I went to the flicks last week to see Gravity at the Palace Cinema. It was in 3D. They’ve improved this somewhat since I first experienced it at the Picture House in Douglas when I was still at school.
This was in the 1940s and we didn’t see a complete feature film in 3D.
It was a sort of dummy run at it, a demonstration film, and as we went into the cinema we were issued with primitive 3D glasses which were made of cardboard with coloured plastic lenses.
All I can remember of the film itself is that it included a live crab sitting on the end of a spade being thrust into our faces to try and frighten us.
It was realistic enough but, in my boyhood mind, I didn’t quite see the point of it. I had seen plenty of crabs up close before. Why should I want to go to the flicks to see one?
After this, 3D disappeared from cinemas, never to return, and we forgot about it and got on with girls. We were allowed to keep our 3D glasses but I threw mine on the fire when I got home.
3D returned to our cinemas in 2009 with a film called Avatar. I didn’t go and see it.
I was told it was a kind of science fantasy thing. I had had enough of that with the crab on a spade.
And so to Gravity, which I had been looking forward to, not because it’s in 3D but because it sounded good and stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. (Do you think George is at least partly Manx, under the Manx Perspective? I think so).
At Palace Cinema 2 the staff issued us with our 3D glasses. They were not made of cardboard and plastic. They were much more substantial and sophisticated.
You would have looked fine wearing them as sunglasses. We were told, in no uncertain terms, that we had to give them back afterwards.
When the film started I had some trouble. I like to wear my reading glasses at the cinema but I couldn’t work out how to fit them under the 3-D glasses, much to the irritation of the lady sitting next to me. She told me to forget the reading glasses. By this time ‘Gravity’ was nearly halfway through.
Fortunately I made it just in time to see Sandra slipping out of her spacesuit and exposing her shapely legs and what looked like a pair of black knickers.
When it was over we filed out past members of the staff holding out big plastic bins to put our 3D glasses in. It had been a magnificent film, a lot better than that crab on the end of a spade.
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A news release issued by the Isle of Man Bell Ringers said they were going to join with bell ringers world-wide ‘to celebrate the death of the most famous of bell ringing composers, Fabian Stedman’.
Tugs at the heartstrings doesn’t it?
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Clive Alford says the magazine Manx Tails reported: ‘The Douglas branch of Save the Children will be launching this year’s festive Festival of Trees Festival on November 22’.
I think we get the point.
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Just a few more Manx celebrities:
Ayatollah Kermeen.
Emma Peel.
Alec Baldwin
Bruce Willaston.
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A last one for Lexophiles: He had a photographic memory which was never developed.