Baffling bursts of laughter and the coming together of popcorn and piss.

Yesterday I finally got round to seeing Darren Aronofsky's award-baiting Black Swan and I must say it's the classiest and most stylish piece of trash I've seen in a long time.  Overflowing with essentially pretty cheap scares and sudden outbursts of violence and horror, it really is a masterpiece of lurid sleaze.  Loved it loved it loved it.  Also it acts as a perfect companion piece to The Wrestler, both centring around performance art (but at very different ends of the spectrum), both surprisingly lurid and grimy films about the suffering body and/or mind can endure in pursuit of said art.

While sat there, utterly entranced by Black Swan, with people screaming - screaming, no less - around me, I started to become a touch unnerved by another crowd reaction.  Deep enough into the film for it to have firmly established itself as something somewhat sinister, shock scenes which had me wide-eyed and worried for my sanity as much as Natalie Portman's seemed to serve merely as light amusement for others.  At more than a couple of moments in the film, the odd few people would burst into laughter, and I'm not talking nervous giggles here, nor was it laughing at the film and any ineptitudes they may have felt were there, but utterly hysterical, pant-pissing, that's-the-best-joke-I've-ever-seen-in-a-film belly laughs. 

People are weird.

Anyway this got me a'thinking, this was not the only time of late when I've observed odd behaviour from fellow cinema goers.  One that springs to mind occurred while watching Danny Boyle's thoroughly compelling 127 Hours.  Now, I'm not one to graze on popcorn throughout a film, never have been, but I understand why to some it's an important part of the cinema-going experience.  And sure, if you're watching Transformers or Tron, staring at the screen with your soulless, dead eyes lurking lifelessly behind a pair of 3D glasses then please, feel free to chow on your flavourless cat litter all you want. 

But 127 Hours?  Odd choice, but there she was, sat just a few seats from me.  A pearl-haired old dear crunching happily away while James Franco suffered the ordeal of a lifetime. 

It just doesn't seem right. 

The kicker came when our hero starts urinating in a flask in case he might need to, y'know, for survival and that. 

"Urgh!", the lady exclaimed with palatable disgust.  Which she followed up with another bite.

And you bet your nuts she was still going at it when the arm came off.

Welcome friends, cinephiles, necrophiles...hell, welcome to all the 'philes!

Welcome to my humble film blog.  Allow me to regale you with intermittent tales of how cinema controls my every thought, and wow you with news of what I have been watching, observations made while at the cinema, as well as snippets of stories from the projection booth, where I spend eight meaningless hours a day.

And at some point I'll get round to telling you why 3D has fooled everyone, why S.F. Brownrigg was the greatest director you've never heard of, and why Kubrick's The Shining is obviously the best film ever made.

What you won't find here is straight-up reviews.  There's more than enough of those knocking about elsewhere, mostly providing worthless, one-sided viewpoints and spoiling the beauty and wonder of going into a film blind.  By which I mean without too much prior knowledge of the film, not actually, y'know.  That's what Audio Description is for.