Movies! They’re great. Well, some of them are shit but those make the great ones even more great. My Freeview+ machine box is full of things I haven’t seen but might like to. I need to delete them, but I can’t. They are movies, and must be watched in order to exist. Like comedians.
When I was growing up, we only had one TV channel. If you wanted to watch something else, you had to put on a wash (it was amazing how often the red sock did it). The movies that they showed on RTE at the time were no more recent than 30 years old. There isn’t an Esther Williams extravaganza I haven’t seen. There was a cinema in Kinsale for a while, but it was soon halved: the top (which had been the balcony) still showed films occasionally but the bottom (erstwhile stalls) became an arcade. Even if you were watching For the Love of Benji (for the love of Jesus) it had Space Invaders sound effects. For a long time, I thought Pacman was a lot bigger star than he was.
Eventually, the guy who ran the cinema went nuts and – for his own amusement – used to take a scissors and cut one of the reels halfway through. He’d come onto the balcony and announce that the film was “broken” and that we’d now be having a talent competition instead. He’d start. He’d sing My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean into a really crappy mic and – so deprived of entertainment were we, Benji help us – we’d follow. I won that competition once. I got a free cinema ticket. It was a year out of date.
These shenanigans lead to the ultimate demise of even the upstairs bit of the cinema, but luckily this coincided nicely with the mushrooming of video rental outlets. Every copy was pirated; I didn’t know Star Wars didn’t have the shadow of a Korean man in it, whistling the theme to something else. Haunting.
I’ve learned much of what I know about life from movies; mainly that a bright smile and a background in synchronised swimming can take you a long way. But I learned most from those early video rentals. Certificates? No such thing. So taken were we with cute canine pictures that my sister and I once rented Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. We learned a lot, that autumn day. Thank you, video shop lady, for you have my innocence.
