"I don’t want to go to the cinema. Nothing would give me less pleasure.”

A quote from Peter Ackroyd, from the article we were talking about yesterday, which I saved for this separate post, because there was already too much going on in that other post, which concentrated on incredibly prolific writing and staunch aversion to travel. I'm delighted to read about someone who has such extreme versions of tendencies I have in what I'm forced to see as moderation.

As for movies, I've written about my resistance to going to the movies:

Why don't I see more movies? 1. I don't like the physical constraint of committing to sitting in a chair for 2 hours. 2. I only go to movies I think I'll like and still don't much like the movies I see. 3. Few movies seem like the sort of thing I'll like. 4. I have no shortage of other things to do (which is the case for anyone who loves to read). 5. I don't find myself in social situations where going to the movies is what people do together (and I don't see why people want to spend their precious time together doing something that involves so little interaction with each other).

But to say nothing would give me less pleasure. That's so extreme.

We actually did go to the movies this week. Last Wednesday. They were showing "Some Like It Hot," and I don't think I'd ever seen it in the theater, but I've long regarded it as just about the most enjoyable movie ever. Meade had never seen it. Afterwards, he said it was too long. Too long! This is a movie that tells a great story — 2 men running from mobsters fall into parallel romances — with economy and zest, and still it's too long.

Movie-watching takes control of your time. I see I wrote that in 2010 here:

I can't commit 2 hours to sitting in the dark, in the grip of some director's sense of how much time to take telling me a story. I can't wait while an actor speaks slowly and pauses and grimaces to try to make me feel that the words of a script are actually being manufactured inside his cranium. I have thoughts of my own.

But there's none of that slow talking in "Some Like It Hot." And there's some great facial acting. How can you tire of those faces?



So... movies.... what do you think? Surely, there are things that give less pleasure.