, knees, or other bodily appendages.
• No Arriving Late Like Woody Allen in Annie Hall, you’re supposed to watch movies from the very beginning to the very end. If you turn up late, tough: go see something else – The Sorrow and the Pity, perhaps.
• No Shoe Removal You are not in your own front room. Nor are you in Japan (unless you are, in which case, carry on). A cinema is a public space: keep your bodily odours to yourself.

The Hunger Game

An interesting post-apocalyptic future where the interestingly attired minority keep the twelve districts that revolted sometime in the past under their thumb. Each child can get food from the state but that means they have a greater chance of being chosen for the Hunger Games. The Hunger Games are a killing zone where one child from the 24 "wins" when all the others are dead (think Lord of the Flies).

As a set-up goes it is an interesting idea and quite a good film but it copped out at nearly every key moment and instead of providing us with a few dilemmas (will she/won't she moments) they find a convenient way to get her out of the situation. It also ends strangely and whilst this is supposed to allow the franchise to continue it makes the film a bit odd.

The performances are good, the cinematography good, the dialogue good and the idea of killing as Saturday night entertainment is good but the painfully obvious script and lack of suspense means it never gets above good. The best bit was the view of the future with the battle to win Saturday night's rating battle with the over the top razzmatazz and the focus on celebrity (even if they are about to kill others) and sugary interviews.

PS In a film about people going hungry everyone seemed very well fed.

Headhunters (Hodejegerne)

Scandinavian crime drama is on vogue for the last couple of years and this film is based on a book by Jo Nesbø. The Millennium trilogy were interesting although not brilliantly written (there is a introductory chapter on Swedish fraud) and the Wallander series in both English and Swedish were very good and this stacks up well against them. In an interview with the director he speculated that the reason for this rise in crime is due to Hollywood films make their heroes whiter than white whilst the bad guys are foolish and dim. In the Scandinavian crimes the heroes are far from perfect, the bad guys intelligent and brutal and the narrative complex.

The film is very good, the plot moves swiftly, the action is good, if brutal, the characters are well drawn and the conclusion is clever and the loose ends are tidied up without being too tidy. The level of comedy was good and produced some smirks and laughs without being slap-stick. I only had to suspense my powers on belief a couple of occasions which was good. It was also interesting to see Ser Jaime Lannister getting his come-uppance that he so richly deserved.

Contagion – Spoiler Alert

A reasonable attempt at a thriller that has a large range of threads and you feel that they are going to draw together in a breathless finale but instead it slowly coughs its way to the end leaving more questions than answers. For instance – what was the punishment for the doctor telling his wife about the contagion, what happens to the village in China, how will Matt Damon cope with his cheating wife’s death, what are the consequences for the girl going out and meeting her boyfriend, will Laurence Fishburne suffer for his decision to give up his antidote and wander the streets when he has no immunity. All in all a bit disjointed and a bit frustrating, a film with promise that does not quite deliver. 

Weddings

A wedding is an expensive business and when you are spending x thousand pounds you would expect businesses to want your business and have a level of customer service that makes you want to spend your money with them. This however is not always the case. At 1 venue it took over two weeks to provide us with a quote for the wedding. We had popped in for an approximate quote but then spend a lot of time on what meal we would like and then took so long to send it we thought we had been forgotten. In other places we travelled 20 miles to find it was already booked, a fact they couldn’t tell us over the phone. A florist told us there were no blue flowers in spring whilst others have told us there are plenty of options. The photographer we say today kept forgetting what year the wedding was and whilst showing us his work on a HD TV kept worrying about the music he was playing. Maybe think about how you present yourself before your customer arrives. If you want my business present yourself properly.

Things I have leant this week

1.      Wich means place, it can either be associated with dairy farming or salt production

2.      Dunwich used to be the one of the largest settlements in the East and one of the largest ports.

3.      A large storm destroyed most of Dunwich leaving a bay where there had been a town before

4.      Southwold lighthouse has at least 133 steps and is one of the least well organised tours you can go on

5.      The light on the lighthouse can be seen 16 miles away. If the light is white you are safe, if it is red you are in danger

6.      There is an organisation in Suffolk that promote kite making and flying

7.      Kite surfing looks like a lot of fun

8.      Southwold buried its cannons so that the Germans would not have a pre-text to bomb them in the Second World War

9.      The large areas of open space in Southwold were left as fire breaks after the great fire of Southwold.

10.  There are no pubs in Southwold that are not linked to Adnams

11.  In the winter the population of Southwold shrinks to less than a 1000 due to the number of second homes in the area.

Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy

Well the setting and colour palette of grey and brown was very 70’s. The preponderance of smokers and the hazy of blue in each room looked authentic. The cragginess of the actors and the world weariness of the characters they played seemed to be genuine. The fact that the script was non-linear and was set in a variety of cities with a range of city vistas pulled from the Seventies, the quality of the actors on show and the topic of spying and “moles” should have been right up my alley. The fact I was noticing these things means I was not swept away by the storyline and not gripped. I should have been but I wasn’t and the reasons for that I can’t fathom or comprehend. Maybe it was that there was George Smiley and in a James Bond way you know it can’t be him, can’t die, will find out which makes the plot a little predictable or maybe casting the most famous actor as the baddie which otherwise was a fairly minor part put a massive arrow over his head, I mean it’s Colin Firth playing 6^th lead after winning an Oscar or maybe I just didn’t care about the characters of their fate.