Of course, to do a twofer, you actually have to have two perfect pauses in the same evening, which I did Monday night.
The premise of this "series" -- which has had exactly five previous entries over nearly ten years -- is that when I pause a movie at a totally unpremeditated moment, and it captures a perfect frozen snapshot of some kind of sudden action or other fortuitous story moment, I consider that sufficient inspiration to write about it here. I think you can see what makes this one good, but let's get to that in a moment.
We got to our Luca viewing at the end of our first full day on holiday this week, after a lot of toing and froing about what night was actually best to project it on the wall of our holiday house. It was about 7:30 before we got started -- an hour later than we'd ideally like, so as to get our kids to bed at a reasonable hour -- but it did in fact work out best for the schedule, considering also our dinner options in the small town here where we're staying. Most of those places are dark Monday night, so eating frozen pizzas in front of a movie was the way to go. And I'd been planning to write about this screening here anyway, so now I can let this post take care of business.
The pause came during one of our many interruptions, to do things like check on the pizza and go to the bathroom. In this case I believe it was fetching ice cream.
In any case, I think you can see why I considered it to be such a good pause. Giulia (left) is throwing a glass of water at Luca (right), and though I didn't know the actual reason she decided to do this -- I was distracted in the few moments before the pause, while working my way over to my computer to pause it -- I did know the consequences would be significant for Luca. Like Madison in Splash before him, Luca turns into his underwater form (a sea monster) when he's doused with water, and Giulia has never seen that form.
As it turns out, it wasn't quite as big a moment in the narrative as I thought it would be -- Giulia is the only one who sees the transformed Luca, and she's almost preternaturally accepting of the fact that he's a sea monster. But the pause is still great, as it catches the water in the air and Luca's hands up defending himself. In a way, it's like the final millisecond of innocence.
Before we get to our second Perfect Pause, I'll spare a few moments to close the loop on the Luca viewing that I first mentioned in this post.
As you will recall, my seven-year-old was inconsolable when it turned out he watched the first hour of a movie I had been saving as a surprise for this trip. I'm glad to say this did not impact the viewing whatsoever. In fact, I think he got a certain thrill from knowing certain things about the movie before we did. However, he was also really good about not saying "Oh, I love this part" or "This is the part when ..." In fact, I could see him actively resisting the urge -- a real sign of his budding maturity.
And here's a picture of him putting a smile on Luca's face:
After we finished Luca and shuffled them off to bed -- having to call them back once for a little post-credits sequence -- I left the projector up to watch my June installment of Knowing Noir. You'll get a full post on Murder, My Sweet tomorrow, so I'll only include the Perfect Pause here:
Nothing remarkable about what was going on on screen, of course. But if you look down in the lower left corner of the screen, you'll see something pretty remarkable indeed:
So yeah, when I had to pause this movie to get a Mini Coke from the fridge (I was pretty tired at this point), I happened to stop it on exactly the one-hour mark, down to the second.
Did I time it? I might have if this were playing on my DVD player, where you can see the timecode running as you watch. I've actually been known to time a pause to an exact time landmark just for the fun of it.
But in this situation, on an iTunes rental, the amount of time passed/remaining is not even visible until you actually press pause, at which point it jumps up on the screen.
It puts one in mind of The Great Last Days in the Desert Pause of 2016, when I made an unpremeditated pause that exactly bifurcated the movie -- 49 minutes and 12 seconds on one side of the movie, 49 minutes and 12 seconds on the other. (Or whatever the case was. It's a 98-minute movie, in any case.)
For some reason, I guess I did not see it fit to write about that.
After a night of such twin perfection, I slept well.
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