Going to the Pictures

No-one calls it that any more, of course. Did I mention that Number 2 Son is a cinema manager? Well he is, and he lets us in on complimentary tickets. This is apparently no big deal, as cinemas make no money on the films they show, only on all the crap they sell you to stuff down your face while you are watching the film. That’s why you often find the ticket office closed, and you have to buy your tickets from the popcorn counter. He knows that even if we paid to see the film we wouldn’t spend anything on cokes and ice creams, so we might as well go in for free. Such a good boy.

Anyway, it’s been a bit of good season for films lately, so I thought you might like a brief guide to what we have seen and what we thought. We’ve seen “Atonement”, of course, completely failing to recognize any of the locations, which are, apparently, places I know well; we saw “Elizabeth the Golden Age” (OK); “Michael Clayton” (good); “Charlie Wilson’s War” (excellent; see earlier post); “Juno” (lovely; but Tigger developed some sort of eye infection, which meant she had to keep dabbing them with a handkerchief); and we saw “There will be Blood”. This last is the Daniel Day Lewis film for which he won an Oscar, yet there were only twenty or so in the theatre to watch it a few days later. Good film; just when you thought it couldn’t get any bleaker or more unremittingly sad and depressing, it did. My kind of film. Not wanting to spoil the end for you, but the best bit is where the evangelical preacher is bludgeoned to death.