The thrill of living in New York, for me, can be summed up in the recent bunch of midnight screenings I have attended at The Sunshine theatre on the Lower East Side. Everything from old classics to newly restored B Movies are screened there every Friday and Saturday night and it makes for a great evening in the big apple.
The last one I saw was the Blues Brothers. This falls in to the category of one of my favourite films that I have never seen on the big screen and what I am learning about that, having seen a handful of them recently (Evil Dead 1&2, Dusk Till Dawn, Taxi driver), is that until you see these films the way they were meant to be seen you really haven't seen them at all.
Now at the risk of beginning to sound like one of those seriously annoying and hunt-down-and-garrote-with-their-own-hair worthy Blu-Ray commercials that appear repeatedly at the start of DVDs, I mean to say that the soundtrack is incredible, the stunts phenomenal and the direction wondrous when you can see the whole damn thing in big-screen-a-thon and hear it in glorious sound-o-rama.
This was never more true than with The Blues Brothers and after the ecstatic reception I'd had to The Expendables not 2 hours earlier I seriously doubted my ability to be wowed again, especially by a film I must've seen a hundred times by now but I was and it was a perfect way to end the night.
My wife, who had also seen the film on DVD but had been underwhelmed at the time, completely realised how terrific it all was when she saw it up there, projected large. It is like watching baseball on television and then going to the ballpark. The ballpark wins hands down, everytime.
9 out of 10 slices of streaky bacon
Points from the Misses - 8 out of 10 slices of streaky bacon