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.

August is the month for the big summer blockbusters, three in total.

The A-Team is a failed attempt to revive a well-loved franchise. First, the good: both Bradley Cooper and Sharlto Copley were great as Face and Murdoch, using all the right ticks for those characters. Some of the action sequences (i.e. the numerous explosions) were decent enough. That’s about it. The rest was a mish-mash of nonsensical plot, with too many pointless threads and characters. Given the film was trying to establish four strong leads, adding a half dozen other people to the mix really left little time for much else. Liam Neeson’s Hannibal was an interesting idea, portraying him as a meticulous and obsessive planner, but we don’t get enough time with him to really see it pay off. Quinton Jackson’s take on BA was pretty poor. Rather than being the mean, near invulnerable hulk of the series, we get a generic brawler who, to add yet another sup-plot, finds religion. There were some good ideas on show, but they were drowning in franchise building, dumb plotting, and the apparent need to move to the next action set-piece. Poor. (See my A-Team Twitter review).

The Expendables, on the other hand, made to qualms about what it was. Sure, the plot was perfunctory and the characters paper-thin, but that was the point. It was all about getting the biggest action movie stars of the last three decades together to revel in their artform. It’s a big dumb action film, with all the explosions, guns, and hand-to-hand fighting you could hope for. If you want a story, don’t bother. If you want to see Stallone fight Lundgren, then this is the film for you. (See my The Expendables Twitter review).

Finally, Salt is a fairly straightforward action-thriller. It borrows heavily from the improvisational spy style of the early part of the Bourne trilogy, but without either the story or meaty contact to really see it through. While a handful of the set-pieces are genuinely well-done, they get lost in the predictable “twists” of the thriller plot. It’s the usual 24-style movie-plot threat and by the time it actually happens you really won’t care. A shame. (See my Salt Twitter review).

The winner is The Expendables, for it’s no-nonsense action sensibility. It would have lost in many other months, but up against two other action films, it’s no contest.

As is the norm, July was a reasonably full month with 4 films viewed.

Predators, while not a masterpiece by any measure, is exactly what it needed to be: an action movie with an 80’s feel, free from large CG scenes and full of physical effects, enough of a plot to put the cannon fodder where it needed to be, and some absolutely great scenes. The pre-credits opening shot is particularly grabbing, pushing the audience immediately into the action and getting things started with some panic. Adrien Brody doesn’t pull-off being an action hero in the same way that Schwarzenegger did, and the slow reveal of the predators themselves was something of a waste, given we know what they look like from the rest of the franchise, but those are small points in an otherwise solid film. (See my Predators Twitter review).

There’s a lot I would like to say about Christopher Nolan’s latest masterpiece, Inception, but can’t do so without leaving a large trail of spoilers. There will be many fiercely argued debates about the minutiae of it’s world and it’s take on subjective reality. That’s how you know it’s going to be a classic. Nolan has created an incredible piece of cinematic storytelling, full of visuals and world-building that wouldn’t work in any other medium. The central conceit of controllable dream worlds is revealed just as quickly as it needs to be, just like everything else in this film from Leonardo DiCaprio’s broken team lead to the depth of the maze that is being built in the incredible plot. That, as I see it, is its only major flaw: everything moves so quickly that only the central concept and DiCaprio get a chance to breath. The supporting cast (and a great cast it is) provide excellent sketches of characters and there are many questions to be asked about them, but we never get the time to see any of it. When the only real criticism you have of a movie is that you want to see a lot more, you have a classic. A fantastic, must-see film. (See my Inception Twitter review).

Pixar’s latest effort is a new look at an old franchise. Toy Story 3 revisits Woody, Buzz and friends ten years later as Andy, their owner, prepares to go to college. The central theme of transition and moving on sets a tone that is both sweet in places, and fairly sad in others. That’s not to say it’s not got the little adventure set-pieces of the previous films, it has quite a few that will make you laugh, but it is less overtly funny than its two predecessors. Revisiting a franchise this long gone is dangerous, but Pixar have done well to put a neat little ending on this story. A great film. One other note: the 3D effects are understated to the point that they actually don’t add anything to the film. If you saw this in 2d, you’d still have the same great movie. (See my Toy Story 3 Twitter review).

I had high hopes for The Karate Kid, a thematically different take on the story structure of the 80’s classic. In the opening chunk, some of my hopes were lived up to: we see the frustration and loneliness of a young boy pushed into a foreign situation. Had the film built on this theme, it could’ve been a great film but it was there just as the set-up for a much more formulaic movie. Jaden Smith managed to get the emotional points across pretty well for an actor of his age, but failed when it came to anything approaching comedy: he has the mannerisms of his father, without the brash charm to pull it off. For a film lacking in depth and out-and-out fun, it certainly ran a lot longer than it should have. The plot on offer could’ve been covered in 90-odd minutes, but we’re given nearly an hour more than that. A shame. (See my The Karate Kid Twitter review).

While I really enjoyed Toy Story 3, this month’s winner is Inception for its clever storytelling and THAT hotel corridor scene.