For various reason, I only made it to the cinema once, so the winner is a foregone conclusion.

Let Me In is an American remake of the classic Swedish film, Let The Right One in. During the making of this film, we were promised that it would be a different take on the source, focussing more closely on the burgeoning relationship between Oskar and Eli (renamed Owen and Abby), and the relationship between Eli and her carer. This remake fails to deliver. What we get appears to be a somewhat neutered cut of the director’s vision: following the plot of the original very closely, sometimes shot for shot, but replacing the uneasy menace with some more obvious action scenes. There are moments where it shines. The few moments that Richard Jenkins gets he puts to great use, especially the scene he’s hiding in a car. Largely, though, it’s disappointingly similar to the original, without many fresh ideas. (See my Let Me In Twitter review).

In another month it wouldn’t have gotten through, but Let Me In is obviously the November winner.

October was an even busier month for cinema than September, with 6 films in total:

Winter’s Bone is a grim story of desperation in an isolated community. A young girl is forced to raise her brother and sister due to an ill mother and an absent father. When said father skips bail, she’s forced to look for him in places where she should not be asking questions. The film is vicious and dark, and paints an interesting picture of a rural family. It’s well put together, but features some fairly unnecessary moments of questionable animal scenes. That aside, it’s a good film. (See my Winter’s Bone Twitter review).

The Town is a surprisingly good crime-thriller, following bank robbers in Boston as they become more involved in a job than they should. The story stands up by itself surprisingly well, with very little waste. There are some good performances too, with Jeremy Renner as particularly notable. A few too many establishing shots aside (yes, I know we’re in Boston, move on), Ben Affleck does a great job in the director’s chair. Along with Gone Baby Gone, he’s showing some real talent on that front. Well worth seeing. (See my The Town Twitter review).

Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake show the problems with mixing business and pleasure in the story of Facebook, The Social Network. While I’m sure the story has been dramatised more than a little, it’s a good one, and well-structured. Framing the story through the telling of two lawsuits against Mark Zuckerberg gives the film the pace it needs to be interesting, without losing the audience. David Fincher proves himself again as a must-see director, with a real mastery of storytelling and simple, clean visuals (even if the reality of a shot is much more complicated). A good story. (See my The Social Network Twitter review).

The original Wall Street was a classic movie, capturing a time and place perfectly through a story of loyalty, betrayal, decency and the shady face of capitalism, Gordon Gekko. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, at best, captures a fairly flimsy, dumbed-down vision of the same environment two decades on. It fails on a number of fronts: the dialogue is awful, the acting is perfunctory, the direction is scattershot, and the story is nonsense. Frank Langella puts in a great early performance and is easily the best member of the cast, while the character of Gordon Gekko shows some promise in his behind-the-scenes trickery. We’re never shown why we should care about any of the other characters, so we simply don’t. By the time the cringeworthy final act appears (“See? They’re not such bad guys. Let’s have a party!”), you’ll care very little about this waste of film. Avoid. (See my Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps Twitter review).

In Despicable Me, Steve Carrell really helps sketch a great villian in the shape of Gru, the evil mastermind who feels underminded by his mother and feels he has to out-do his rivals. At first, he’s a little Wile E. Coyote, but quickly finds a sweet side that adds some depth. That’s where this film delivers: as a sweet film about a grouchy villian finding his humanity. Funny and fun.  (See my Despicable Me Twitter review).

Finally, Paranormal Activity 2 serves as a prequel of sorts to the events of the first film, but fails to capture the simple but effective scares on show there, going for louder and bigger moments. Some of them work for sheer shock value, but it quickly pales by comparison. Given the horror in this kind of film is rooted in suspension of disbelief, casting Sprague Grayden as one of the bigger characters was a mistake. While she puts in a great performance, it was impossible to take her seriously in the role given her work on some big TV shows (24, Jericho, Sons of Anarchy). If you’re looking for a Halloween scare, you could do worse, but I wouldn’t go out of your way to see it. (See my Paranormal Activity 2 Twitter review).

Another tough month to pick a winner. The Social Network and Winter’s Bone came very close, but I think The Town wins on the grounds of sheer enjoyability.

September was a decent enough month for cinema, with five films in the fight:

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is the latest effort from Edgar Wright. With a track record including Spaced, Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, you’d expect something a little bit special; and that’s exactly what you get. More than any film this year, Scott Pilgrim is bursting with constant visual invention that delivers the story beautifully rather than suffocating it. The story itself is sweet, funny, exciting and full of great ideas: as soon as you think you know what’s coming, the rug gets pulled from underneath you. I’ve not read the original comic, but as a standalone piece of work Scott Pilgrim Vs The World is very worthwhile. (See my Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World Twitter review).

Steve Carrell and Paul Rudd team up for a fairly meek comedy, Dinner For Schmucks. While there are some decent enough jokes (most of them focussing around the bizarre characters, particularly Zach Galifianakis), it falls flat far too often. Some of the more mean-spirited comedy just doesn’t work, and the final act is far too long: at two hours, it more than overstays its welcome. Average, at best. (See my Dinner For Schmucks Twitter review).

Dog Pound is the fairly dark story of three newcomers to a young offender’s prison. From the outset, an air of menace is maintained: from the authoritarian guards, to the beatings from other inmates, to… well, I’ll let you see. The low budget feel adds weight to the feel of increasing pressure on the boys, and helps build up the brutal final act. An excellent but dark movie. I highly recommend you see it at least once. (See my Dog Pound Twitter review).

Despite the whacky Hollywood comedy style of the trailer, Cyrus is and feels like a real indie film, and works very well because of it. The laughs never erupt, but they don’t have to: the comedy comes from the characters. All three leads really understand their parts, and play them to perfection. A good film, but not a great one. (See my Cyrus Twitter review).

Finally, The Other Guys is another great comedy from Will Ferrell and Adam Mackay, with Mark Wahlberg joining Ferrell in a bizarre buddy-cop movie. It’s pretty much what you expect from these guys: a film with great lines, over the top moments and bizarre characters. The middle act drags a little longer than it should have, but it’s a good comedy otherwise. Worth seeing. (See my The Other Guys Twitter review).

Picking a winner this month was a toughie but I think the winner is Dog Pound. Scott Pilgrim was very close, but I think the gripping discomfort of Dog Pound clinches it.

In part one, I discussed some of the fundamentals of building a cinema community that is engaging. In this part I’ll go a little further into the social aspects of such a community.

Building out from the fact that you can track, rate and recommend films, engaging in some form of debate around the merits of those films would be useful. People love to talk about films, and there are plenty of forums around to do just that but those forums don’t know a huge amount about your film habits. They can’t tell you that a discussion has just kicked off on a film you recently watched, that people are discussing a forthcoming sequel or that it’s actually a poor quality knock-off of another film. By tying the discussion of films into tracking and recommendation, you can do all of those things and more.

While the last thing the world needs is yet another social network, having some connections between accounts would be of great benefit. If I’m looking to go and see a film with a particular friend or friends, it would be easy to check the films we all want to see automatically and recommending it, rather than picking through them one by one. Turn this around: if I want to see a certain film but don’t know who wants to see it, the site could easily give me a list of my friends who also want to see it. Slightly different, have all my friends been raving about some new film that I don’t know about? Well, let me know and I can add it, see it and join in that conversation. There are a lot of interesting possibilities here.

Next, throw location into the mix and you can power another bunch of community-building features. If I genuinely don’t know anyone who wants to see a film, maybe there are some other like-minded people in my area that would like the company. A little feature to negotiate a time or set up a meeting and you get more people through the door, and a happier audience.

Probably more interesting is using the recommendation features and location together to build film groups. A bunch of people in the same area all like horror films? Encourage them to start a group to go and see all the new scary movies that appear, and discuss it later. You wouldn’t even necessarily need location for this: you could add film groups to the forum and have people across the country discuss their favourite zombie movie.

I hope I’ve shown that a handful of features, mixed and remixed, can drive a hell of a lot of interesting behaviour that would benefit the movie-going public and make a cinema chain stronger.

It’s always surprised me how little Cineworld (and other big cinema chains) have made of building a community of film-goers, especially given their Unlmited cards.

Here’s what Cineworld do right now towards engaging with customers:

• If you sign up to their website, you can keep track of your bookings, and anything you’ve ordered from their shop. Note that unlimited customers can’t advance book tickets, so that’s not helpful.
• If you sign up to their website, you can keep track of anything you buy in their shop section. Since the only thing they appear to sell is cinema gift cards, that’s not hugely handy for unlimited customers unless they’re buying for someone else.
• If you follow Cineworld on Twitter, they have competitions and info, and answer questions you may have. Handy, but not the most engaged community.

I’ll preface my ideas about how they could both improve the experience they provide for customers and their engagement by saying that as I understand it, right now, they can’t connect the use of an Unlimited card to an actual user account so those ideas are a little fanciful just now. The rest are not.

That important issue aside, a few thoughts.

First and foremost, a cinema-focussed community is about films: seeing them, discussing them, and figuring out what else we would like to see. From that:

Each film shown at Cineworld should be followable from the moment it’s added to the release schedules. They maintain a list of future releases. Users should be able to add those films to the list of films that they would like to see. Once they’re nearly out, it would then be trivial to send reminders to all interested users that whatever they want to see is nearly out.

Now, importantly, this could not only apply to future releases, but current releases and past releases. It would be useful to know when a classic film is being re-released, or shown as part of the cinema’s sporadic classic film series.

Having trackable films leads quite comfortably into having rateable films. Users should be able to give a personal rating for every film they have seen. Once you have this information, you can start to push a lot of interesting functionality. You can do things like take the noise out of the listings page. If I can view a listings page of current releases that I have not already seen, that clearly makes picking something a smoother process. Films that I had already tracked as wanting to see could be highlighted, and films the cinema think would be of interest (more later) could be too.

Additionally, if Cineworld could track viewing through Unlimited card usage, the tracking of films viewed could be automated and reminders for ratings could be sent out.

Now, knowing what the users think of each and every film, it would be possible to start employing the same ideas that have helped Amazon and Netflix: based on prior ratings, personal recommendations could be made on what to view next. This seems so obvious to me I’m surprised that no cinema chain has picked up on it. Netflix practically built their business on top of it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the first cinema chain to do this seriously disrupts their industry in the same way.

Tracking, rating and recommendation: the three obvious pillars on which to build a community. That’s just a starter. I’ll be discussing the social aspects and stickiness in part 2.