"It's called home ENTERTAINMENT"

"Do you want to watch The Dark Knight?"

I think about this. I know that I ought to. It's the second-highest-grossing film of all time. Lots of people clearly loved it. Christian Bale and Aaron Eckhart are good actors, and Christopher Nolan's made some interesting films that I've enjoyed.

I think some more. The film is going to be long, it's going to be loud, and it's going to have lots of set-piece chase sequences and explosions. I hate noisy overblown films. I find the sound design to be deafening, the dialogue muddied, the character development and plot consistency thrust aside in search of BIGGER! LONGER! LOUDER! fight sequences.

No, I don't want to watch it. I didn't enjoy the first Batman film in this series. I don't want to watch another bloody film with The Joker chewing scenery left, right, and center. I only liked the Tim Burton one with The Penguin and Catwoman; no penguins, I'm not watching.

"You don't have to watch it. It's not supposed to be hard work, it's supposed to be entertaining."

I decide not to watch it, and the decision feels right. There's something terribly satisfying about deciding that you no longer have to watch what all the cool kids are watching. I just wish I'd said the same thing about Sin City. Actually, I did want to watch Sin City; I just wish I hadn't once it was over. A highly stylized exercise in male wish fulfillment, full of violence and with all the women being scantily clad prostitutes? Not my cup of tea. At all. And it FELT really long, with people "dying" and then waking up, and lots of drawn-out, repetitive fight sequences. At the end, I couldn't believe it was less than 2 hours in duration; it felt like an eternity. By contrast, we've watched Ice Age and Ice Age 2 in the past week and really enjoyed them. Fun stuff.

I sometimes worry that I'm slipping into middle-age with astonishing speed and ease. When PJ's away, I tend to watch a lot of ITV3 -- or OAP TV, as I like to call it. Repeats of Poirot and Jeeves & Wooster; nice dramas with happy endings. (Although, there's a whole class war issue at play in Poirot; it's nearly always the servants bumping off their masters and mistresses out of seething resentment. Interesting.) Or it's fascinating and mad French documentaries on BBC4 about the house of Chanel. Or QI, either on Dave or the new series on BBC1. Nothing too challenging or depressing.

On the other hand, I really liked V for Vendetta, and I didn't expect that at all. It felt very English for a Hollywood thriller, with a really English vernacular and some GREAT jukebox scenes (an early 60s Wurlitzer, I think). And, we also enjoyed Offside, an Iranian film about girls trying to get in to see the Iran-Bahrain World Cup qualifying match in 2005/6. And tonight we're going to watch Helvetica, a documentary about a font. I know: The fun never stops here in Hampshire!