Gravity

Off for the first visit for quite a few years to the cinema at Waterloo Roundabout, better known to me for its Bullingdon stand, a stand which only rarely fails me. Off to a slightly wobbly start, finding their web site a bit of a struggle, not least because when you get to the bit where it says select your location, you fail on both W for Waterloo and L for London, having completely failed to realise that the place is filed under B for BFI IMAX. Got through that, so then for a modest premium I acquired a couple of premium seats, to find out later that, apparently unbeknown to their web site, there are two sorts of premium seat, one sort with width and another sort with width and leg room. I managed to chose the former, but hopefully I will get it right on any future occasion. And so onto the cinema itself, rather swisher than I remember but without the Virgin style hostess in smart red uniform to introduce the proceedings, having to make do with a young host in civvies, not the same thing at all. But he did claim that the screen was the largest in the UK and it was certainly very impressive, in shape more like an old-style television screen, high for its width.

The film in question was 'Gravity' which has, it seems, made a great deal of money out of a heart-warming if thin plot, livened up with shots of a middle aged film star swimming around a space station in her undies (older readers might remember Barbarella), shots of & from space and various 3D special effects. Good for people of my age and station in having very little sex or violence of the ordinary sort, the sort of thing one gets in, for example, 'Game of Thrones'.

The picture quality was indeed very good and some of the 3D effects were startling, but in the end rather disappointing. It seemed to work best with large tubular structures - in the way, for example, of an electricity pylon or a space station - perhaps because this sort of image can be worked up with the likes of the AutoCAD package mentioned on the first of yesterday's posts. But most of the time it was rather if someone had built a set in the way of an theatre set with painted flats lining both sides of the stage and then had a few people (and other objects)  flying around the stage. So most of what you saw was rather two dimensional, but arranged on several flats, rather than the one flat of regular films. In fact, a moving version of those books of hologram pictures one used to buy as Christmas presents for a while. The ones which you had to stare at for a while, until the holographic image jumped into view, perhaps of several cut out animals pasted into a cardboard box. Clever stuff but not yet worked up into cinema. For the moment, not much more than a novelty.

The sound system was very good too, but the sound track was poor, often far too loud and thumpy. Entirely missed the opportunity to point up the emptiness and silence of space with something light and ethereal. I seem to recall that the not that dissimilar '2001' did rather better in this department, but memory might be playing tricks again (see next pasragraph).

Exit to inspect the arty jigsaws being offered by the discount bookshop diagonally opposite the Old Vic, and decided, in the end, against Goya's clothed maja, being rather put out on the way by discovering that I no longer knew the difference between the clothed and unclothed version, despite having once seen them side by side (with only the Rokeby Venus in between) at some point in the past. And then that I needed a serious nudge before I remembered that it is getting on for a year since the academic German Pope had been superseded by the cuddly Argentinian one. Memory clearly getting more than a bit tacky at the edges.

On to pay a long overdue visit to the Duke of Sussex, a pub of which I have fond memories and which once hosted a fine Christmas lunch for a bunch of us from the Treasury, memorably enlivened towards the end by a bunch of Frenchies from Eurostar. But I was, I am pleased to be able to say, on parade at more or less the right time the following morning. Last night, again for the first time for a while, I took a couple of pints, a couple of pints of something called Trelawny from the St. Austell brewery, a gang I know better for something called Tribute, although this last seems to have been somewhat pushed aside by the more aggressively marketed Doombar. Very good they were too. Company interesting, as ever, despite the train drivers' corner seeming to have moved on a bit.

And so to the semi-fast train to Epsom, on which I discovered that real phone users can manage the things one handed, typing their messages with the thumb. I clearly have some way to go if I want to stay in the game.

PS: the trailer for a 3D version of the Hobbit made it look like the sort of thing that I would not enjoy at all. Perhaps more suitable for adolescent boys into dungeons and dragons (or today's equivalent).