AMERICAN REUNION

FROM IMOGEN: I’ve never seen an American pie film. Not out of pretentious snobbery. Instead I had a closeted youth free of such vile, crude, populist, lowest-common-denominator jokes.

No really, I somehow just missed the boat. However, this Saturday I decided to end this spell of bad luck. I was going to immerse myself in American Pie and the viewing conditions had to be optimum.

I wanted an out-of-town leisure complex pretending to be American. The sort with a Pizza Hut, Bowlplex, Chiquitos with the chipper Mexican music drifting out the door and the golden arches of McDonalds announcing your imminent arrival from the motorway. A place so successful at emulating the birthplace of the $955 million film franchise, the real-life American I went with felt he was home - that guy sat two seats down could well be Stifler. The only thing testifying otherwise were the Bristolian accents of the ushers.

There’s not much point in going into plot, its pretty simple. One friend asked me if I missed all the in-jokes. Well, I can’t answer that as I don’t know the in-jokes so who knows if I missed them- a catch 22 situation. Yet really it didn’t seem to matter. I went for the cinema experience: the big screen, Hollywood voiceover, the sound of someone cramming popcorn in (and around) their mouth, and, despite Orange’s best attempts, a phone going off followed by a scrabble in a bag and a really-loud-but-still-whispered ‘fuck’.

My tagline of ‘I don’t care what’s on, I’ll come with you, I just LOVE the cinema’ has been dangerous at times. I sat through Wolverine without watching any X-men before. I’ve even watched Hall Pass. American Reunion was more entertaining than the former (which, however, is very unintentionally funny), and less gross-out than the latter (the words ‘too far’ come to mind).

Psychology says laughing releases endorphins etc. etc. As Vinny is a psychologist (-cum-blogger obviously) this is an informed opinion. I’d gone into the cinema feeling a little under the weather, I left the cinema with a beatific Hollywood smile. Siegfried Kracauer damned 1920s Berlin picture houses as ‘palaces of distraction’. Is this Vue Longwell Green’s new tagline? I admit, I was not edified in any way, but it sure was fun.