In order to not have to give sweets to kids in Halloween costumes (how American; how ghastly!), Kathy & I went out to Bath’s new Odeon cinema last night. Yeah, I know – I ranted about their woefully inadequate web site back in July and their response to Matthew Somerville, who was …uh … doing them a favour. Five months on, and the site still blows, except they’ve added a "text-only film times" facility. "Here you go, disabled people, please use our other entrance. You know, the one you can actually use"
Right, now that’s out of my system, I can move on to the actual cinema and the film we went to see: Finding Neverland.
The cinema is bright, cavernous and airy inside. I’m always more impressed by inner-urban – rather than leisure-park – multiplexes, because they have to respond to their surroundings and use space in creative ways. So, in the space previously occupied by a Ford dealership, we have a pub, an eight-screen cinema and soon-to-be-added restaurants and a health club. Ticket prices are extortionate — £6.50 each — but we weren’t paying ‘cos we had vouchers for Christmas. Yes, last Christmas. Leg-room is in short supply, but that doesn’t bother a shorty like me.
And so to the film: Finding Neverland is a dramatised biopic of J.M. Barrie. Well, not his whole life — presumably that could take somewhat more than two hours — but rather the period during which he wrote Peter Pan. It’s sad — there’s illness and death — and I saw some of the film through misty eyes (the musical-strings-to-heartstrings interface is strong in this one). Anyway, I’m not a film reviewer so I’ll keep this short: you need to believe in fairies, or the fairies will die.
Top film – go see!