I decided I really didn’t want to endure a game of rugby(-watching… pfft as if any­one would actu­ally play sport) and, being halfway home, decided to give Tori a call and see if she was un-busy. So I wound up in New­town for the sec­ond con­sec­u­tive night. We were kind of con­tem­plat­ing going some­where and a film was flagged as an option… so, after call­ing Voda­fone Direc­tory Assist on my PDA (hilar­ity ensues as I had called from a menu screen and didn’t have access to touch-tone num­bers until I nav­i­gated var­i­ous appli­ca­tions mid-phone-call whilst call­ing the phone all kinds of names, to both our amusement/my dis­dain) we man­aged to get ses­sion times (because Women’s Col­lege routes all Inter­net traf­fic through the uni, which makes for a great way to spend lots of money down­load­ing things quickly, and Tori’s account was empty. USyd Inter­net rates are com­pa­ra­ble with most pri­vate edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tion over-quota rates: that is to say, hor­rif­i­cally expen­sive per [insert met­ric here]. Maybe they’ve got slightly bet­ter rates for res­i­den­tial stu­dents but I doubt it. It’s the biggest scam on the planet, far out.) for… The Omen.

Tori’s choice, note ;-) So we headed down to Broad­way for a 9.45 ses­sion and got there with time to spare (spare time being spent acquir­ing Podz, which suf­ficed as din­ner for me :-/) which was nice. The carpark there late at night is retarded, though, as the food court shuts and there’s a cinema-only entrance which is acces­si­ble only from a cer­tain end of a cer­tain floor despite many many signs to the con­trary. Anger induc­ing. Ah well… we did get there in the end.

The movie was crap. Pre­dictably. It took itself seri­ously as I imag­ine only the Da Vinci Code could (though, hav­ing not seen the film — only every trailer ever made for it about three mil­lion times, which is prob­a­bly the sum of its con­tent — I prob­a­bly have no right to say that. Dis­claimer in place. I’ve at least read the book.) but was laugh­ably less con­vinc­ing. And gra­tu­itously open for a sequel. Includ­ing the inex­plic­a­ble jackal-giving-birth thing, which, inci­den­tally, although pre­sented as Bib­li­cal allu­sion, has absolutely no foun­da­tion in Rev­e­la­tion or else­where.

For­tu­nately, it was a fun audi­ence. I love it when there are fun cin­ema audi­ences, because it’s such a lin­ear top-down medium and it’s won­der­ful see­ing that care­ful edit­ing sub­verted by an audi­ence that feeds off itself to turn rather turgid hor­ror into black (or even not so black) com­edy. One per­son recog­nises humour in the ludi­crous­ness of a sit­u­a­tion, for exam­ple, and their laugh­ter feeds the other 90 peo­ple to inter­pret a tense moment as some­thing tru­ely pathetic. It is the ulti­mate in sus­pen­sion of disbelief.

So, yes. Good fun, crap movie. Inci­den­tally, the num­ber “666”/significance of dates fea­tures far more heav­ily in promo mate­r­ial than the film itself. For­tu­nately. It just makes it all that much less ridicu­lous. Still, ridicu­lous was def­i­nitely the flavour of the film. Prob­a­bly not worth see­ing if you’re not there to revel in it’s crap­ness and gen­er­ally pay it out. On the sub­ject of such films, don’t even waste your time with the just-released-to-video film, Cer­berus. Not only is it a bad movie (not in itself a bad thing), it’s also so obvi­ously mediocre there’s no great plea­sure to be derived from insult­ing it.

It scores points on the graphic-violence front, wherein it bears stark resem­blance to the injuries sus­tained by a cer­tain heavily-impaired knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but apart from that… well, I’d hap­pily take back that ninety min­utes of my life. Which I’d instead spend stay­ing up stu­pidly late writ­ing blog posts and won­der­ing when I’m going to start actu­ally mov­ing beyond lots and lots of vague ideas, pick a base image (I’ve been shoot­ing all this stuff I’d love to turn into designs lately!), and start cod­ing CSS.

And now, I’m going to bed.