I love a good story, especially about something inspirational that changes lives. Lawrence of Arabia was my first encounter with a person who made a difference and through reading and movie-going, I have encountered many more. They are remarkable people who changed our perspectives and whose stories enhance our own lives, through the skilful retelling of their stories, by great producers and directors. Sometimes, like Ghandi, Erin Brockovich, and Mandela, they are figures of our times, who teach us moral lessons and show us what we can achieve together. At other times they are purely fiction, recreated from a novel but they teach us valuable moral lessons about the nature of others and ourselves. If not for the wonderful but brutal portrayal of Dian Fossy in Gorillas in the Mist, I doubt that there would be many of those wonderful primates left in the wild.
Movies can move mountains. I will never forget the blanket silence that enveloped the audience of Spielberg's Schindler's List at the ABC cinema in 1993: One of the most poignant cinema-going moments that I have ever experienced. If anyone born post-war was ever in doubt about the evil of Nazism and why we fought in World War Two, the three hours of powerful film-making that they had just experienced left them with no doubt.
The power of a movie to influence opinion can be exploited. Power corrupts. Ultimate power corrupts ultimately. Working only to entertain for profit can have a negative effect on young minds and behaviour. Watering down dialogue and increasing the level of violence, purely to appeal to a global audience, reduces effective storytelling. I am not saying that all the movies in the past were wonderful. I just think that the current level of violence aimed at young people is excessive and that those with so much influential power should be mindful when yielding it.
In January this year I went to the launch of The Winter Gardens Film Festival at Blackpool Opera House, with two girlfriends. It was a magical evening, with a pre-show cocktail in the art deco bar, the Wurlitzer organ playing before descending into the stage, then the movie: Black and white (as was the dress code for the event). It was the original 1930's version of 42nd Street and included so many sexist remarks and violence towards women, that we three feminists were shocked. There's one thing that cinemas has helped to change. There was a jazz duo in the bar afterwards and it was lovely to really dress for the occasion. The tickets were £7.50 and I highly recommend the experience to you all for next year.
I wrote the poem in 2010 and although I have managed to worm out some excellent big-screen experiences in the mean time, my overall opinion remains the same.
On the Shoulders of Giants.
I love a
night at the movies,
A
feature in through most of my life,
The cost
of the theatre was always outrageous,
For my
father of four and his wife.
But he
took us along to view Zulu,
And Can
Can in Manchester too,
I dragged
Nana to see Sound of Music,
We went
several times: Technicolor was new.
The
Gaumont was stuffy and smoky,
With
overstuffed plush velvet seats,
An
usherette guided us in with a torch:
During
the interval, sold ice-cream and sweets.
The
studios told us a story,
with
passion, with skill and with style
Hitchcock
intrigued us, then scared us,
Musicals
made us all dance in the aisles.
Eastwood
was dirty as Harry,
A magnum
tucked under his coat,
Then Clyde
the orang sent us ape with his punches
I
laughed so much at Airplane, I just couldn’t cope.
In the
glorious nineteen seventies,
Scorsese
sizzled and Coppolla soared,
Lucas
launched the light-sabre,
Brian
had a life,
Oh my
God how we roared.
I still feel myself on the edge of my seat,
As
Spielberg’s monstrous ‘Jaws’,
Munched
into box-office history,
A Great
White blockbuster: but look what it caused.
When Cameron
sank the Titanic
She went
down spectacularly,
But he
didn’t raise her and sink her again
In
Titanic two and three.
I used
to love going to movies,
until
Stephen attempted Jaws 4 in 3D.
Jurassic
Park opened the gates to extinction
Of
everything I loved to see.
The sequel,
The
prequel,
The
crappy 3D-quel,
Just
rolled on their way,
They had
nothing to say,
We went napalming into the nineties, The budgets exploded beyond exponential
and up by the power of three.
Comic book heroes in trios,
rebooted, re-caped, on a spree.
Homogenised, Superman movies,
with watered down dialogue, are not for me.
When Jackson adventured with Tolkien,
I accepted there had to be three.
It hadn’t escaped my attention
that Lord of the Rings was a trilogy,
though trebling up on a Hobbit
seems rather offensive. I hope you agree.
The rise
of the cinema complex
has
altered the industry.
The
closing of beautiful buildings,
The
Regent, The Princess, The Tivoli,transformed into pool halls and night spots.
No place for the family.
And oh how our choices have narrowed,
with every screen showing the same,
A Mega-bot sequel,
A Mega-size
Pepsi
and
Mega-big popcorn,for one Mega-bucks fee.
When
asked why they churn out more robots,
the
studios simply say,comedy and dialogue don’t travel well,
explosions can net £20 million a day.
Will our children understand prejudice,
without films like The Rabbit-Proof Fence,
or consider the rape of an Afghani boy,
if The Kite Runner isn’t made in his defence.
If there is a filmmaker listening,
I’d love more like Amelie,
I'd like my 'third-kind–close-encounters’
to be truly amazing. Not just one of three.
I still love
going out to a movie,
not watching tax-dodging flix on TV, I want to be moved by the story,
I like a film speaking to me.
Give me more makers like Kubrick,
more actors as good as Carloff,
Now they stand of the shoulders of giants
And all
they can do is fall off.
Thanks for reading, Adele
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