Entertainment Features

Men, there comes a time when you sit down and realise there may be something wrong. Darragh Harkin tells us about his affliction with watching movies from start to finish.

By Darragh Harkin

A few weekends ago I committed the man-crime of the century by downloading Win a date with Tad Hamilton. Now before you start judging me (although it may be too late), understand that I was forced to do it. Not by my girlfriend or by a woman of any kind, I wasn’t even forced by another human being. Instead I forced myself.

That’s right, I forced myself to do it as I have an affliction that means I must watch movies right until their very end. It doesn’t matter how good or God awful the film is. If I start watching it at all, I must see how it ends and 24 hours previous to the download I’d fallen asleep watching said movie on TV. This of course meant I missed the ending and due to my self-diagnosed affliction, I would have to waste more of my time finding it on the Internet. But why, I hear you ask? Why was I watching it in the first place? Why did I need to see the ending of a very predictable movie and if this is a real affliction is there a chance that you might have it too? Let me explain.

On that Friday night I was chilling with my lovely* girlfriend catching up on a few episodes of the latest series of Dexter when she started to fall asleep. This is quite normal as it was past one o’clock in the morning and she'd been up since seven am. Sadly, as a man of leisure, I was nowhere near tired and needed something else to watch before bed. I could have kept watching Dexter but that would have been a tad futile. You all know, as well as I do, who the real boss in a relationship is and had I gone a couple of episodes ahead of her, I would be made watch them again a few days later.

So instead I switched on RTÉ and Win a date with Tad Hamilton had just started. Yes it’s a terrible Rom-Com and yes I should have switched it off straight away. But to be fair, it does feature Kate Bosworth and Ginnifer Goodwin so let’s just say it caught my 'interest'. Five minutes in and I could tell this was a mistake as the film was boring and now I would have to watch it to the very end or not feel right. This is how the affliction works as it forces me to watch movies that I know I won’t like. It doesn’t matter if it’s Eat Pray Love, Bride Wars or Step up 2: the Streets, if I come upon them within the first fifteen minutes I feel a need to watch them to the end. It’s a curse, and don’t be surprised if you have something similar as I’ve seen the signs in many of you.

For example you might be hanging out with your mates in the local when someone asks who was the right back for the Arsenal team that won the league in 2004? Most of the time you will have the name and shirt number in a split second but it’s the occasion where you can’t answer that the affliction takes over. You won’t allow yourself to Google it just yet as that would be admitting defeat. So instead you and your mates sit in the pub not talking but scratching your heads trying to think of his name.

Pascal Cygan someone shouts. No is the answer. Philippe Senderos? No again and again and again, until someone crazily suggests Lee Dixon. This will go on and on until you get the right answer and if you can’t solve it then Google will do it for you. It’s this need to get an answer that means you have the same affliction as me just in a different way.

Another example is something your parents might do. They start telling a story and for some reason feel the need to be exact with dates and names. If they can’t remember a certain persons name no matter how irrelevant they are to the overall story they won’t continue until it’s figured out. Shouts will be thrown across the kitchen as if it were a moment of life and death: “Breda! What was the name of Michael Smith’s second cousin on his mother’s side that leant him the Elvis cassette in July of '82?” Who cares should be the answer but instead a world-class shouting match will take place before your eyes until someone realises his name was Frank and it was a Rolling Stones cassette in January of '87. We all hope this type of thing won’t happen to us, but in some way it already has. This is just another form of the same affliction.

This problem can be seen in everybody on every single day and in many different ways. Sometimes it’s an actress you recognise in a TV show but you can’t quite place where it is you know her from. You get the old brain working overtime before you embarrassingly realise she was in a porno you’d watched and perhaps it’s best to keep that one to yourself.

It could be someone asking what the name of the fourth Ghostbuster was. You know the answer, you have to know the answer and yet it’s a struggle to get the words out. All these little problems combined are what I’m calling an affliction, a need that us men have to get something small finished or else we suffer. It’s the reason I’ve watched more than any straight mans fair share of chick flicks and right now it has you thinking "was it Winston"? Yes it was Winston, he was the fourth Ghostbuster but if I hadn’t told you and you couldn’t look it up, would it have wrecked your head all day? Yes, of course it would, as it’s an affliction we all have in some way lads, so what are we going do about it?

Well we could form some sort of Stonecutters club that meets under a bridge every second Tuesday and you need to get a flaming pony tattooed on your upper thigh to join, but I don’t think any of us want to do that. Instead we will just put up with it and get on with things like always, as we are men and that’s what we do. We control the world, build ships, planes and bridges, fly humans to the moon and create technology to save peoples lives. We do all these great things and on our days off, so what if we watch a few terrible movies or argue about football to pass the time. I won’t hold it against you and I hope you won’t hold it against me.

Finally, in case you are wondering about Win a date with Tad Hamilton let me tell you, it’s not good and has long since been deleted from my computer. It’s so poor in fact, that it tries to balance the whole love story around the idea of a girl having six different types of smile. You do wonder how these movies get made sometimes and it’s not worth checking out for any reason other than having the same affliction as poor old me.

Now I’m off to switch on the telly and hope I don’t come across Battlefield Earth as that is something even a blind man doesn’t want to see.

*if I don't say she is lovely, a world of hurt will be bestowed upon me. Let’s just hope she doesn't read the article this far down.