The Martin Anderson Column: Watch With Mother

Martin tries in vain to watch some movie he likes - so much can go wrong!

Martin Anderson

Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem directors the Strausse brothers have recently been positing iMax and 3D as two possible solutions for the slow, shuffling exodus from cinemas to home entertainment systems, with the largely-consolidated cinema chains now facing at least the second major challenge to their hold over audiences since responding to the 1950s TV incursion with cinemascope and new sound systems fifty years ago.

Nottingham’s Savoy cinema has even gone so far as to obtain a licence for patrons to take drinks into the auditorium. But if arguing about the anchovies on a pizza delivery can bring turbulence to a night in watching a movie with your mates, it’s presumably impossible to meet the needs of several hundred people without compromises that will have hordes of them returning to Blockbuster or Amazon rental.

Block mobile signals and the secret texters flee; let the unwanted commentary track that is Fat Bloke and his dull mate go unchallenged and you lose the cinephiles – challenge them and you lose Fat Bloke et al. Ban non-cinema food and you lose a punter for every extra bucket of overpriced popcorn sold.

If it’s hard to get Mr. Public to watch a real film in a real cinema, it has to be admitted that sometimes events conspire to utterly fuck up the total, Videodrome-style communion between a viewer and their desired film whatever the venue. I thought, as the nation’s couches groan under the weight of 50 million turkey-fed arses in the next ten days, it might be amusing to remember that sometimes you’re lucky if you get past the opening credits uninterrupted.

First of all there’s the question of who decides what you’re going to watch. If you’re a male nerd dating a girl who loves weepies, you can mostly kiss goodbye to the guys at ILM as you head off into hankie-land with the soggy object of your affections.

Marry her and watch this capitulation turn into negotiation, where some of the ‘film deals’ are done a long way from the living-room. Accede to your wife’s demands that you go into that knicker shop with her, even though she is hardly going to be asking your opinion in the changing rooms, and even though the assistants will be giggling because you don’t know where to look…and magically gain yourself a nag-free showing of Batman Begins.

The need for negotiation has survived the advent of DVRs and on-demand viewing for two reasons: a) the ‘other person’ has to endure your tastes for two hours or more (much more if you’re into Peter Jackson) and is infrequently inclined to do so and b) time is a more precious commodity than rentals, scheduled showings and torrents.

Blood family can be worse than partners, though. My dad is a wonderful guy, but he well knows why I will no longer watch movies with him, unless it’s in the sanctity of a cinema (if you can get him to join a box-office queue with more than three people in it). He is a Non Pausing Interruptor. I have seen him get up from watching a DVD rental to make himself a sandwich and miss $22 million worth of special effects, or a crucial plot point without which the film will prove meaningless. I think that after forty years of TV that wouldn’t wait for you, he just figures he’s too old to start using Pause buttons now.

Why does it matter to me? It’s not like I missed anything. But it does matter. The act of viewing is a lonely one, and with mass-TV audiences becoming a thing of the past, the importance of sympathetic passengers with whom to share the transit is highlighted.

But no family-related viewing fuck-up is more of a chairbound bungee-jump than the moment that the straight-thriller you’re watching with your grandparents throws up an expectedly explicit sex scene. I remember well the cleared throats and portentous twitching that accompanied our Ingrid’s seduction of Madeline Smith in The Vampire Lovers, watched as an evening film round my nan and grandad’s house in the late 1970s. It was to be a couple of years before I got beyond minute 27 of that film, back in the days when a film was shown once every two or three years, rather than two or three times a week for a year.

Sometimes even that one rare showing could go wrong – in the late 1980s I was bored enough to tune into a scheduled 6pm showing of a Gary Coleman film called Playing With Fire, only to find that some crossed wires at the beeb had led to one of Sybil Danning’s sleaziest, nudiest slasher films -They’re Playing With Fire- being shown instead. I can only imagine the chorus of thunks as vicar’s pipes hit the floor nationwide.

So if you intend to sit down with a good film this Christmas, be it broadcast, rented or naughtily obtained – I wish you luck. Sometimes you need it.

Martin writes his (mostly) sci-fi column every Friday at Den Of Geek. Check out the complete list of his columns.

 

21/12/07