Night Out

Last night we watched The Neverending Story at the Rooftop Cinema which was a very cool venue - actually, it was downright cold, but also cool in the less literal sense. The movie was not as magical as it was when I was a ten-year-old bookworm, but it has survived the tests of time better than The Labyrinth. As with most older movies, it is essential to apply liberal doses of imagination to the not-so-special effects. Take, for example, the part when Atreyu tells the scary wolf-creature that he'd rather go down fighting than be taken by the nothing. The wolf leaps toward him, snarling as the wind of the nothing tears tree from rock. The audience sharply inhales and - cut to Atreyu pushing the large, dead wolf away, its legs sticking out at right angles from its torso as it lies on its side. The whole audience, with the probable exception of the young girl sitting in front of us, laughed out loud.

On our way home, a guy around our age got on the tram and loudly asked if there were any English on board, which there weren't (I quickly decided that I'm Ameralian). A couple of stops later, someone got on wearing an English cap. Our "friend" immediately started singing "Four nil four nil four nil four nil" to the tune of Auld Lang Syne. I guess we won the cricket! The guy wearing the cap turned out to be an Aussie, too, and they soon joined voiced in a rousing rendition of "Yellow Submarine" except the chorus went, "We all live in a convict colony, a convict colony, a convict colony...."