Ok, I haven’t watched one movie since this insanity started. Try to avoid watching things on tv because that’s how you die. Internally if not externally. Binge-watching 17 hours of Songs of Praise, just ain’t my thing. And although, according to everyone; everything on Netflix is ‘just brilliant!!!!’ it’s generally one person tells you their fave, the next person tells you theirs, and so on, but the faves rarely coincide. So you have to watch everything they have. 22 million years of collective series. Just so you don’t miss the ‘one’ which ‘you just MUST see’.

I did watch a bit of ‘how to tame a dragon’, which I’ve seen before and is a truly brilliant animation, clever and funny and cute. But I have two ‘lists’ of movies. One is the films ‘I’ve seen’, which means on a cinema screen. Tvs don’t count, however big they might be, in-flight movies don’t count because you wouldn’t want turbulence whilst watching Touching the Void, f’rinstance. And pilot announcements always seem to come when the dagger is poised over his heart/their lips are about to touch/the dog is just going to take a dump on the neighbour’s lawn/the car is at the cliff edge, and that upsets me. I don’t want Keanu Reeves bullet-time interrupted because there’s a special offer on Clinique fucking make-up. So when I ‘watch’ a movie it has to be the full extra-large, sweet popcorn experience.

But that frees up that movie for repeated watches on tv later on. I’m not saying this makes any sense to anyone, I’m just saying. My rules. We all have our own. And once ‘liberated’ then I can watch that movie any time, in any bits and pieces I may catch, to my heart’s content.

And my heart is never as content as when I’m channel-flicking (yes, I AM that annoying ‘man’, as apparently no-one with a Y-chromosome has ever done it) and come across Terminator 2. Even 1. Or Kill Bill. Any number. Anything by Tarantino. A Knight’s Tale. Don’t ask why, I just love that movie. Possibly having a mediaeval square dance to Bowie’s Golden Years is the reason, I don’t know. Batman movies. Love them all. Anything with Gene Hackman, Robert De Niro or Wonderwoman. Just because.

This week they showed Fatal Attraction. I couldn’t be bothered to watch it. When it came out we went to the ABC in Golders Green (now deceased, long before coronavirus) and were sitting in the ante-room before the 8.30 show, waiting for the last people to come out. I got bored. The world’s most impatient person is not a badge I wear lightly. And wandered. And opened a door. To be facing the screen. Just as Glen Close rose out of the bath, dagger in hand, at the very end. The absolute AHHHH!!!!! moment of the entire fucking film. Which I’d seen ten minutes before my showing began. I’ve always been ahead of my time.

But those movies are just the ones I love to see in bits. My proper ‘all time faves’ are different. Because I have my movie-snob image to consider so I’d have to include at least 4 subtitled films in any top ten. Preferably made originally in Uzbekistan, Zaire or Madagascar.

Happy Day-which-seems-like-all-the-others

A xxxx