PLANS CHANGE

Fillums, eh…? Don’t you just love them? Sitting in the dark, watching a whole world of imagination open up whilst someone crunches popcorn behind your left ear, or decides to stand up and block your view at the crucial moment, only to return two minutes later and have to ask at full volume about what’s been going on before taking that call that they simply can’t ignore.

Actually, I do still love going to the cinema, sitting in the dark with a certain amount of excited anticipation that I might be about to see something rather special, enjoying that “collective experience” that is somehow in danger of being lost forever due to piracy and downloading, as the advert that they’re now running would have us believe.

Unfortunately, these days, so few of the films seem enticing enough to tempt me in any more, and even the ones that do can leave me with a rather dreadful sense of disappointment afterwards, like going on a blind date with someone whose photograph was twenty years out of date, you sometimes feel that you’ve been brought there under false pretenses.

I went to the cinema a couple of weeks ago for the first time in quite a while to see a new film about people in costumes fighting each other collectively, joining together to battle some mighty foe which was far too much for each of them alone, but which in no way could be allowed to diminish the iconography of any of them, which was apparently the end result of fragments of an ongoing storyline seen in various other films about people in costumes fighting each other individually, or something.

It had a title, “Avengers Assemble”, which felt like the panicky response of a marketing manager suddenly realising that there had been an absolute disaster of a movie with the same name about a decade ago (which I, rather perversely, actually quite enjoyed, Mrs Peel…), and they had come to believe (if marketing people can ever really be said to believe anything) that potential ticket-buyers might be stupid enough (because if there’s one thing that marketing people do believe in, then it’s the stupidity of people) to mistake it for that movie and consequently stay away in their droves.

Still, plans change.

I did, for a little while start to doubt my own memory. Surely for the past however many months, the film was always going to be just called “The Avengers” wasn’t it? So where did this strange reference to the construction of flat-packed furniture come from? It was certainly out of left-field and it was certainly rather late in the day, but, maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was always going to be called that…?

Then, later on in that same week, a rental disc turned up of “Captain America”, the ending of which had become rather obvious having seen the old assemblage just a few days earlier. Nevertheless, we watched it and it really wasn’t half as awful as I expected it to be (I think the period setting helped), and we sat, as is traditional with these movies, through the credits (on fast forward to be honest) to see the tag sequence that they tend to add on at the end.

It turned out to be a trailer for the movie we’d actually seen the previous weekend (wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey) which ended with the captions announcing that “Captain America will return in The Avengers - May 2012”

“That’s now!” I exclaimed, “and yet we saw it in April!” before spotting that the expected title did indeed include no reference whatsoever to the building of relatively cheap wardrobes.

Plans change.

Still, credits are becoming something that I’m coming to pay more and more attention to. Perhaps it’s because they now so much more rare on television. The same envelope containing “Captain America” also bought the animated movie “Steamboy” along with it which struck me throughout as a piece of  “Manc(unian) Manga” so it was rather heartening to read those credits and find that there was indeed a strong Japanese presence in the production team and that my instincts were not wrong.

What this all tells you about the kinds of films we rent, however, is anybody’s guess, but at least we don’t feel as if we’re squandering our hard-earned on buying actual tickets to see the wretched things.

So what advantages does going to the cinema actually give you for your extra pennies admission fee, apart from the opportunity to buy popcorn at over-inflated prices and spend more on two tickets for one performance than you will on an entire month’s movie rental?

The opportunity to sit through a seemingly endless sequence of adverts that precede the movie and which now seem to be trying to entice everyone into a world I know nothing of. It’s all for a life of video games, night clubs and expensive cars that really seems irrelevant to any kind of a life that I might be living.

Do people really fritter away that many of their precious few hours on this earth playing endless games about shooting each other or driving fast…? Is that what we’ve evolved into?

Otherwise, I endured some dreadful trailers for movies I wouldn’t ever venture out to watch, like some Jason Statham nonsense that failed to receive the derisive jeers from the room which I expected it to, but seemed to actually be quite popular amongst my fellow audience members.

Well, it takes all sorts.

Another trailer did cheer me up as it showed a rather raddled looking old Mel Gibson trying to rediscover both his youth and his credibility. As for the ravages of time that have treated him so unfairly, well, I haven’t felt so happy since I saw MI: “Ghost Protocol” and noticed that Tom Cruise is developing a backside almost as huge and saggy as my own is. We all end up sitting on porridge, you know, Tom, despite your many pacts with whoever gave you your lifestyle. Even those so-called “hard bodies” you see sweating and straining away their lives in the gyms will one day look down at the effects of gravity on their aging bodies and wonder what became of it all.

Hmmmm…. When I started writing this today, it was going to be about something else entirely. It even had a different title and a different publishing date.

Still… Plans change…

Maybe I’ll write about what I meant to write about tomorrow, or… Maybe I won’t…

Plans change.