After All, It's Only a Movie.

I've totally struggled over the title of this Holiday Blog Post, & for good reason. I can't think of a suitably pithy, succinct yet witty way of saying that viewing of old movies over Xmas can really make you feel bad.
Not that I'm spending all my time lying on the couch glued to the rather mean little TV set that's in the corner of the quintessential beach house that I'm staying in with Maeflower & Tacitus in Macmasters Beach.
Far from it.
I've spent hours refining my quintessential beach outfit to ensure the least amount of skin is showing, although I did uncharacteristically wear a bikini top that I purchased in a last minute buying frenzy on Xmas Eve which fell off when I was dumped by a wave. Thankfully no one noticed.

I've fallen over on a bush track in the magnificent Bouddi National Park that is at our doorstep & spent an entire day limping.

I've overtaxed my calf muscles from too strenuously soft-sand trudging along the beach.

I've eaten foods I don't normally allow myself to eat like Meat Pies from a cake shop.

I drank flavoured latte-like hot drinks thinking that they actually contained caffeine only to wonder why after nearly 24 hours without coffee I was starting to feel like I was invaded by Aliens.

I was so engrossed with talking to my BFF Marge on the phone while flicking through my iPad that I didn't notice when Maeflower accidentally sliced the top off her finger whilst making dinner. I didn't even notice when she calmly asked while I was still on the phone if she could borrow a hair tie which I only much later realised she used as a tourniquet to stop the prolific bleeding.

But in spite of all this activity, I have managed to get in some old movies.
Sadly, the traditional Xmas movie, "It's a Wonderful Life" wasn't shown on the one lousy TV channel available in the beach house. "Jaws" was shown instead.
Hard as it is to believe, I had never actually seen "Jaws". How could I have avoided such a juggernaut for all these years, I wondered.
The answer is simple: the sight of the actor Robert Shaw being devoured limb by limb by a giant blow up plastic shark. For most of my life there would have been absolutely no way I could have viewed that spectacle. I saw it as a mark of maturity, but perhaps more the hardening of my emotional arteries that I sat gripped to the set on Xmas Nite watching the shark relish every tasty morsel. No wonder poor Robert died not that long after the making of the film at the young age of 51.
I was also amazed that I had never heard the classic line, "we're gonna need a bigger boat" which I'm told is up there with all the other iconic movie lines like "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy nite" & "How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don't even know how the can opener works" & "Mr deMille, I'm ready for my close up" which are all lines that seems to have summed up my life & possibly yours at various points.

Last nite we couldn't stomach another episode of the reality show, Highway Patrol which features clips of Angry Loners whose faces are pixelated whilst they are giving the finger to police officers after they've been pulled over for such offences as broken tail lights.
So we watched Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" which I found inside my Laptop. We marvelled at James Stewart's beautifully creased neck which was proudly on show every time there was a close up of him kissing Kim Novak, who was 25 years younger than him. Apparently, according to trivia that Maeflower read out, Hitchcock was so enraged by how old poor old Jimmy looked, he never used him again, which is kind of a shame.
But I thought the funniest bit of trivia was when Kim asked Hitch for some kind of motivation for her character & he airily replied with something like, "don't bother yourself with that stuff, after all, it's only a movie", which kind of sums up my life right now.