Love Feature: A website that sets couples up based on their film tastes
by Stuart McGurk.
Wednesday, 08 October 2008
We’d barely spoken, my date was sitting in stony silence, neither of us had laughed once, both of us were utterly miserable and I was thinking of ways to top myself with a straw.
The date was an hour-and -a-half old, and I couldn’t have been more pleased. She was having an awful time. Things were looking up.
After all, we were watching the appalling Simon Pegg comedy How To Lose Friends and Alienate People. If she’d spent the time guffawing, I’d have been in trouble.
“So, s**t?” I asked.
“S**t,” she agreed.
Fantastic. To be fair, that’s probably not how new dating service Moviesanddates.com, which promises to match you up based on your taste in cinema, is supposed to work.
But then, as I discovered, uniting you in what you hate can be just as important.
Which isn’t to say that the website is particularly scientific. Now, I can see the benefit in finding, for instance, someone who has the same tastes in cinema. Someone who, like me, is obsessed with the films of Billy Wilder, 30s screwball comedies, anything written by Charlie Kaufman and most things with Bill Murray. At best, it reflects a similar sensibility. At worst, it gives you something to talk about when your hilarious John McCain impression falls flat.
But in the words of a friend, wouldn’t my peculiar devotion, at 28, to golden-era Hollywood see me paired with a 70-year-old dear with a liking for Jimmy Stewart?
I resolved to run at the first whiff of Murray Mints or wee. But I needn’t have worried, as the site is as complex as the schoolyard game where you pick a colour and a number.
Apart from typing in my favourite film (The Apartment) and what genre I like (does anyone who actually likes cinema think like this?) I must pick, from a list of about 20 options, what actor I look like, what character I “act like” and the same for what I want for my date. Frankly, I don’t care how much I pound on the Natalie Portman option, it ain’t gonna happen.
And you have to worry about the person who selects “Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction” as the “personality” they require. Is bunny boiling “hot” now?
So, finally, the date. This involves being texted your seat number and meeting your blind date at a specially arranged screening. Despite some early shocks as the other “Movieanddaters” arrive, my date happily turns out to be Kelly, a sassy, sarky 25-year-old fashion stylist.
As we chat in the arranged drinks party after the film – the idea is you can chat to others too, but this feels rude – it turns out that our film tastes aren’t that similar. Yes, she likes Charlie Kaufman. No, she’s not a Billy Wilder fan. Screwball what?
Still, more importantly, we both dislike the same films, decided anything that features Denzel Washington and explosions is awful, and that Shark Attack 3: Megalodon is so awful, it’s brilliant.
As always, though, film is a good starting point for banter, but hardly best for flirty chat. We soon abandon it for talking about flatmates (hers: insane, agoraphobic and Hare Krishna respectively) and some less-than-publishable things about Noel Fielding.
We swap numbers and depart, both agreeing we’re quite shocked it wasn’t awful. Unlike, of course, the film.
