Confetti

As we head into the preview screening of Confetti we’re greeted by security gentlemen, who search our bags and confiscate our camera phones. I’m not entirely sure how much they think we’re going to achieve with a camera phone 2 days before public release, but…

Still they’re very organised, little bags to put your phone in and a numbered label to enable you to reclaim your phone at the end…it’s only as we head to our seats that it occurs to me that we just kind of assumed they were legit. Pushing thoughts of local news headlines reading “audacious thieves make off with 50 mobile, in cinema phone con”, to the back of my mind we settle in to enjoy the film.

It’s only once S and I are fully ensconced in the Filmworks theatre number 16, that I confess quite how I had come by 2 free preview tickets.

S’s response is that she wants a label to wear making it very clear that she’s not a reader of Heat magazine…

The film was ok. Somewhere between Love Actually and Wimbledon (but much, much better than Wimbledon). It’s not the sort of film to change your life, or make you rush out and get it on DVD, but it’s amusing enough and a pleasant way of spending a few hours.

The basic premise is a wedding magazine competition to pit three couples against each other for the most 'original' wedding. As the magazine proprietor Jimmy Carr (sorry I can’t remember the character name, but he’s just very ‘Jimmy Carr’ anyway) puts it: “Of course it’s not everyone who wants their special day ruined by an unusual theme…but some people do”. And so we have the 1930’s Musicals Wedding, the Tennis Wedding and the Naturist’s Wedding.

The couple for the latter are first introduced to us riding a tandem in their birthday suits.

S, an occasional tandem rider, whispers to me “oh look, I’ve never seen a tandem with a cross bar for the bloke at the front, but a dropped bar for the woman at the back”. I remark that only S, could watch a scene of two naked people on a tandem, with bits bouncing un-restrained, and make a remark about the sodding bike construction.

Still we both enjoy (quite possibly for different reasons) – it’s a good enough film for a night out with the girls.

P had turned down the opportunity to join us (hey if he’d known about the bikes, maybe…), but we meet up with him afterwards and endeavour to cheer him up. Work reorganisations are causing him stress as he watches as his job and all the initiatives he’s set up (so successfully) look to disappear due to changes in Home 0ffice funding (no good doing good projects if the results can’t be easily quantified in a spreadsheet table eh?). He really is about as low as I’ve ever seen him.

Café Rouge is full, so we pick Pizza Express. For once we go for desserts and P disappears behind a large toffee fudge sundae thing. Suddenly his mood lightens and he’s bouncing and laughing again. He’s the first to acknowledge that he must be about as shallow as a puddle if a bowl of ice cream is all it takes to switch his mood like that.

As P heads off to pick up his bicycle, S and I head for the car and discuss our concerns for P. As S puts it, she doesn’t think their freezer is big enough to hold the litreage of ice cream that would be needed to keep him happy at the moment. Stupid Home 0ffice, they know not what they may be about to lose.