We went, not to one of our usual city-size multiplexes in the retail parks of north London, or to the run-down three-screen Odeon in near-ish Muswell Hill, but to a cinema I’d never visited before – the Barbican in the City. Inside the screening room, people were drinking wine. Sweet and Lowdown, about a virtuoso guitarist called Emmet (Penn) and his laundress wife, Hattie (Morton), seemed a terrible prospect. I could be persuaded to go outside the action genre, but drama usually had to mean time travel and comedy a steady rate of jokes about penises. I was 18 at the time but by no means finished negotiating the borderland between teenage and adult tastes and I still favoured films with bangs and airborne car crashes and orchestra-scored baddie kills. The choice was a friend’s: I had to be persuaded. That was a real rite-of-passage outing – to see Sweet and Lowdown, the director’s eccentric ode to Prohibition-era jazz musicians, starring Sean Penn and Samantha Morton.
I went to see my first Woody Allen on the big screen in the summer of 2000. Rare gem? Sean Penn, right, in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown. How had we come to watch the way we watched? And in this way it took a robust £1m at the UK box office.ĭozing in the screening of Café Society, expensively sugared and with a preposterous little garden of legroom to unfurl into, and now clued up to the option to skip the cinema entirely next time in favour of a stream, I thought about how that term “box office” and how it was more unhelpful, more figurative, than ever. Last autumn, the independent British film 45 Years was made available to stream on the same day it premiered in cinemas.
Just under a third of the UK population now streams films and this year sales of digitally streamed or downloaded movies outstripped sales of DVDs for the first time.Īs traditional behaviour has changed, so has tradition: that well-grooved route for a movie, for instance, from cinema to DVD to telly, is now crisscrossed and complicated by internet-enabled detours. To phones that with the right software could call up hundreds of thousands of feature films. To cinema seats resembling pool loungers. As Allen’s film played I lay on the near-horizontal, watching it down my nose and trying not to fall asleep during the slow bits like an old man in front of the snooker – asking myself how we’d got here.
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