Very much winding down towards my holiday now. It's only two days away, which I can't believe. I have done no preparation so far and haven't even double-checked my flight times to ensure that I really can do the 6Music show on Saturday morning. I could check right now quite easily, but let's live a little dangerously. I probably better check before the day though. Nah. I will just turn up at an airport (don't want to check which one) and hope for the best. That would make me cool, right?
So I've been watching some films and failing to exercise very much in the last couple of days (though still slowly losing weight - a month without chocolate today!). I joined
lovefilm a couple of months ago (for the second time) and they now allow you to download certain films for free and I've been enjoying picking a few classics to idly watch as I get on with other things.
At the back of my mind I've been thinking there might be a podcast in providing a director's style commentary to films I know very well, even though I have nothing to do with them. I had been watching Total Recall for the millionth time on TV the other day and commenting on Twitter. It might be a fun service to have a funny commentary which you can listen to as you watch a movie. I haven't seen anyone else doing this, though I suspect others have thought of it. In a sense that doesn't matter because it's a personal look at the film.
In the last couple of days I have watched that stalwart of my childhood "American Werewolf in London" which as I am sure you will know I watched many times as a teenager and some parts of it got rather foggy on my videotaped version. But I know the non-Jenny Agutter in the shower bits pretty much off be heart too and incidentally was amused at how tame the sex scene it and admire my younger self for managing to find it quite so exciting on so many occasions - we didn't have the internet and needed to make do with what we could. I remembered to look out for the jiggling boob of the porn actress when she answered the phone. Ah, how sweet and innocent I was back then. It's a great film and Jenny Agutter is delightfully posh and beautiful. The film is 30 years old and London looks like another world. If I had seen a film from 1951 back then I would have thought it was prehistoric and would have laughed at my parents for wanting to watch it, but now I understand the nostalgia and disorientation of rapidly passing time.
Today I had a look at "Top Secret", a Zucker brothers film that I believe came after Airplane. I had loved this when it came out and remember I went to see it with my brother when I had popped up to visit him at University. It had blown my mind then and I remember rewatching it with my friends on video a year of so later and still being impressed. I could almost recall the conversations we had had about how brilliant the jokes were. My friend/nemesis Steve Cheeke's voice was ringing in my head. But whilst American Werewolf still stands up (as does Airplane), Top Secret seemed a bit forced and broad and slow. And it didn't have Jenny Agutter in the shower or enjoying being given cunnilingus, which is a rookie mistake. Still some funny bits, but not enough to justify 90 minutes of my life.
But the 14 year old me is still massively impressed by the technology that allows me to watch these films instantaneously in my own home, on a computer, without the danger of corrupting the tape however many times I replay a certain section.
