National Cinema Day

It’s National Cinema Day in the UK on Saturday.

Hundreds of participating cinemas are offering tickets to all shows for just £4, to celebrate the joy of experiencing movies on the big screen.

In Dorset, I’m a great fan of Dorchester Plaza, an independent cinema which offers you the chance to see up-to-date films at a fraction of the price of the big multiplexes. The Plaza is just one of the hundreds of venues taking part in National Cinema Day.

It’s a bit of a hike from Lush Places to Dorchester. But it’s so worth seeing a film on the big screen, rather than waiting for it to appear on TV or watching it on a hooky Firestick which keeps buffering.

In the part of France where I’m lucky enough to spend several months of the year, we used to have the most wonderful cinema showing VO – version originale – films with French subtitles.

It’s where I saw Elvis, Rocket Man and the Aretha Franklin documentary.

Sadly, the cinema closed because the couple running it retired. I did have a fleeting notion that perhaps Mr Grigg and I should take it over but then I thought better of it.

There is nothing quite like sinking into a comfortable seat and watching a film unfold. You are transported to another time and another place, which is so much more intimate than watching it at home, even if you have a popcorn cruncher or Coke slurper sitting beside you.

With a good film, you can totally immerse yourself in the onscreen action.

In Lush Places, we have a film club which is brilliant value for money. I’ll never forget seeing a spider scuttling across the village hall’s wooden floor in embarrassment as we all sat open-mouthed at a racy scene in La Spagnola, a 2001 comedy drama directed by Steve Jacobs.

I have never looked at courgettes since without wincing.

And then there was the time a handful of us watched The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980) at Halloween. It was surreal seeing Jack Nicholson prowling the scary corridors of the Overlook Hotel, with axe in hand and a terrifying grin on his face, while half a dozen of us sat on village hall chairs, with the curtains closed to the outside world where children were tricking and treating.

I love going to the pictures and always have. The first film I remember seeing is Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book at the old Taunton Odeon with my big sister in 1967 when I was six years old.

My contemporaries always say they cried when Bambi’s mother was killed by a hunter. I didn’t, but I wept buckets when Mowgli went back to the Man Village.

I felt so sorry for Baloo. It was just how imagined my mother feeling (she didn’t) when I first went to primary school at the age of five. How would she cope without me, the baby of five, helping with her daily chores on the farm?

I had the joy of studying film and television history as part of my Open University degree in humanities. I struggled with some modules but I slam dunked that one.

In no particular order, here are ten classic film sequences from some of my favourite films (I will endeavour to do a post on British films and foreign language ones at some point. I love them all):