A good movie is a trap door to another world, I am pretty much character aligned when it comes to movies, I like strong leading characters that engage me right from the off. True they usually have some sort of weakness that they often need to overcome in an often predictable pattern but if I’m engaged then I’m with them for the journey.   Now I’ll admit to being a sci-fi fan but for me the premise needs to make sense, like the end of Prometheus, how in the name of God did the thing that Shaw took from her tummy manage to grow so big and strong with no visible food source… it was in a lab?? Which brings me to the fact that I think there is good cinema and great cinema at the upper end of the cinematic scale. There is loads of bad, I pretty much lump every ‘chick flick’ into that category along with Harry Potter. Controversial…

There are loads of films that have a meeting to me for one reason or another. Like Le Grand Bleu, now I love Jean Reno but this film is very special to me because I saw it in Paris on the 10 anniversary of the original broadcast with my then boyfriend. We were visiting his grandparents in Lardy and it was Bastille day. Now this was a big deal for them because of the fact that they were in fact royalty. French defunct royalty and they definitely didn’t celebrate as per the rest of France. The grandfather was deliberate and calculated in his communication style, the sort that takes 5 days to say a sentence with little content but all the same made you pretty happy to be in his company. Our time with them was punctuated with eating events and so the release to Paris was a timeless meandering adventure. It was cold when we arrived and we found an amazing café (that’s still there) serving the best hot chocolate I have ever tasted. Paris was our playground, we had a battered old map and guidebook and a list of places to tick off our list. At the end of our day of freedom we found a theatre celebrating Le Grand Bleu and flopped into the huge seats, with a glass of wine, for this was Paris and that is what you do in Paris. I hadn’t seen the film and I was enchanted from the very beginning. This film resonated with me, I have no idea why but earlier this year I heard the news that my ex boyfriend had passed away at the age of 36 and so that film is now occupying a special space in my heart.

Then there is Citizen Kane, I have heard about this film for years and never got around to watching it. Sure it’s a classic, but it is more than just a good story, the lighting is menacing at times, so thick that it’s hard to breath. Then there is the speed, or lack thereof, man this is a slow film, but it took me to an era where things were slower, less mass produced and had substance. It’s a film that sits at the top of all the ‘must see’ film lists but I wonder for how long…  

Someone mentioned a film in conversation recently that threw me back years, to one of the best remakes I feel I have ever seen. The Thomas Crown affair which I first saw in secondary school-then I realized that I had not in fact seen the original. The premise of my viewing of the remake was in fact a rather awkward ‘date’ with a fluffy chinned fellow student and quite a lot of uncomfortable fidgeting during the ahem, strenuous sex scene(s). Needless to say we both burst out with nervous laughter when his Dad picked us up and queried our thoughts on said film. I can’t say it was a roaring success of a date, but the original is currently showing in my living room in a vain attempt to bridge my previous overlooked cinematic history.

The new Star Wars both excite and worry me and I wonder if the whole world of cinema will go 3D with heaps of effects and ridiculous glasses needed to participate in the overall experience. It’s not for me I don’t think, I could be proved wrong but sure why do you need to see things in 3D? Sure wasn’t I trying to escape that world in the first place…