Technically the post title should be The Philadelphia Story and Random Window Shopping... but that's not nearly as snappy...As always, today started off with the Very Early Supermarket Safari... blah, blah, blah... same as usual... well almost the same as usual, because they're inexplicably doing some sort of construction or alteration to the car park where we usually park, so that threw us off slightly (sad, but true).
Once we were done with the mostly boring supermarket portion of the day, along with the associated Unpackingness we headed into town...
The 2009 Adelaide Film Festival started on Thursday, and one of the movies on the list (in amongst a lot of things that seem to be about Tibetan yak herders or some such) at the Palace Cinema was the 1940 classic, The Philadelphia Story... which both Ma and I are quite fond of (really, Hepburn, Grant and Stewart, what's not to love?), so naturally I bought tickets...
There were a lot more people than I really expected there to be for a 69 year old movie being played at lunchtime on a Saturday... and a wider mix of people that I thought there might have been.
The main downside to the whole thing was that it was a pretty crappy copy... when it first started the sound wasn't working, and then there were certain spots where the pops and scratches and slight jumps in the film made it both annoying and difficult to watch... and if you'd never seen it before you would have missed at least one important plot point, the plot point about half the movie hangs on in fact. Which was very disappointing, especially since I'm fairly certain that the DVD copy that Ma has is in perfect condition (they couldn't have just used one of the restored or cleaned up versions, they had to use an actual crappy film version?).
The other downside was the fact that possibly because it's not exactly an action packed movie, but for whatever reason I found myself nodding off a little bit at a couple of points... that's more about me than it is about the movie... not enough sleep/caffeine or something.
It was nice to see it on the "big screen" (even if that big screen was actually in the "old school" aspect ratio, which made it pretty much square), and with other people, just to see where they laughed (and they probably laughed in more places than I would have expected)...
Once the movie was finished we just wandered up Rundle Street, and then up the Mall... just really killing some time, window shopping (we didn't buy anything of consequence) and (in my case) perving on the pretty pretties who seemed to be all over the place.
I was very glad to get home and get my shoes off though, since I'd decided to wear my red Converse sneakers, and I still haven't really broken them in... so as always it was nice to be able to rip them off my feet when I got home.
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Still, a crappy copy of a screwball classic is still many times better than an excellent copy of the latest blockbuster. Or maybe I'm just a snob.
I remember taking a class in college, 'The Silver Screen and the American Dream: American history, culture and communication through film." Generally, it was a great course: watch a classic movie on Tuesday, get lectured at by an English professor, a History professor and a "communications" professor on Thursday. Two of the three were fine, the third, however, looked like a frog, said "um" every third syllable (seriously, not word, syllable) and managed to find a homosexual undertone to everything. When you can find gay subtext in "Public Enemy" you know you're reaching. Ironically, he was the "communication" portion of the triumvirate. On the up side, I got to see both "Philadelphia Story" and "Bringing Up Baby" on the big screen.
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