Helen Cox edits New Empress Magazine, and she’s got something to say.
Don’t know if you’d heard, but last week Ridley Scott released his first sci-fi film since the 1982 genre breakthrough: Blade Runner. You may also have heard that a lot of people came out after seeing this film feeling disappointed, disgruntled and confused. The probable problem? They believed the hype.
Helen Cox edits New Empress Magazine and she’s got something to say...
Anyone else remember a time when Orange adverts were actually funny? Back in 2003 some pretty ingenious marketing bod had the idea of partnering with cinemas to create a 2 for 1 evening even though mobile phones have nothing to do with cinema and have, in fact, made the cinematic experience decidedly worse. For an idea like that to succeed you need a way of making it look like something more than just a transparent promotional ploy: enter Brennan Brown (Mr Dresden) and Steve Furst (Dresden’s balding sidekick Elliot) - the fictional dimbo-dumbo Orange executives who lord over the Orange Film Board and have sworn an oath to promote the phone, the whole phone and nothing but the phone.
Helen Cox edits New Empress Magazine, and she’s got something to say...
A strange and frightening phenomenon is sweeping the British multiplex: picturegoers everywhere are being short changed when it comes to the quality of their tickets. Once over it was possible to go to the cinema, pay your £4 (we are talking a long time ago here) and be presented in return with a sturdy ticket stub that clearly marked the date, film and, often, the showing time. Now, in the standard multiplex cinema and even in some independent cinemas, your grossly inflated £8-12 gets you a slip of flimsy receipt paper printed in patchy ink that fades and decays after just a few weeks. On the surface this may seem something of a trivial issue but it is a little bit galling that the price of cinema tickets constantly rises (the British Film Institute reported that admissions were down 2.4% in 2010 but box office takings were up – thank you 3D) whilst the cinematic experience itself becomes increasingly substandard – even down to the smallest stubby detail.
