In 1999 I struck up a conversation at Heathrow with a nice young man after noticing he had a monogrammed suitcase (yes you read that right). He claimed to be rich though I never found out if he was telling the truth as after our one date we parted ways; he was too preppy for me and I “wore too much make up” for him. Still, that check-in queue chat resulted in a date seeing Man On The Moon in Manhattan on Christmas Day night.
My 8 year old said to me last night that he had thought this year would go slowly but it’s racing: “I feel like I’m going to be 18 soon!” he claimed, dramatically if understandably. When you’re young a year should take forever; by my age it feels like Christmas and a new Star Wars film every other week.
Lockdown makes everything even more confusing; we’re like birds during a spate of weird weather, only nest-building is all we’ve got. Is it even spring? In film terms, about now we’d be expecting the tentpole movie marketing to be building, and annoying though it can be – sometimes it feels like we’ve seen the blockbuster before it’s even out – I miss it now it’s gone.
Around now I’d also be starting to think about booking that summer staple, the Great British Outdoor Movie Screening. Last summer it was Top Gun, and yes I did wonder how I’d missed its homoerotic subtext back in 1986.
Those outdoor screenings may be held in high summer, but few of us make it to the credits without feeling like Scott of the Antarctic. What we should take with us is a comfy chair, a sleeping bag, a furry onesie and a thermal hat. What we optimistically think will suffice in warding off frostbite is a plastic-backed Robert Dyas picnic blanket and three bottles of pinot grigio.
I love films but I’m still often surprised when I rewatch supposed “old favourites” how much I’ve forgotten. Often it’s the all-round cinematic experience I’m really remembering – surroundings, friends, foreign cities – rather than the story.
Those bittersweet movie memories have been flooding back, though at least they’re more fun than my distinctly odd dreams. (Lockdown dreams are so weird. I never even watched The Osbournes and yet Sharon has already popped up overnight to give me some advice. I can’t remember what it was but if it involved four facelifts then Sharon, count me in.)
Sorry – other people’s dreams, like other people’s holiday photos, and now other people’s eggless, flourless, butterless, cocoa-less, sugarless chocolate cake recipes, are by definition boring. Still, if you think film flashbacks are too then you’re in the wrong article, as here I go. Yes – it’s my life, not in movies, but at them.
I grew up in Newcastle and spent many a happy evening at our local independent cinema, the Tyneside. A ‘90s visit with a friend one Christmas Eve to see It’s A Wonderful Life for the first time, after a boozy lunch, was as festively fabulous as it could be as we sat both entranced and exhausted in our seats, surrounded by bags of Christmas shopping.
A few years earlier, a blind date (same cinema, different screen) with one guy turned into a first date with his best mate (reader, I didn’t marry him but we did go out for nine months) when first guy turned up three hours late, having shaved all his hair off for a joke. The year before I had emerged almost traumatised from the same cinema after a double bill of Blue Velvet and Angel Heart. Both movies fit into that “fantastic films that never need to be watched again” category. (Well I think they were fantastic. I haven’t seen either since 1987.)
More recently a visit to family near Boston after a bereavement included those cinema watches necessitated by a desperation to do something, anything, that might take our minds off things; even though you know that in those situations cinemas aren’t really escapism at all but somewhere to sit down in the dark, the sadness just temporarily less physically weighty. The movie theatre was the lovely (and calming) independent arthouse West Newton Cinema; the films were the bubbly Crazy Rich Asians, and Puzzle, starring the much lamented Irrfan Khan (yes it’s about jigsaws, yes it’s a treat).
This time last year I was at the UK premiere of John Wick 3: Parabellum at London’s Ham Yard Hotel, and yes Mr Reeves himself turned up to introduce it, with director Chad Stahelski. My lack of PR-lobbying skills meant I hadn’t been invited to a press screening; instead I won the tickets in a competition. (I win prizes seldom but spectacularly: a week in New York in the mid-90s, an actual chocolate brick at Christmas 2018, and, well, Keanu.)
It was in New York in 1999 that I experienced the American tradition of going to the cinema on Christmas Day. At Heathrow, en route to see my sister, I had struck up a conversation with a nice young man after noticing he had a monogrammed suitcase (yes you read that right). He claimed to be rich, and that he lived next door to some museum: the Met? The Guggenheim? I can’t remember. And I never found out if he was telling the truth as after our one date we parted ways; he was too preppy for me and I “wore too much make up” for him. Still, that check-in queue chat resulted in a date seeing Man On The Moon in Manhattan on Christmas Day night.
I can’t remember much about the film. I didn’t know anything about comic Andy Kaufman, the film’s subject, beyond his acting role in Taxi; a show that seemed to alternate with Cagney & Lacey in the 11pm slot on British TV in the late ’80s. Appropriately, Airport Guy and I did make out in a yellow cab afterwards, so I can tick that off my bucket list, along with a date with someone with monogrammed luggage who may or may not have lived next to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A trip to Cannes a few years ago meant I got to watch a 70mm unrestored print of Kubrick’s extraordinary 2001: A Space Odyssey, with an inspiring introduction from superfan Christopher Nolan, who explained we were sitting in one of the few venues able to play the soundtrack as it should be played – the Théâtre Claude Debussy. (I wonder what he’s doing in lockdown? Probably checking the edits of TENET on his iPhone.)
Movies can be magical – if not quite from the cradle to the grave – then through nearly all the years in between. At my local Picturehouse I’ve seen a packed audience of small children bouncing up and down almost as one, popcorn flying, shrieking with laughter at a naked Gru getting stuck in a net in Despicable Me: 3.
Maybe one day some of those kids will be like the three elderly men at the film club screening of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal in the same cinema, talking about the film’s effect on them when they first saw it decades before: how it opened their eyes to cinema, and was still fresh in their minds over 50 years later. (I can see those kids at a film club in 2070, hair grey, hips wobbly, eyes shining: “and Gru… Gru was naked! In a net!”)
My own earliest movie memories are mostly in my teens, at the local ABC and Odeon, when films stopped halfway through for an interval and an ice-cream. Quite the relief when you’d just sat through the boiling bunny in Fatal Attraction.
Art deco surroundings and listed buildings are lovely, but I’m certainly not averse to a purpose-built multiplex. I’m rather fond of our nearest Vue, which may be starting to look a bit down-at-heel but shows a decent array of movies at low prices and has endearingly cheery staff (I hope they’re all there when we get to return). I remember one trip there to see shark movie The Meg with my tween (look, it was a 12 and Pippin the dog survives!) where I let him go to the loo on his own. He took ages to reappear in his seat, having gone out of the wrong door and got stuck.
Or that Boxing Day when I took him to a Showcase Cinema (he loves both the huge reclining seats and the nachos) to see that year’s Worst Movie™, Holmes and Watson, which he (and, to be fair, much of the audience) thought hilarious while I sat cringing through a courtroom scene about onanism. (That was also a 12 btw. A trip to see a 12 film with a tween is always a risk, but then life’s a gamble.)
We had more success with a Christmas showing of The Muppet Christmas Carol in the middle of a housing estate in Hackney. A train, two tubes, another train and a walk got us there, though we didn’t catch a glimpse of the snow-covered screening hall until we’d climbed through an old wardrobe in a wood panelled study, into a winter wonderland of fake snow and a glowing street lamp.
Though sometimes cinema trips bring forth not just love, hate or indifference, but sheer bafflement. Yes I did indeed take my 7 year old to see Cats last year. On Christmas Eve, for a treat. What can I say? There are some mistakes the parenting books just don’t prepare you for.
You don’t need me to remind you that many independent cinemas are struggling to ensure they’ll be able to reopen their doors after the pandemic. You can donate to West Newton Cinema here (USA) and the Tyneside Cinema here (UK).
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