Due to the recent ability to watch newly released films on the internet, I hadn’t been to the cinema in a very long time. In fact, the last time I went to the cinema it was to watch the fifth Harry Potter film in July of last year. Similar to all the previous Harry Potter films, ‘The Order of the Phoenix’ added, changed and deleted vital bits of the storyline, therefore completely ruining any slight chance of pleasure for the millions of people that had read the book beforehand. Of course, most films that are based on novels completely obliterate all resemblance to the original plot and so by the end of the movie, the only thing that has stayed the same is the title. Hollywood has always had the tendency to take something good, turn it into something bad and still make a large profit out of it by selling it at very high prices. Overall, the Harry Potter movie was a big disappointment, so much so that it put me off paying to watch something that really was only going to depress me.

But being able to watch films on your computer means that you can watch what you want, where you want and, even more appealing, you can skip through the boring parts. And it is free. However, with the release of “Hancock”, a film that I thought should only be seen on the large screen for maximum pleasure as it features Will Smith playing an anti-hero type superhero who combines fighting bad guys with drinking and rebelling against the masses to a comical effect, I decided to try the whole cinema experience again.

The first thing that I did wrong was to try and book the tickets via the cinema telephone line. They had one of those computer voice recognition systems in place that required me to say the name of the movie that I wanted to watch about ten trillion times before I got to the right one. And then I had to use the trial and error method for half an hour until I got to a free time slot. Why don’t they just tell you which times are free and ask you which one you want to go to? After this of course, I found out that the cinema is tucked away in some remote part of Chichester that takes about an hour to walk to from the train station and another hour to get lost, buy a map and then walk along a small footpath to get to. It was not a fun start to my day.