Fun with chalk and blackboards at the Odeon Covent Garden.

The Odeon Covent Garden has always had terrific film introduction game. Usually, a screen is devoted to one film only, but I've noticed they've recently mixed it up a bit more, so there's more variety in the films they show.

Here are two introductions that tickled me, whether it be for the font, wording used, or in the latter case, the creative way they squeezed five film titles onto one board!

Of course, this BBFC nerd's eye was drawn to how, coincidentally, all five of these films were 15-rated! Although one of them really ought not to be.

Nobody's gonna drag Harry down.

I was perusing Awards Daily's FYC gallery when I noticed this ad Warner Brothers put out for Dunkirk:

In case that shade was a little too nuanced, here's a list of actors who WB are campaigning for:

It's of trifling importance as bar Mark Rylance, none of the cast really have a shot at an Oscar nomination (and even for Rylance, with no show at the Golden Globes, SAGs or even the London Film Critics' Circle, that's an uphill battle), but I couldn't help thinking that Warner Brothers are shading Harry Styles somewhat by not listing him here.

I wasn't bowled over or anything by Harry Styles in Dunkirk (he did what he had to do, no more, no less, but was definitely more successful transitioning into acting than his former beardgirlfriend Cara Delevingne), but given he got to act 'angry' and Christopher Nolan used both of his PG-13-mandated allowances of the f-word on Styles, it seems somewhat amiss not to at list him here. It certainly couldn't hurt, IMO, and bar Rylance, who was the standout performer, the gulf in acting quality between Styles and the rest of his co-stars certainly wasn't that palpable.

So it's a bit harsh for Warner Brothers to be tacitly saying 'young Fionn Whitehead is worth the adspace... but you? Nah.'

As a side note, back when Dunkirk first hit UK cinemas in July, I was tickled by this e-mail we got from the Odeon:

Interesting that here, they've focused on the two Peaky Blinders and Inception/Dark Knight Rises actors, Cillian Murphy and Tom Hardy (who British audiences would more likely to be familiar with), thesp Kenneth Branagh and of course, the pretty boy Styles himself, yet omitted Oscar-winner Mark Rylance as a result.

It reminded me of what Nolan said about casting Styles in his movie, 'I saw thousands of young men, but Harry just had something that the rest didn't.'

I believe that 'something' in question is the ability to draw in randy teenage girls by their droves. ;)

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I saw this pun in The Sun, and I kind of loved it:

A ranking exercise (part 1)

I gave an R class on Thursday, where I showed how you can sort a dataset by more than one criteria. Here, it's sorted by BBFC rating, then IFCO rating, then alphabetically to give a rough outline of all the films I watched on my Odeon Limitless card (over two subscription years) from childish to most adult

My challenge to you: within the blocks of where the BBFC and IFCO ratings are the same (so for example, the first three films in the table), re-rank them so that the list of most childish to most adult is more accurate. Obviously this is a totally subjective exercise, but, give it a go!

Professor Marston and the Small Screen.

I'm very excited about Professor Marston and the Wonder Women. Luke Evans aka Gaston plays the title character, a psych professor who created the Wonder Woman character, who was inspired by two women: his wife, and his wife's girlfriend. 

His missus is played by the fierce Cambridge alumni Rebecca Hall, and their lover is played by Bella Heathcote, who's striking good looks were one of the few redeeming factors of that trashy The Neon Demon.

The film opens in UK cinemas this Friday, and in booking my seat, at one of Leicester Square Odeon's studios, I was struck by how tiny the cinema (and thus, the screen) was!

5 x 6 = 30, + 3 = 33.

A cinema which seats merely 33 people!

Is that the smallest cinema you've seen, or can you go even lower?

Happy Questionnaire Day.

Before I saw Happy Death Day on Saturday, representatives from Universal presented me with this survey which is, er, comprehensive, to say the least:

Needless to say, I didn't fill the whole thing in, but, Universal reps, if you're reading, I gave your film a 7/10. I thought it was nonsense, but unchallenging, enjoyable nonsense, anchored by a fine comedic turn from Jessica Rothe (the one in the green dress dancing behind Bugeyes in La La Land) and I also enjoyed the presence of Ruby Modine (aka Matthew Modine's daughter), who is very pretty, a decent actress, and testament to the good kind of nepotism (the bad kind being Cokehead Delevingne, naturally).

Also at the cinema, I saw this rather striking poster for My Little Pony: The Movie.

Statistical Analysis of Usage of My Odeon Limitless Card

I went on a 4-hour R course last year, and since then, I’ve just been fixated with adapting the code they gave us to draw pretty graphs with, in order to nerd out over my personal interests (chiefly, films and football).

This post will be much like the one I did six months ago when I analysed my film-watching habit of 2016 across all mediums, only here, I’m just analysing the 69 titles I saw on my Odeon Limitless card with some attempts at ~science behind the graphs I present.

Review: ODEON LIMITLESS CARD

After being underwhelmed by the limited range of films offered by the (ironically named) Cineworld Unlimited card, I voted with my wallet and defected to the Odeon Limitless card as a means of watching as many films as I wanted to in the year instead.

In terms of cinemas, the venues ranged from plush, comfortable and state-of-the-art (the newly renovated Orpington Odeon is as luxurious as any cinema I’ve been to, and one of the finest things about my otherwise fairly humdrum hometown) to scummy and very badly maintained (Birmingham, where I saw Lights Out, had muck all over the floor, as well as brats watching the film who were clearly under-15).

Is this, the start of something wonderful and new?

Or one more dream that I cannot make true?

Restaurant review: CREAMS CAFE (Orpington)

As part of Orpington's attempt to make itself more attractive to property buyers, the town is undergoing something of a revamp. It now has a bright, shiny new Odeon (super-handy for me as I have an Odeon Unlimited card!) as well as a whole array of recently-constructed restaurants and cafés. I decided to give the Creams Café my patronage one Saturday evening, pre-Bad Moms.

I've been to one Creams Café before, in Wembley, and in terms of quality of the dessert, I'd say the north-west and south-east London venues are comparable. You get plenty of bang for your buck at Creams Café - the bubblegum sundae pictured above was only £4.95, and in addition to being delectable, was more than even I could hope for; I wasn't able to finish it all. 

And it's not just bubblegum sundaes they do, there's a wide range of dishes offered on the menu, from waffles to sundaes, with every ice cream flavour you could possibly want. Multiple kinds of chocolate flavours, some with chips in, some without, fruit sorbets, etc. When trying to decide on a dish, I felt, quite literally, like a kid in a candy store.

So purely from a food and monetary point of view, Creams Café certainly suffices. Why anything less than an A-grade rating, then? Well, I'm sorry to report that the quality of the service was just not up to scratch. My friend ordered both mine and her choices, and for her dessert, they brought the wrong order to our table. 

What had happened was that when ordering, she had pointed to her choice on the menu, and the inattentive sales assistant had keyed in another choice. After taking the wrong order away, they insisted on seeing her receipt, which made us very anxious, because they were treating us like criminals for their mistake. They finally made the dessert she had originally ordered, which was 20p more than the dish they charged her for. My friend offered to foot the difference, but the manager said 'don't worry, it's on the house'. 

It's not really 'on the house' when she paid for 97% of it, and had been delayed in receiving it due to the sheer incompetence of the sales staff who couldn't be arsed to listen in the first place, is it? So stop pretending you're doing us a massive favour pal.

Creams Café do a bomb sweet treat. This I'm not refuting. But if you go to the one in Orpington, I'd just warn you keep your eyes open and check that what you ordered is what the teenagers who work there keyed in. They don't seem to have much in the way of Quality Control at this place; you'll have to do it instead.

Grade: B