Monday, October 19, 2009

Standards are slipping?

In the old days, newspapers NEVER had typos, but they tend to have a fair few these days (sorry, it's the Editor in me). Similarly, I've started to notice standards in the cinema slipping too!!!
Went to see Zombieland last week and they repeated the trailer for Saw 6 twice... Maybe it was deliberate...but I can't see why...Mistake!!
And then on Saturday I saw Korean movie Thirst...and halfway through, it went really strange... The story started to jump around a lot... I thought 'hmm has the projector gone all funny?'. It really wasn't making sense... A character suddenly was paralysed, and then later we saw how it happened... Another character suddenly disappeared and only later we found out what happened to them...
I put it down to quirky storytelling, as I was still able to 'get' the movie, but I compared notes with my chums today and I started to get suspicious. Turns out I was correct - the screening I saw just wasn't right! So I emailed the cinema to warn them about future screenings and it turned out that a 'trainee projectionist' messed it up!!!!
So I got two complimentary tickets :-)

3 comments:

JamieB said...

Sometimes it pays to complain...

Did I ever tell you about the first time I saw Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai"? This was at the NFT, and there were no subtitles. Instead, there was a live translation provided by a terribly, terribly well-spoken British lady piped to every seat through these huge heavy bakelite headphones. If that wasn't bizarre enough, the projectionist screwed up the order of the reels there too. So, the number of bandits that our heroes had killed went up and down like a yoyo while, over the headphones, there was a furious rustling of pages as the spoken-translation lady tried to work out what the h*ck was happening!

And, no, I didn't complain -- I enjoyed it too much to do that!

Mart said...

I think you mentioned that before yes.
It's funny how we can still understand the movies though!
I can't imagine a posh woman saying all the samurai's lines...

JamieB said...

It is funny -- it's like watching something meant for the TV screen in some cr*ppy low-res stream on a laptop screen. You're sure beforehand that you can't possibly enjoy watching something that way, but then you get into it and forget about that stuff...

Years later I went to see "Last Tango in Paris" at the NFT -- the first time it had been shown in a British cinema since its original release. That did have subtitles. So I missed out on some terribly, terribly well-spoken British lady having to say lines like, "Ten years from now you'll be playing football with your t*ts". Shame...