(That’s the only French content in this post.) This is what the old Odeon in Kensington High Street will look like after it has been re-developed as flats with seven cinema screens in the basement. Looks good to me. The Art Deco facade has been preserved but the conservationists are still furious.
Cinemas have changed a lot. Typically there are smaller auditoriums with much more comfortable seating and more legroom and maybe even a little table or tray for drinks. It’s an upgrade from CIE in the 1960s to Emirates Business Class. The picture and sound quality are also both of the highest standard. Seeing live opera or theatre in the cinema is arguably better than seeing it in an opera house or theatre. This is why DVDs and downloading films at home will not put cinemas out of business. But why do they still smell of popcorn? Restaurants don’t smell of boiled cabbage.
Ridley Scott’s latest, The Martian, is a genre film. Man gets stuck with no air, water, food at bottom of mine shaft or bottom of sea; has to work out how to survive and then is rescued, not without difficulty. Plot spoiler; this is what The Martian is about except it’s set on Mars (natch). The scenes on the mother-ship seem to me very Star Trek but the shots of the Martian landscape are impressive on a big screen.
Just one snag. As Matt Damon, playing stranded astronaut Mark Watney, trundles around in his Mars buggy your mind wanders to David Lean and Lawrence of Arabia. Yes, it is Wadi Rum in Jordan again and very recognisable it is too. I was humming “I’m the man who broke the bank in Monte Carlo” while Mark Watney was listening to Abba.
Another gripe about modern films. Our attention span is supposed to have got shorter but films now are Wagnerian* in length. The Martian runs for 2 hours, 20 minutes. The new James Bond film is 2 1/2 hours. The credits have got longer too. The Martian has 84 people credited under Art Department alone. Some of them have weird jobs; drapes master?
*The Flying Dutchman and Das Rheingold both run for about 2 1/2 hours.
