I’m no professional film critic but I do love movies. Like any kid born in the 1950’s I was bought up on suburban cinema houses. Ours was called the Selywn. I can remember the lollie lady coming down the aisle in intermission. The slurping of ice creams, the constant grind of fantails reading the wrappers about Grace Kelly and Cary Grant. The jaffas rolling down the aisle. The first movie I saw there was The absent minded professor with Fred MacMurray a bumbling likeable sort of dude. As I got older I haunted Melbourne cinemas, The Times with its newsreels, the two Metro cinemas in Bourke Street , The Roma an underground raincoat like cinema where Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke uttered those famous last words , ‘ what we have here is a failure to communicate’, before the man in dark glasses shot him through the throat. Then there was the Romanesque Regent and down below was the Plaza where I saw How the west was won. The Palladium where I saw Woodstock and crazy Joe Cocker. The Bercy, The Rapallo and the Forum and the Century where I saw William Holden say ,’ well we can die like men in The Wild bunch. Now I’ve got older and I’m reduced to my couch drinking cardboard red wine watching the Caine Munity rolling those steel balls with a demented eye. It was all about the strawberries. I miss the farts, the perfume of a girl next to you sending you into wild fantasy, opening night watching Apocalypse Now with my gal wearing army dungarees from the second hand store from Mitchells on Russell street. What a night that was with the necking in the back seat the fumbling with buttons , hands, lips wandering everywhere , sighs from the seat behind, was that a Dennis Hopper sigh or was that me and I my girl. That idea of being invisible in the dark knowing a Black sea of humanity was with me…. somewhere…..oh well Bogie is about to rub his steel balls again, mum , where’s the strawberries, hush stupid , I can’t hear.