“Saturday night at the movies / Who cares what picture you see”, part 1

Today, the BBC has reported, ad nauseam (you'd think it was a slow news day), that cinema attendance in the UK is better than in most other Western countries.

These are the figures: one in four of us UK types go to the flicks at least once a month, and 75 per cent of us have been to watch something on the silver screen in the past 12 months.

Well, colour me hard to please, but it ain't that fucking impressive, is it? When Wife and I lived in north London, we used to go to the Odeon in Camden Town every Sunday. That's four times more often than is being raved about in the press. As Big Brother's Imogen might declare, "What the fuck, beb?" Were we singlehandedly keeping the UK cinema industry in business?!

I must say, though, that even before leaving London, our cinema-going had dipped. The main reason for this was the unexpected and frankly shocking closure of the wonderful George & Nikki's cafe, almost right next door to the cinema mentioned above. To use a phrase that appears only once on Google, and that will lead you back here, too: Cunt me with a cunting stick, their all-day breakfasts were to die for. Even the veggie version was phenomenal. But that's probably a post of its own.

So, getting back to the pictures...

The inimitable Candy Minx recently said, in a comment at Mister Anchovy's blog, that the cinema is "the chapel of image and community experience in imagination". Essentially I do agree with that. I believe that the movie theatre is the only place to see a film as its director intended. In practice, though, things start to get a bit rotten in the state of Denmark.

To be continued...