I would dearly love to go to Bath

One of the plus sides of our internet age is that we can come to have friends in far away places. For me, one would be Matthew Coniam, whose love of the cinema has caused him to create a most entertaining blog.

Here is a slice from one of his recent posts where he was pondering the qualities that make a screen presence endure in our social consciousness:

"So will our children know much about Jennifer Aniston? Not sure. Here she is in a film I only watched last night, but try as I might, I just can't remember the title of. I had to go to the shelf to remind myself in order to Google for this photo, and I'm now going to have to go to the shelf again - and we're talking less than ten minutes later - to remind myself again in order to write the title here.

Ah, yes. It's called 'Just Go With It'. Ask me to remind you at the end of this post and I'll doubtless have to go and check a third time. A suicidally unmemorable title, I'd say. Originally sat to Jen's right in the picture is Adam Sandler, a light comic actor whose true level of popularity I've never quite been certain of, but who also keeps working away, in films that seem to do consistently well-ish but rarely smash (or bomb). I've only seen him in 'The Wedding Singer' and 'Fifty First Dates'. He gatecrashes when we invite Drew around. (Even Winona couldn't hold my attention too long into Mr Deeds.) He's showing his age in this one; getting a bit stocky, and it looks like he's dyeing his hair now. Comes to us all, I suppose. Quite a nice little actor, albeit not one I would have picked from the chorus line personally.

A few good laughs here. Not too bad. It's not really a pure pink film, but a kind of couples movie that strives to appeal to both sexes equally, and full of references to contemporary popular culture, of which I understood just enough to realise how much of the rest of it went careening over my head. And even when they're not punchlining about tv shows and pop groups I've never heard of, they're talking very quickly, often at the same time, and with a lot of ambient noise. And I know this is supposed to be a golden age of sound recording, but to me at least a lot of the dialogue reached my ears like this:

Adam: Dgfgf rhrhhr jjytuwpq shdh?
Jennifer: Kf Lotrgfcd ghtyr!
Adam (unimpressed): Thf hghr jkupzcmght agde.
The blonde cutie Adam's trying to pull: Wqryr hghfde slpu.
Adam's dorky brother: Aw, come on! Retss fgfhr hjyt!
Jennifer (in comic triumph): Ghjfkjtye puytrew!!!"

Keira Knightly, patron saint of Movietone News

This guy cracks me up!

A very fine writer and a lover of the theater, his blog is a delight. Read the whole post here.