It's seems such a simple thing - read the time a movie starts on a website, take note of that time, get to the cinema before that time, see a movie. Sounds so simple, doesn't it? and yet, in the World of Michelle, it's something that gets cocked up as many times as it doesn't.

When I first noticed it happening, I used to blame the website I'd taken the information from. Several times I'd had stand-up fights with the ticketing staff at Village (mostly) telling them their website is [obviously] crap and needed a redesign, with real developers and information designers because it couldn't possibly be *me* every time.

Could it?

Age is a wonderful thing when it lets you chill the hell out and realise: everything is, actually, your fault.

Simple plan for Sunday - wake up, get up, go see Look Both Ways at the Rialto at 12:30pm. Easy and accomplished all but for the fact the movie started at 12:10pm and by the time I arrived, it was 18 minutes underway. Upon checking the listings, the next available move was First Descent - a documentary style movie about snowboarding. I'd seen the trailer and it looked pretty spectacular so I bought a coffee and a ticket and settled in to another serendipitous movie afternoon.

First of all, if you haven't been to the Rialto Newmarket in a while, get your skinny white butt along to those comfortable generous seats. I still fidget a bit but at least now there is room to do so.

First Descent follows a group of snowboarders to Valdez, Alaska to snowboard the backcountry where so few mountains have ever been riden before. The team is made up of four generations of snowboarders. Three snowboarding pioneers: Shawn Farmer, Terje Haarkonson and Nick Parata take two 18 year old world class freestyle snowboarding superstars: Shaun White and Hanna Teter, out to some of the biggest snowboarding challenges in Alaska. It also traces the rise and development of snowboarding from a strange culture that saw them banned from ski fields, to a legitimate Olympic event and a lucrative career for those at the top of their game. The movie splices historic footage with profiles of the team and their training then boarding of those amazing mountains in Valdez.

The film footage is incredible. Apart from the breathtaking Alaskan mountainscapes, the filmmakers are obviously extremely experienced in capturing this sport on tape. In some of the historic footage of Shaun White's Winter X Games runs for example, you can see the cameraman captured Shaun's run while snowboarding behind him and I can only imagine these skilled cameramen were employed to do the same and more on the back mountain runs we see in this movie.

The real shining star of First Descent thouh, is the soundtrack. Not just the choice of music, but the use of sound. The sounds of Terje's descent when he gets stuck having taken a bad line down the mountain is amazing. The sound of his breath being forced from his lungs as he lands hard to get himself out of the sticky situation tells so much about the concentration and nerve needed for this sport.

There's another really cool sound part too. In Norway, with the quarter pipe, the music stops as the boarder leaves the lip at the top of the pipe where everything goes silent - the crowd, the music, the sound of board on snow - and you hear one, quiet, classic SLR shutter sound - then the sound crashes back as the snowboarder lands the jump.

Damn good sound.

So now I've enjoyed my serendipitous movie-going afternoon, I'm going to go see a movie now from the Latin American Film Festival before I go home.

[my apologies for the quality of this post.. not that quality has ever been a criteria here at thejamjar.com - but i'm sitting in an internet cafe typing this and my head is everywhere and nowhere these days and I didn't really figure out what i was going to say before I started typing and i'm quite hungry having not eaten yet today so yes, apologies and i will probably edit this later on but i'm gonna post now cos well you know - i can't stand anything as a draft and my next movie starts in 3 minutes so thankyou for your patience]