Indeed

Fingers crossed, I will be moving into a new place before the month is out.
I saw the washing machine in use with my own eyes when I was viewing the flat, and it is therefore already better than where I am.

They (ie. Sunday paper columnists and such) say that moving home is one of the most stressful things you can experience, and doing it for the second time in a year is having an effect on me. It’s actually easier this time around as I never fully unpacked here, and I’ve been shedding a few items along the way, being ruthless about whether I will actually want to watch a particular DVD, listen to a CD or read a book again – meaning that now I am finally getting around to watching Alias series one.



I picked it up in a sale due to the general recommendations of friends and ex-colleagues, and it’s a fairly entertaining watch, but there’s a problem. I have just watched the Wire season 4 across two days. Seeing as the Wire is possibly the best TV series ever produced, it’s a tough act to follow. It probably doesn’t help that Alias is a slightly glossy big-budget show which revolves around a pretty young lady being a spy, but all of the smirky funny bits, slo-mo, soft-focus ideal-home ‘real life’ scenes, international locales that all look like California and god-awful singer-songwriter moments detract from the experience for me. Maybe it’s my own inability to process the type of show that attempts to be a drama, soap, comedy and thriller simultaneously, whilst others excel at one thing. I guess that’s not actually true, as Firefly is admittedly a mishmash of things, but it excels at its mash.
It kind of tells me that it would be a waste of time for me to ever bother with the likes of 24, so now I’m just waiting until I can get my hands on my next ticket to the corners of Baltimore.
Spoiler! All my problems with the show are illustrated in one scene where Sydney considers that her double-agent mum had her as part of a spy plan, involving looking at photos in her soft-focus apartment delivering a voice-over with what sounds like Enya playing in the background. Pah.
Oh no, wait, a scene with Quentin Tarantino running down a hall to Rob Zombie’s Dragula after using a motion tracker that’s literally straight out of Aliens (and therefore using tech design that looks 20 years out of date) probably pips it.


Lester Freeman shows the team the Deadwood piss-take from season four

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I went to see the film ‘Rec’ blind, as it were, without having read a scrap of print about the thing before my bum was on seat – all I knew is that it wasn’t from the UK or US, and that it was a horror film that probably revolved around camera POV. (More spoilers for those who need to know.)

Horror films have been using first-person shots to ramp up the tension for decades, with 1978s Halloween springing to my mind from behind the mask of the young Michael Myers, as he commits the deed that gets him locked up. The strictly controlled vantage point and limited peripheral vision of first-person shots all contribute to a build up of fear, in much the same way as tight close-ups and darkness are used to stimulate your imagination about what you can’t see. The Blair Witch Project is arguably the most famous in the horror genre to use the POV of a video camera to the same effect, cutting down the field of vision of the naked eye and doing away with objective shots so that you identify more closely with the situation of the people being terrified. A number of films have used this device since the last millennium (or 1999) when Blair Witch was released, but few have decided to stick to it exclusively, with even 2002s My Little Eye avoiding the problems of exclusively subjective shots by having its action relayed via CCTV cams.
Cloverfield is the highest profile first-person horror since Blair Witch, and Rec was released within months of it, but both find it hard to get around the problems inherent in the device. Scream managed to successfully lampoon the horror film’s descent into genre rules whilst being a decent example in itself, but was filmed before the most recent addition to the list of ‘unrealistic behaviour in the horror genre’ was added to classics such as “let’s split up”: when you are experiencing something creepy, scary or even life threatening, don’t put down your camera as it’s obviously more important to document what’s happening than it is to escape with your life.
To be fair there would be no film where this not the case, but it is a problem that, for me at least, makes it harder to suspend belief and therefore enjoy the movie.
Whilst Cloverfield went the opposite direction to the Blair Witch in terms of scale and spectacle, Rec takes a much more low-key and credible direction, for the beginning at least.
The film follows a TV production crew of two, the presenter Angela and her camera-man Pablo, as they wander the streets at night, documenting the lives of those who work whilst we sleep. During a stint at a fire station, Angela gets her wish to liven up the show when an emergency call comes in and the crew accompanies some firemen to the scene.
Reports of screams from an old woman’s flat have led to the police to ask for the fire service’s help to break in – what they find is a crazy fat lady covered in blood, who shortly attacks and bites one of the police officers before things go to pot. The Police lock down the building and the residents of the apartment block, along with the remaining policeman, firemen and documentary duo find themselves subject to some sort of zombie/infection outbreak. Dead people walk and want to eat the living, and of course the ambitious Angela sees it as the story of the century rather than a nightmare situation, and Pablo doesn’t put down his bloody camera.
Rec doesn’t offer anything you haven’t seen in the multitude of living dead/28 x later offerings, as people carry on as if they’ve never seen such a film before. True, if it happened to us, you probably wouldn’t want to believe it either, but as soon as you did you might decide it was worth a try to start separating heads from bodies. Anyway, Rec ticks all of the boxes of the zombie/hand-held cam sub-genres, including the recent favourite pitch black/night vision scene that we have seen in 28 Weeks Later, I Am Legend and Cloverfield, but the tangent that Rec diverges into basically steals from the Exorcist, as it transpires that the zombie outbreak is due to an enzyme spread by a girl possessed by a demon in the attic.

So Rec is a right little vulture of a film, picking over the carcasses of horror gone before and putting together a Dr. Frankenstein creation of re-animated parts. That’s not to say it’s a bad film, it’s well made and features good performances, and the opening act is great, but there is nothing on offer that you haven’t seen an improved version of elsewhere.
What’s most surprising is not the magpie-like collection of other horror movie shiny things, but the fact that Hollywood has already lined up a English language remake. And not only have they lined up said remake whilst the corpse of Rec has yet to expel its last breath, but judging from the trailer it seems to be a shot-for-shot remake.
Check the trailer out yonder: http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/quarantine/

The only feature that would prevent me from immediately dismissing Quarantine in its entirety is the fact that it features Jennifer Carpenter in the lead, who also assumes the role of Dexter’s sister in the TV series Dexter. So it can’t be all bad.

A hospital gown, open up the back

There are many studies of ex-cinemas, the grand old picture houses of the 30s and 40s of cinema’s heyday, the time of talkies and newsreels before TV came along. While some were converted into more conventional theatres or bingo halls, many of these buildings were lost and the legacy of local cinema with them.

But I don’t intend to talk so broadly about cinemas, rather I’m focusing on the changes that are happening to this very day.

I first started going to see films regularly when I was around 16 or so. It coincided with a newfound independence and the ability to legally back up my desire to see ‘15’s.
I had taken a year out of school after a bad start at my sixth form, and in the interim before I started my A-levels at a college, I took the opportunity to drink in as much cinema as terrestrial TV could offer.
All day long I would watch films on TV or from videos recorded when I couldn’t catch them, and I took in everything from 40s screwball classics and 50s B pictures to 70s thrillers and 80s blockbusters.

When I started college, I found myself with quite a bit of free time as we only needed to be in college for our lessons, so I made many trips to the Harrow Warner plex to see the latest Hollywood jobs and got the tube central for anything more unusual.
I carried on in this way at University, except unlike college, which I enjoyed, I grew to hate Uni and so would spend an increasing amount of time going to the pictures or collecting videos with my new part-time job’s discount.

Rather than just the films, visiting the cinema itself was part of the experience, and I came to know the differences between cinemas and between screens within the cinemas themselves, making a little mission to visit as many different cinemas as possible, at least in central London.
This aim was a lot more interesting back then, as there were simply more cinemas around. Since the early 90’s I have seen the demise of many a cinema in the West End, some of which I never got the chance to visit.

At some point early in the millennium, Odeon gained ownership of the ABC cinema chain, and began a process of assimilation or destruction.
A number of cinemas, such as Panton Street and Covent Garden survive those times as new Odeon cinemas, but many fell by the wayside.
One most recent loss is the Odeon Wardour Street and ex-ABC Swiss Centre, cunningly located in the building with the tourist-trap clock on the Piccadilly corner of Leicester Square.
Whilst many wouldn’t feel such emotion at the loss of this cinema, owing to the Mezzanine-rivalling ‘front room’ screens, it provided the opportunity to see world cinema and arthouse fare that sometimes weren’t covered elsewhere in London, even with the likes of the ICA, Panton Street and Curzon Soho catering for such tastes.
Despite the relatively small sizes, the screens were still larger than the current monster HD sets and so did at least provide something you couldn’t get at home.
I had managed to see something in each of its four screens before it went, and I have to say I had an affection for the smallest, with the bizarre metal rail between the front row and the screen.

An earlier ABC loss that never made it to Odeon status was the ABC Piccadilly.
Situated on Piccadilly itself, it was opposite the Tower Records/Virgin store and was basically just a small box office at ground level before the descent into the depths were the screens lurked.
The ABC Piccadilly was once a venue for adult movies and in spirit can be seen in the film “An American Werewolf in London”, though that scene was actually based on the Eros cinema that used to be at the site where you’ll now find the Gap shop. It never seemed to lose that seediness, which not only grew from the two screens being literally bisected into four (making for a less than immersive experience) but mainly from the flea bitten state of the place. It has been the only screening that I’ve had to walk out from before the film began because of an unidentifiable but nevertheless rancid odour.
Last time I checked it was still boarded up with the obligatory tourist tat stalls parked outside its doors, long may it rest.

Just down the road from there was the Plaza cinema, a wonderful building with a large lobby and a high ceiling leading to each of the four screens. The Plaza specialised in showing Blockbusters that hadn’t quite completed their run, but had been on release for some weeks, and offered them at budget prices. A sort of grand scale and more expensive Prince Charles cinema, the Plaza provided the opportunity to catch things you may otherwise may have missed, but without the unforgiving scheduling of the PC. Whilst most of the screens were of an average to good quality, the main screen upstairs was beautifully tiered and huge, well worth the asking price.
One day there were flooding problems in the basement and the cinema was closed for refurbishment. It never re-opened, part opening years later as a Tesco Metro and the rest opening later still as the Apollo cinema, a decent cinema itself but amusingly almost the opposite of the Plaza, a luxury cinema for top-dollar prices.

Another recent loss to arthouse venues wasn’t that far from Odeon Wardour Street. The Metro Cinema, which changed names to the Other Cinema a couple of years before its demise, was a lovely little two screen venue which specialised in foreign and indie releases.
Found down the side of the Trocadero on Rupert Street, it had an old-time ‘Ed’s Diner’ feeling to it and it seemed like the only reason it hadn’t been multiplexed to death is due to it being hidden out of sight.
Today it has become a front for yet another theatre ticket box office catering to our theatre-greedy tourist community.

Still more losses are even more obscure – the Odeon Haymarket was a few minutes from the now Cineworld Haymarket but closed not long after I was regularly cinemagoing so I never visited it; likewise an indie cinema of which I have forgotten the name on St. Martin’s Lane, toward Trafalgar Square and opposite from the Duke of York’s Theatre.
I could swear that there used to be a cinema called “The Phoenix” down the side of the Phoenix theatre, off Charing Cross Road, and my memory of a picture house that once stood on Oxford St. at the Tottenham Court Road end is hazier still.

Despite the increasing success of box offices in recent years, I can’t help fear for my cinemas, and I’ve never taken for granted that I have so much choice – I can’t comprehend of what it would be like to live somewhere where you maybe have a choice of a two-screen indie and a multiplex at most, three screens of which are taken up showing the latest blockbuster on rotation.
Whilst I do appreciate some of the positives of the multiplex chains – the usually large screens and generously terraced seating - it has to be said that sometimes the audience just doesn’t actually give as much of a fuck about seeing a film as they do in the West End. Even as you venture out of the centre, to the Odeon Tottenham Court Road or Marble Arch cinemas, the audience become that bit more irritating that much more frequently, where the act of film-going is seen as a social event instead of what it is – sitting in a dark room with strangers and watching a fucking film.

I would go on to discuss the cinemas that remain today, but that is for another time.

Here’s a picture found at this link Golders Green cinema. It closed after screening Eyes Wide Shut, the only cinema within walking distance. Bastards.


Follow these links to find information on London’s lost cinemas, and some pictures here

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Just in case you thought you were safe from review-pimping, you’re not. The links to my latest reviews of anime, Fearless Hyena and Hand of Death DVDs can be found at the top of the review links on the right.