Beyond the Films
Last night I watched the Special Features of (my Blu-Ray) 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) with the only person I know who would be interested in doing that – my eighty-six-year-old father.
He took me and my brother along with him to see all the films he wanted to see. Between 1963 and 1983 the idea of babysitters wasn’t a concept I’d even heard of let alone experienced.
If Dad wanted to see Chinatown or The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor, I got to see it aged 10 or 11.
That’s how I know that when I was five years old I saw 2001 in a cinema, for the first time. I also know that my brother who was eleven or twelve at the time thought it was boring but cognitively appreciated the interesting idea of artificial intelligence. I also remember that for some reason my father used to take us all to see revivals of films he liked. There was no babysitting so my brother and I went along to all of the films. I got to see some things that rocked my world and scared the hell out of me.
