I like films. You probably know this already. However, I have recently discovered a shop which sells second-hand DVDs for the price of a rental and it has significantly increased my intake. Herein lies a problem, because what I am discovering is that I can't watch more than three films in a 24 hour period without my brain consolidating their plotlines into one, giant, thing.
Back in the day, there was a phenomenon called scholastic synthesis. This describes the way in which accepted Aristotelean philosophy and Biblical teachings became so interwoven with the thinking on science and nature that they essentially became one and the same thing. I suppose this film thing is the modern equivalent. But like all modern equivalents, it is far more spiritually enriching and likely to boost your overall level of intelligence.
I watch a staggeringly intellectually stimulating array of films. I'm pretty much a one-man renaissance. In the last five days, I have watched all of the following: Bowfinger, Southland Tales, Ted (I went to the cinema and everything, and have as such also absorbed the condensed storylines of a number of trailers, too), The Producers, Four Lions, The Hunger Games and Zombieland. Also, to further boost my credentials to assume the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge in the near future, I am currently watching Volcano.
I know what happened in all of these films. Not one single part of any of them has passed me by. Apart from pretty much all of Southland Tales, which confused me in the extreme but it had The Rock in it and I refuse to believe he would let me down. For the life of me, though, I couldn't with any confidence tell you which bit was in which film.
I mean, I'm fairly sure that the bloke out of Flash Gordon doing coke with a teddy bear was in Ted, but who's to say definitively that it wasn't also a running theme in a number of other productions? Did Ted run the London Marathon? I'm pretty sure that was in Four Lions, which also featured Sean William Scott selling screenplays to a zombie who lived up a tree in France. But who's to know? And does it really matter?
None of it is particularly a worry unless I'm playing Trivial Pursuit, after all. But now this is giving way to a greater concern: I think I'm starting to lose the thread of exactly which parts happened in real life and which didn't. I am quickly discovering that the problem with films - every volcanic eruptin', fissure in space-time rippin', sentient stoner teddy bear creatin', post apocalyptic reality TV show killin', alien invadin' moment of them - is: they're too compellingly realistic.
And I am very concerned.
1 comment:
I can empathize... we've been having a simultaneous "Doctor Who" and "Extras" marathon and my head is brain is trying to reconcile sci-fi and snark.
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