I'm not often excited about the cinema. I like films a lot, but I'm usually just as happy watching them at home without all those Other People one has to deal with at the cinema. At home I usually get to chose my company and I like that. All the same there's something quite special about seeing a film at the cinema and when I do go I generally enjoy myself.
Tonight I went to meet some friends and see a screening of The Blues Brothers which I was excited about. It's one of those films I've been meaning to see for years and somehow never have. I remember my friend Kris back at school enthusing about it often in classes, at least as far back as 1991 I can distinctly remember listening to him talk about it, and thinking then that I should really see it. He talked about it the way I sometimes talk about The Yellow Submarine and, I suspect, had a similarly verbatim mental recording of it to mine of Submarine*. Somehow 18 years later I still haven't seen it in full, so I was quite excited about seeing it "properly" at the cinema with a good crowd of friends.
When I arrived Anita was already there, and the boards listed the showing we planned to see in the colour that means limited tickets are left. By the time Dave and Doug** arrived it had been sold out so long that they were announcing the fact over the tannoy so that people would stop queuing for it and getting disappointed. A minor difficulty of seeing films with my friends you see is that some of them go to the movies an awful lot, and so they have those unlimited cinema pass thingies, which are great except that you can't book in advance with them.
Happily another of the (rare) films I was actually excited about seeing was (unexpectedly) on, and that wasn't sold out so while everyone else went home to sulk (mostly lightheartedly) Liz and I went to see Moon and it was brilliant.
Afterward I walked back home through a largely empty and slightly damp city. Light drizzle happened just enough to be refreshing and picturesque without ever reaching the point where it made me irritated about getting wet. Instead it just added a sheen to everything so that lights and colours reflected in very engaging ways. I startled a small shrew or vole or something on the corner of Canning Street and slowed to watch the tiny shape bounce off ahead of me in springy leaps along the edge of a building for a few meters before it found a hole to dive into. I like that the nights are getting properly dark again...
I love walking through the city on nights like that when everything looks like the set of a really well shot car commercial: reflective and moody and suggestive of adventure in a way that feels like there should perhaps be a saxophone involved, certainly a well scored soundtrack (I was borrowing Solaris' this evening because it was that sort of night and because, unsurprisingly, it fit well with my post-Moon mood.)
I'm not sure if it's the being intensely visually stimulated for two hours and then tipped out into the night but I often find I'm more-than-usually aware of my surroundings after a good film, and to be fair, I'm pretty aware of them most of the time while I'm walking around***, I think that's one of the reasons Edinburgh's home: it's just so damned pretty all the time.
Bed time for happy Patricks.
*Lost original edit that is, not the DVD release which unsettles me enormously
**Doug having even dressed up for the occasion!
***Except for the parts that are people I know, which I more often than not miss completely
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