Last night’s trip to the local Vue cinema:

£10.25 per ticket, which couldn’t be purchased at the ticket office because that was closed, so had to be bought from the concessions stand and therefore involved a lot of angry people missing the start of their movies because they were queuing behind people who were buying tubs of popcorn…

…But not hot dogs, because they’d run out of hot dogs by 7.40pm on a Thursday night.

Usually the projection at the Vue cinemas is woeful (out of focus, out of rack etc) but this was a digital projection, so they couldn’t fuck it up…

…Oh, except that the projector was a little weaker than it should have been given its distance from the screen…

…Although the weakness of the image could be attributed to the fact that the cinema refuses to bring the house lights all the way down at the start of the movie for “health and safety reasons”. There was therefore a mis-aligned spotlight shining onto the right hand side of the screen for THREE HOURS.

Before the movie started, we were treated to several stern lectures and warnings about film piracy. Apparently it’s a crime to be taken very seriously because it’s destroying the entertainment industry.

Is. It. Fuck.

Cinema exhibition is dying because the big cinema exhibitors are greedy, arrogant, incompetent shitstains who care more about flogging snacks than showing movies and who have been butt-raping the public too hard and too long.

Last night’s outing cost about £30 (double that if we’d needed a babysitter).

Regardless of the quality of the movie, the quality of the cinema experience was shit.

The Blu-Ray will be out in a couple of months and will cost £15. I can watch it at home whenever, with whoever and as often as I want.

Cinema (the place, not the form) is indeed dead. But it wasn’t killed by pirates, it was fucked to death by fat sweaty middle-aged white men who weren’t smart enough to keep one of the simplest business models in the world ticking over.

R.I. fucking P.