London Film Museum

Forget it - overpriced, tatty displays - save your money and just stroll up and down the south bank, sample the street performances, book some time at the viewing room at the bfi ahead of time. You'll be MUCH better off - culturally and emotionally.

Went to the Film Museum today to see the Ray Harryhausen exhibition and was bitterly disappointed by the whole experience. Paying £13 to walk through dirty rooms with random, tatty-looking memorabilia is a joke. The coolest things in there perhaps were the Star Wars room (tho they charge £7 if you want to take a photo) and the display case with light sabers and Princess Leia's blaster. However, the glass on the latter was terribly dirty and even the items in it covered in dust. Does no one take care of these things in there!? The model of Grauman's Chinese Theatre in the Charlie Chaplin was an equally depressing sight - cheap, badly made, badly painted. Overall, the place was in terrible disrepair, with vinyl stickers peeling off doors, dirt stuck to their sticky sides, backdrops for exhibits sloppily painted onto walls (check out the New York 'skyline' behind the flying Superman figure). Finally, no care at all seems to have gone into setting up the exhibits in any coherent way at all and most 'stories' are told on giant posters you have to read (could do that on the internet without paying £13, thank you very much) , without any visual or interactive aids to bring the exhibits to life. Terrible. I feel cheated out of a valuable couple of hours of my life.