I’ve watched two films in the last two days, The Muppets (at the cinema) and Moneyball (on Blu-ray) and aside from the quality of the movies themselves, I was struck by how absolutely irritating the two experiences were, for completely avoidable reasons.
The Muppets was preceded by no less than three different messages from three different organisations about why cinema was great and piracy wasn’t so much. One of them, depicting a dusty, cobweb-ridden abandoned cinema, seemed designed to inflict deep guilt on the viewer for potentially letting a mythical post-cinema future come into being. I, needless to say, was sat in a cinema as I watched this, and I had paid just under £30 for the privilege. I’m not sure I needed a massive slab of remorse for causing something I clearly wouldn’t be responsible for. Another, ostensibly to advertise cinema advertising (…yep), featured Ray Winstone slowly cockneying up and down the aisles with gravitas, patronisingly telling me that he goes to the cinema for the experience, apparently. Well, he must be having a very different experience to me, because I’m having one where Ray Winstone is threateningly trying to sell me advertising space.
(Later, on my way out of the cinema I walked past a group of people who were on their way in to watch The Phantom Menace 3D, and they were dressed-up (quite professionally-so) as Star Wars characters. That’s the kind of effort some people are making for their cinema trips. Surely they don’t need to be sold to?)
The Moneyball Blu-ray was a US disc, bought on import. Before getting to the menu screen and being able to actually press ‘play’. I was forced to sit through a full ten minutes of stuff that I didn’t want to watch, but had no choice other than to do so. There were three trailers for other movies – one in particular that looked astonishingly bad, seemingly a weepy inspirationathon about a group of dads who invented a charter in which they promised to be… wait for it… good dads – followed by a very lengthy, generic and completely redundant advert for the Blu-ray platform itself. (Seriously, what is the point of that? Congratulations?) Of course there was an anti-piracy message as well, this time including a hideously long piece of small print that flashed on and off the screen for a second, that I guarantee no-one, including the person who wrote it, has ever read. I spent most of those ten minutes pressing buttons on my remote to try and skip to the menu, and bitterly complaining that it just wouldn’t let me do it. By the time I got to Moneyball being allowed to start I was just exasperated.
I understand about piracy. I get that it is illegal and bad. I really don’t need to be told off about it.
I have never pirated anything in my life, besides taping a few songs off the radio onto C90 cassettes when I was about nine years old. I wouldn’t want to think about how much I’ve spent on music, movies and games in the last twenty years, but it’s safe to say it’ll likely be a five figure sum (*shudders*). However, both the cinema and Blu-ray experience were markedly spoilt for me by the preachy, overly-authoritative way that they were presented.
It shouldn’t be like this for the customers who are doing it the honest way.
Writers, actors, directors, producers, artists, musicians and other creative people are working hard to create incredible pieces of art. Should it be such an irritating experience to access it?
Shady Gaff 