_{“Don’t you go to the movies?” “Mostly just to eat popcorn in the dark.” Charles Bukowski}

It’s cold out there. It’s winter out there. It’s madness out there. Feels like just the right time to get out there and go to the movies.

“Movie? Surely you mean film?”

Well, fairly surely, I’m sticking to movie, and this brilliant article on the movie versus film debate is one of the reasons why. It seems movie has bounced into our vocabulary like a grey squirrel, and pushed little film out on to a lonely, professional limb.

Then there’s the what to watch question. Not sure what we’ll go to see yet, but just the idea of it is helping to shift the dark. For me there is such pleasure in sitting in the popcorn gloom of a cinema, surrounded by strangers and their mobiles until the lights go out. Then the small screens disappear and off we fly, all of us together, to another world.

We could, of course, be transported from in front of our television or a laptop, but it always feels like an edge is missing. Like we’ve cheated. How can we properly go to the planet Tatooine, or the Mushroom Kingdom, or Barbie Land, or Into the Void, on a sofa by ourselves?

And besides, homemade popcorn may be good, but it hasn’t got that cost-us-way-too-much pop about it.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023