Very Wrong

Andy‘s already written about this but what the hell, it’s good blogfodder.

I’ve been doing a lot of webwork this week and, as such, hadn’t left the house other that to stock up with milk and fags at the Co-op, such is the curse of the home worker (vis the title of Dave‘s blog) so when Andy suggested a movie it seemed like a top idea, even if spending a couple of hours in a dark room isn’t necessarily the best way of “getting out”. Since I’d been working nights I suggested an early showing, say 11am, and given there are fuck all decent films out at the moment plumped for The Machinist, a dark and disturbing movie about sleep deprivation, guilt and the awfulness of existence staring an incredibly emaciated Christian Bale.

So we buy out tickets and wander into Screen 4 which while not the shitty living-room sized screen you sometimes get is certainly the place they put the odd and the arthouse at the Five Ways multiplex. Since it’s an 11am showing it’s just us an a few random blokes in their late 20s, early 30s (for a palace of dreams, the cinema can give a quite brutal shock of reality) and we settle in to suffer the adverts.

Which are all for kids stuff. Cereals, toys, hyper-hyper animations shouting out at my fragile brain in widescreen at top volume. It’s most disconcerting. Andy wonders if we’re in the wrong screen, but I reassure him – the film and the adverts/trailers are on different reels and at this time of the morning it’s not out of the question that the underpaid teenager running the projector just got it wrong.

Then the trailers, which again are for every kids movie due out soon, from the kinda interesting (Willy Wonka, Robots) to the utterly shockingly awful, and it being Easter there are loads of them, and endless stream of wrongness considering what we’re about to watch. The trailers end, the tedious Orange “advert” with that guy who isn’t Kevin Spacey does its thing and the title card comes up.

Pooh’s Heffalump Movie.

Turned out while all the computers in the system, from the national website to the ticketing tills, said The Machinist was showing, the typed out schedule for the staff had this sub-standard Pooh cash in listed so that’s what they showed. And there’s something beautifully absurd about this – how wrong can you get? You order a Bourbon and you get Sunny Delight.

It actually all worked out okay because we then had a couple of hours to waste before the next showing and there’s nothing better than having to creatively fill time, plus it was a nice day and I really needed outside stuff, so we wandered around Brindley Place and the canals (some photos) and all was good before returning for our desired dose of misery and pain.

The Machinist is okay. Visually it’s stunning but the actual plot seemed a little linear to me. The reveal at the end, while not obvious was a little 2+2=4 and it didn’t seem to be trying to say anything interesting or deep. Maybe that was the point – that there isn’t really anything to say about guilt other than how it eats you away. I dunno.