Cinema
Posted in The cinema used to be the best place in town to sit back, relax, stuff your face with saturated fats and laugh until a tiny bit of wee came out. That was back when films were films: they were always about a fish-out-of-water cop wisecracking his way to a bust, a gun-toting archaeologist who killed Nazis or a teenager who could travel through time in a magic sports car.
These days, every second film on the listings page is somehow based on fact and designed to provoke debate. In the last few weeks I’ve endured Munich, Good Night and Good Luck and a new one about lunatic kids in west London called Kidulthood. That’s 90 minutes apiece on international terrorism, the role of the media in modern democracy and moral decay in the inner cities.
These are all fascinating and complex issues. Still, I wish they wouldn’t bother us with them in movies.
All these films do is create crash-course “experts” who walk out of the theatre armed with hastily acquired opinions on the subject they’ve just seen tackled. Opinions that they proceed to bellow at anyone who will listen for the next fortnight in a vain bid to appear genuinely clever (as opposed to drunk, which they invariably are).
I’m boycotting cinemas until Hollywood goes back to its roots and allows stupid people to stay stupid. And the rest of us clever ones to do our learning out of books and use the movies as a place to switch off. Hopefully, while watching a werewolf play basketball or a team of misfits fight ghosts
