newstatesman.com

Until the advent of luxury cinemas, I never realised that the moviegoing experience could accommodate quite so much pretentiousness. Having avoided such venues since an unhappy visit to the then-new, swanky-model Screen on the Green a few years ago (from punk to plush in just over three decades—that’s progress), I hadn’t allowed them to impinge on my life. But finding myself at a multi-screen London cinema a few weeks back, having set out to see This Must Be the Place without realising that it was showing in the venue’s sole razzle-dazzle auditorium rather than in one of the sticky-floored, rat-infested ones, I swallowed my pride, coughed up the premium ticket price and stole shame-facedly into the darkness.

The bar at the back of the auditorium glowed faintly, and the usher-turned-temporary-barkeep bade me a good evening. That was, for me, the first entertainment-killer. I don’t like being pampered: all it does is induce waves of guilt in me. I don’t like it in hotels, on planes, and certainly not in cinemas. It gets in the way. But that’s my problem. The real issue with the usher-turned-temporary-barkeep is that he had to stay on duty, sitting at the end of my row, throughout the screening, just in case I required an emergency mimosa with accompanying salted pretzels.

More