Avoiding the hype (and random tangent)

I'm a bit of a hoor for the filums so I am. I have for many years religiously bought Empire magazine as much for recommending old movies that I haven't seen as the ones yet to come. On that note I'm also lethal for hoarding - every year or so (normally when I've decided to move house yet again!) it breaks my heart to throw out the umpteen magazines and copies of the Ticket and various supplements from the weekend papers that I haven't got round to reading.

This normally results in me sitting down for several hours to do some catch up reading (and noting of the various albums/films/books that I should check out some time in the next 40 years or so!) and suddenly realising that the new tenant has arrived for their room and I haven't even packed yet!

I think the hoarding instinct comes naturally to most people - the question is of course whether you have that mercenary vein in you where you can casually throw out all this accumulated waste which you've grown unusually attached to. Which reminds me (jaysus I wasn't even going to talk about hoarding) I saw a documentary on more4 a few weeks back about these people who compulsively hoard - the people in question all suffered from a particular form of OCD where they literally couldn't bear to throw anything out.

There was a couple featured where the husband had literally filled their house with rubbish and his family were forced to intervene, one woman in America had cut off contact from all her friends because she didn't want them to see how much she had accumulated in her apartment but the the most depressing was the guy in England who not only hoarded everything he bought, but who actually went out and sifted through peoples rubbish to find more materials for his collection. In the end he was served with an ASBO because the amount of rubbish that had built up outside his house was attracting vermin. But this wasn't the worst - the local council arrived at his flat to clean out the rubbish and it turned out that he was even hoarding his own faeces.

Outside of the natural disgust that anyone would feel over the thoughts of someone doing this, what fascinated me about the programme was the way an obsessive habit like hoarding can turn from something funny we've all done at one stage or another (you should see my sister's teddy collection!) to something that takes over your whole life - most of the people in the documentary were aware of their condition and how strange it was yet every one of them felt powerless to do anything about it. A friend of mine has a mild strain of OCD but he has it under control and doesn't really talk about it. You just wonder is it something that is wired into your brain from birth or is it something that develops as a reaction to some event in your life.

Any psychologists out there?!

Anyhoooooo - talk about a protracted tangent! My point is this for the most part I'll read film reviews except for those rare films that I'm dying to see - in these situations I'm kind of like the lads who come into the restaurant on a Saturday and say

"whatever you do don't tell me what happened in the match - I'm recording it at home"

Its the same logic with me - there are certain films that you want to see free of any predetermined notions - you've seen the trailer, you've thought "that looks deadly - now please no-one talk about it!"

So to the various American bloggers I read -

Stop bleedin talkin about Juno!!! We still have to wait a few weeks over here to see it!

End of rant

Now here's the trailer