Restless crowds make all the wrong noises

What a brilliant movie it is, so stylised with beautiful sets. It was amazingly over authentic and deserved every award it got.

The lead actor, Jean Dujardin, was as good as I had been told and so charming with it.

It’s true what they say, films that win awards boost their sales enormously. The Dominion Cinema 2 was sold out when I was there.

I love the family-owned and run Dominion, but I have decided that I prefer its smaller space, rather than Cinema 2. This is because as The Artist is a silent movie there were some scenes that were exceptionally quiet, but you could hear people eating their popcorn and slurping and sniffing, which was incredibly off-putting.

To top that, when it was almost silent in parts, with no music at all, you could hear the thunder from the sound effects of the film in the cinema upstairs. Not good really and not the Dominion’s fault, people seem to expect to be able to make as much noise as they like at the movies because, normally, film soundtracks are usually so loud these days. That’s one of the reasons why The Artist was such a good homage to the silent movies of old, with a simple story well told.

Funnily enough, audiences on the whole are pretty noisy. Since television has taken over lives, people actually sit in theatres as part of the audience and think that the actors/performers can’t see them. Believe me, they can and having the kind of audience who feel it is OK to give a running commentary of the show, eat their way through packets of sweets or to pop to the loo whenever the urge takes them really puts performers off.

Toilet breaks are also the bane of a stand-up’s life. Just as the comedian is doing their best to perform, all these beer-swilling boys and girls have to rush off for a pee every few minutes. The hazards of the job, I guess, although for the late-night stand-up comic who has their act interrupted, as we all know, it is often the escaping audience member that is left feeling a prize pratt.