Selenay's Ramblings

Er, OK, so experimental Monday got shifted to Saturday but the reason will become apparent.

( Cut for food discussion )

After our pizza, Mum and I settled in to watch Towering Inferno. I still regard this as the best, totally classic disaster movie. It has everything right and modern attempts at the genre are never going to compare. For starters, modern attempts wouldn't allow two heroic stars, they wouldn't let the only devloping-romance plot involve people over 50, and it takes its time to get started which is the opposite of modern movies. By the time the fire gets going, we're nearly an hour into the movie and we've got a whole host of characters and stories to really care about. Steve McQueen, by contrast, doesn't appear on the screen until after the fire is discovered. There is no set-up for him, we know very little about his character apart from the fact that he's a good firefighter and at the end we've learned the important stuff about him but nothing about his personal life.

It's a movie that stands up to repeated re-watchings because I notice something different each time, largely due to the number of different plots and characters. This time I really noticed the relationship between the mayor and his wife, who are both in their fifties and don't follow the modern view of beauty. What I love is how strong their relationship is. The mayor is head over heals in love with his larger, beautiful wife rather than having an affair with some twiggy little young thing. They both worry about how their daughter will cope without them and he does his best to comfort her and remember their long years together. That makes his final fate the more tragic, in a way.

In other thoughts, I'm undecided about whether I'll be watching CSI or Gray's Anatomy this year. I missed both of them last year so there is stuff to catch up on. I suspect that CSI is the easier one to pick without seeing the previous season, but Gray's is stupidly addictive. Oh, the decisions.