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When film scholars talk about the magic of cinema, you increasingly wonder if they mean being hit by a Skyrim Vampiric Drain spell. There is nothing enchanting about the fiddly process of online booking, of navigating the drab corridors of a 13-screen multiplex, of breathing in the aroma of foot-long hot dogs apparently doomed to stew on heated rollers for eternity. Even if you manage to find your allocated seat among the choppy, often chippy sea of humanity, there's a deafening prelude of crass house ads, spoiler-filled trailers and Kevin Bacon hawking 4G before the magic can even begin - and that's usually the exact moment someone opens a gigantic bag of crisps.Going to the cinema is borderline unbearable, then, but millions of us still do it because even with all the joy-sapping obstructions, there remains something uncanny about a movie - it's reality, and then some. We usually experience the world in a way that feels like a read-only file. But on that enormous screen, it's possible to witness a world that seems disturbingly real that is also bending to a creator's will. Using camera movement, editing and shot composition, this intense hyper-reality can be sculpted, shaped, even shredded. It might not technically be magic, but it's a really great trick.
That's why movies stay with us. Everyone has a personal canon of films that have been in their brain forever. In the years before Timehop and Letterboxd, you might not even remember when or where you first them, but Lady and the Tramp, E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial or An American Werewolf In London are so deeply ingrained, they're part of your firmware. Things only get confusing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Ocean Software were licensing major Hollywood action films willy-nilly, then enthusiastically marketing their game tie-ins to consumers who were often too young to go and see the actual movie. In these cases, the experiences of game and movie sometimes become so entwined that it's impossible to separate the different memories.
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