Harry Potter gave me a sore bottom

I was dragged to the cinema the other week to see the final instalment of the Harry Potter saga. I have to confess I quite like these films. As well as being a good bit of light-hearted entertainment and escapism, I also like to fantasise about Hermoine using a Pario-Erectus charm on me.

Without wanting to sound like a film critic, I thought the previous film was the worst of the lot, mainly because it was so boring. It was basically a couple of kids walking through a forest and attempting to destroy something that made them angry when they wore it round their necks. Not only was it duller than a Party Political Broadcast but it was a bit too much like Lord of the Rings, which consists of 3 films where a couple of kids walk through a forest and attempt to destroy an object that makes them angry when they wear it around their necks.

Now, I don’t want to accuse J.K. Rowling of plagiarism or anything because she is a great author, a credit to our country and is rich enough to hire the best lawyers in the land to sue me if I suggested such a thing. However, I have noticed many similarities over the 8 film saga with other well-known films.

Harry Potter is basically a story of a young boy who lives with his aunt and uncle. He meets a wizard who tells him he is also a wizard and his parents were killed by an evil dark lord wearing a black cape. He takes him away to train him to be a wizard. A great, white bearded wizard - who was the evil dark lord’s teacher before he turned to the dark side - sacrifices himself so that Harry Potter can ultimately fulfil the prophecy he appears to have been pre-destined for. Oh and his male and female companions, who wind each other up throughout the whole sage, ultimately end up falling in love and they all live happily ever after.

Now does this not sound just a little familiar? I’m pretty sure the basic story of Star Wars is that of a young boy who lives with his aunt and uncle and meets a wizard who tells him he is also a wizard and that a dark lord wearing a black cape murdered his father. He then takes him away and trains him to be a wizard before he sacrifices himself to allow… you get the picture, right?

Now, being a bit of a Star Wars nerd and my beloved being something of a Harry Potter fan, I enjoy pointing this out to her because I know how much it winds her up. Still, despite it being the same story – only not set in space - it doesn’t stop me from enjoying the films. What does stop me from enjoying the films is the cinema.

Forgetting the extortionate prices they charge for a ticket and the even more extortionate prices they charge for food and drink, I’ve never understood why they insist on making popcorn the preferred food. It has to be the noisiest thing possible to eat. All I can hear during the quieter moments of a film is the rustling of popcorn boxes and that disgusting slurping sound people make when they drink through a straw. This, for me, ruins the atmosphere.

Still that isn’t the most annoying aspect. All cinemas are fundamentally badly designed. When something is designed for a purpose it should be good. An aeroplane, for example, is designed to fly. If someone designed an aeroplane that failed to take off it would be deemed a failure. Likewise, if a car designer built a sports car that couldn’t get past 20 miles per hour they would get sacked.

Now, cinema seats are designed to be sat in for hours at a time. So why in the name of Dumbledore’s danglies do they make the seats so uncomfortable?

For a start they are too close together. This means I can’t sit comfortably because people either side of me are invading my personal space. I either have to sit squashed up or subtly fight with my seated neighbours by bashing legs with them every 2 minutes in order to get their legs out of my space. The seats share armrests so the whole film is spent battling for supremacy with the people sitting either side of me. I find I can’t concentrate on the film because I’m constantly keeping my peripheral vision to the left and right, waiting for them to take a handful of popcorn so they move their elbow and allow me to take control of the armrest. Of course, this is usually short lived because every time I move my arm to get more comfortable, they move their arm back.

Then there is the flaw in the way the seats are laid out. Now, whilst the seats are on a raised platform and you are generally sitting a little higher than the row in front, it is never enough. I always end up sitting behind the tallest man in the world with the world’s biggest afro. I more often than not find myself sitting in front of that annoying little pecker who keeps fidgeting and kicking the back of my chair.

Then we get to the seats themselves. I’m not sure what they stuff them with but it’s not what I would call padding. It’s more like brick. They are also a stupid shape and appear to be designed with the sole purpose of making one’s buttocks go to sleep.

What was fundamentally a good film was ruined for me because I found my concentration ebbing very quickly as a result of the constant need to fidget in order to get comfortable. After half an hour I had lost the feeling in my left cheek. An hour into the film, both cheeks had gone. Then pins and needles started to set in down both legs. If that wasn’t bad enough, my fiancée always insists on holding my hand which means I have to hold my arm in an awkward position, resulting in pins and needles down one arm as well.

By the time the film ended, I had lost all feeling from the waste down and I couldn’t move my arm. I then had the embarrassing prospect of trying to get up from the seat and walk out of the cinema. I looked like I had special needs.

As painful as this all was, it wasn’t anywhere near as painful as not being able to make jokes about Amy Winehouse this month. Apparently it’s too soon...