Lines Not Appearing in This Film

I'm always a little surprised to wake up on the 28th or 29th and find that life is returning to normal so quickly after all the holiday craziness. You'd think that with all the prep work that people do, it would last longer, but no - life calls and you've no choice but to answer.

Lunchtruck and I have a fairly steady routine - on Boxing Day we tend to stay home and avoid the 6 million people at the post-Christmas sales. I don't normally need a deal that badly, and I bruise easily. Instead we allow ourselves to indulge in a post-holiday feast, watch movies, and hang out. If we get antsy, we go for a drive. By the 27th, we are antsy, wondering how our nice neat abode got so cluttered. The piles of stuff start to get sorted, newly-received presents get new homes, and puttering occurs. By the 28th the underpinnings of life demand my attention, and grocery shopping, taking out the garbage, picking up more cat food, returning phone calls and reading emails all start to happen again.

This year was a little different. We actually entered a store on boxing day in search of some DVDs, and managed to get out relatively unscathed (although I did have a few minutes of panic when I lost sight of him in the electronics section). We didn't know it at the time, but that one event caused us to slide into our regular routine that much faster, and here it is, the 29th, and I feel like all the holiday madness was weeks ago.

Lunchtruck surprised me by bringing home two classic movies from our local independent movie rental place on Wednesday night. I normally wouldn't mention that it's independent, but experience has shown me that most of the chain rental stores don't tend to carry classic films, or if they do by chance have a section for them, black and whites are considered film noir (regardless of whether or not they are) and 'classic' starts with Star Wars, to quote Roger Ebert.

Last night we indulged in The Godfather, a movie I haven't seen since I was a child, and which Lunchtruck claimed he'd never seen. We were both enthralled. Even with the violence, it was cinematic magic. We had an ongoing battle about who the artist was that played Kay, with me insisting it WAS Diane Keaton, and Lunchtruck saying he didn't think so. Guess who was right?

Tonight I took a break from the ongoing re-creation of my publishing project (stupid program malfunctions...) and opted to settle in with the felines and watched Casablanca, another movie Lunchtruck had not seen from start to finish. It's been ages since I saw it, and this time round I still loved the dialogue, the sets, the obviously phony backdrops, the plot, but I caught myself considering the more technical aspects - lighting, composition, line and form... And then laughing at myself for being the photography geek I am. I mean, really, when Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa Lund is professing her love to Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine, who in their right mind is going to be considering the catchlight in her eyes and the shadowing of the room? Apparently, I do.

As for the famous line "Play it again, Sam" - you guessed right - it doesn't appear in the film. Not even the trailer.