We watched a film the other night.

It's nice to see a film that you know nothing about. In fact, it's so nice, and so unusual, in these days of always-on internet and google, that I don't want to tell you anything about the film that we watched that might influence you in any way, or fill you with expectations of any kind.

And so I find myself in the contorted position of not being able to tell you whether I liked the film or not, as I would have preferred not to have been told this by someone else. But come to think of it, since I'm blogging about the experience, you could reasonably assume that I at least didn't hate the film, and thus I shouldn't tell you even which film it was, for the same reason.

Hmmm...

OK, since I'm not going to tell you which film it was, I might as well tell you that I liked it. I suppose this blog entry basically says: "I saw a film that I liked, but one in which most of my pleasure came from the fact that I didn't know what it was going to be about." I can further suggest that the same would be true for you if you saw this particular film, without knowing anything about it.

From this you might draw the conclusion that it would be a good idea to watch more films about which you know nothing, in the hope that this film of mine (or one like it) turns out to be among them and you end up enjoying yourself.

I appreciate that this information isn't terribly useful to you.

Hmmm...

If I were Douglas Hofstadter, I would end this stupid blog entry by finding a way to tell you which film I was talking about but in such a disguised way that you felt that you hadn't received the recommendation through normal channels and thus retained the pleasure of fresh discovery. Embody the message in the medium, sort of thing, alerting you only by spelling mistakes or other out-of-message indicators. But very serious complications arise when you start trying to encode things using the first letter of the first few words in a sentence, for example, and anyway, you'd have to promise not to go and research the film even if you did work out what the the film was, to avoid spoiling the aforementioned pleasure-from-ignorance. It's probably safest that I leave you in suspence.


This post was originally on LiveJournal.