Movie Times

I've never really and truly enjoyed going to the cinema.  Even when I was little, and it was presented as a treat...nine times out of ten I'd always end up being led out in tears anyway.  It was just too...well, dark in there.  Too intense.  The screen was too big and bright and loud, and I found it deeply unnerving that you weren't allowed to move or talk (this was quite a long time ago, remember).

When I look back on my childhood dislike of the cinema I think it was borne of the fact that it's just too much life...there on that huge screen, presented for you to give it your full attention.  As somebody who has always pretty much drifted through life, planning mostly nothing, with things happening by accident here and there, that was always going to be a pretty daunting concept.  Even now, I usually always find myself welling up in the cinema, even if the film isn't conducive to it.  You can't not care about the people on the screen; can't help relating the plot to your own life and getting all existential about what it all actually means...while a poignant soundtrack plays in the background.

(Ahem.  Well, that's what it's like for me, at any rate).

I worked in a cinema as an usherette once, when I was eighteen.  It was 1995 and the summer blockbusters were Judge Dredd, Die Hard with a Vengeance, Free Willy 2 and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.  Now, please don't envy me when I say I had to watch these films about three times a day, every day.  The scripts for all of them are burned onto my brain, even now.

Sometimes I would sit there, in my little bucket seat by the doors, clad in a skirt pinned up at the back with a huge safety pin and a blouse whose sleeves I'd had to roll up due to them coming past my hands (there were no uniforms left in my size and being as I was temporary staff, they were reluctant to order me one) - and I'd just mouth all the words.  Occasionally I'd flash my torch into the audience just as the film got to a 'jumpy' bit; that was my lame idea of relieving the stupefying boredom.  Or there'd be someone kicking the seats, and it'd be my job to tell them to stop.  The first time I did that was pretty terrifying, actually.  I'd never so much as said the proverbial boo to a goose, and now here I was, having to tell a great big man with a shaved head to stop kicking the seat in front of him!

With extreme trepidation and my heart threatening to leap out of my chest, I approached him.  I switched on my torch and shone it right into his face, as though he were a police suspect. "I'm going to ask you politely; will you please keep your feet off the seats?"

Whether I'd shamed him with my politeness or he'd just felt some sympathy with my strange pinned-back-and-rolled-up attire and the fact that my voice was trembling more than, say, it would have sounded had I been standing on a washing machine in full-spin, he duly did what I asked.  He even added a genuine-sounding "Sorry".  I went back to my bucket-seat with a feeling of elation I'd never previously experienced.  That incident went quite a long way to creating the 'dragon-lady' persona that followed (sorry my family, friends, vague acquaintances and everybody I've ever worked with).

As I got older, I realised that my disenchantment with the cinema didn't centre quite so much on the film or the big, bright 'n' loud screen, but with the other people sitting in the room with you.  That doesn't just extend to strangers; these days I choose my cinema-partners carefully due to the fact that I've previously been to see films with people who have committed the following crimes:

• Fallen asleep and then started snoring loudly
• Behaved as though we were just lounging around at home; loudly commenting on the film's events and characters: "Oh - I recognise him...what else has he been in?"  "Oooh, that wasn't very nice was it?" (poking my arm) "WAS IT?" 
• Gone off to the toilet just as the film's started, then expected me to fill them in with what they missed as soon as they got back
• Taken me to see a grisly horror under the guise of it being 'plain old science fiction' (the culprit was a man I'd started seeing; the film was Event Horizon.  I spent the entire film sitting in the cinema with my eyes squeezed shut.  We didn't last long)

So you see, for me the cinema is a complex place...full of fear, frustration and life-changing events.  You could say it has the basis of a Hollywood blockbuster, really.  Or at least a low-budget British sleeper hit.