{"id":702,"date":"2014-09-05T08:53:53","date_gmt":"2014-09-05T08:53:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/?p=702"},"modified":"2014-09-05T08:53:53","modified_gmt":"2014-09-05T08:53:53","slug":"nobody-not-even-the-rain-has-such-small-hands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/williamgallagher.com\/selfdistract\/2014\/09\/05\/nobody-not-even-the-rain-has-such-small-hands\/","title":{"rendered":"nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"3330__hannah_and_her_sisters_(1986)movie_\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That film poster was on my bedroom wall throughout the time I was a student. Where my friends and housemates had thrash metal posters, I had Hannah and Her Sisters<\/a> but it was for a very sensible reason: it was my favourite film.\u00a0Today I don’t have one. Not just one. It seems a weird notion to have only one. But back then \u2013 er, when in the hell would it have been? I’m lost \u2013 I believed the best film ever made was Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters.<\/p>\n

Now, I don’t mean I believed that in some combative, argumentative way: I didn’t evangelise the film, I wasn’t shocked if you said you preferred Howard the Duck. It was just for me, just fact, just Hannah.<\/p>\n

Yet this week it never entered my head\u00a0when asked what\u00a015 films have most stayed with me.<\/p>\n

Well, clearly it did enter my head or I wouldn’t be talking to you about it. But I was tagged in this Facebook meme \u2013 if you haven’t been tagged yet, hello, you are now \u2013 and I rattled off this lot in a thrice:<\/p>\n

Grosse Pointe Blank
\nTrainspotting
\nBourne films 1-3
\nBoyfriends and Girlfriends
\nMission: Impossible 1
\nThe Cider House Rules
\nThree Colours Blue
\nLeon (aka The Professional)
\nHeaven Can Wait
\nThe Shawshank Redemption
\nCapricorn One
\nDeathtrap
\nThe Sting
\nAmelie
\nThe Empire Strikes Back<\/p>\n

Okay.\u00a0The list is true enough, though Empire was a push to get it to 15, but nothing that I’d especially be wanting to tell you about. You know what happened next, though. Other people wrote their 15 and I kept seeing ones that I should surely have had. I think the biggest shock for me was that I’d missed off Twelve Angry Men. (Not ten days ago, I watched the Tony Hancock version on YouTube<\/a>. It’s the one where he says “Magna Carter \u2013 did she die in vain?”.)<\/p>\n

Nobody picked Hannah. So I have no idea why I finally remembered, but it was a memory with a punch. A flood. Can you have a flood of punches? Central Park in the autumn. The most gorgeous New York City bookshop \u2013 now long gone, I’m afraid, even before I managed to get to it, which just makes seeing it more precious. Woody Allen’s character is a producer on a TV show that is really Saturday Night Live and has a corner office with windows looking out across the city. Carrie Fisher looking amazing. Barbara Hershey melting my heart. The music. Oh, but the music. I have the soundtrack album on vinyl somewhere and haven’t\u00a0played it in a decade but the very opening notes of this trailer are bliss to me.<\/p>\n