A different format for this years AGM. Too many injurys to play golf plus we decided that we should sit, drink wine and watch a long film for a change. After much debate the film selected was Once upon a time in America. At 229 minutes the plan was to watch half of the film and then have an intermission where we would be served ice creams and go for a walk. What actually happened is that we spent too long in the pub at lunch time and could not fit in the intermission. To make it more complicated we lost control of the remote and could not get back to the mid point of the film and so missed about 10 minutes of the film. The plot was quite complicated and there was quite a bit of switching between events at different times of a group of boys growing up to be gangsters in New York. Sergio Leone originally planned for the film to be two 3 hour long fims, then a single 4.5 hour long film. Eventually the distributer managed to get him to cut it to 229 minutes. For the US market the distributers cut it downeven further to 139 minutes and rearranged all the scenes so that they were in chronological order all without Sergio's input. That is probably the reason the film did not do well at the box office.
However, dispite the missing 10 minutes, some difficult rape scenes and the difficult plot most of us were pleased to have viewed the film. There was a significant suggestion from the chairman to switch out the film two Top Gun films instead. To appease Dan we decided to show Top Gun Maverik after returning from the pub exhausted by the AGM discussion. Of course there was lots of scenes of men in uniform and planes zooming around. There was even a link between the two films! Jennifer Connelly (12 years old at the time and her first film credit) played a young love intrest in Once Upon a time in America. 35 years later she is Tom Cruise's love interest in Top Gun Maverik.
The AGM was expertly chaired. There were some difficult decisions to make. Dave is now a c*untry member with no voting rights and we potentially have a new member TBC. Other than that there was the usual bollocks which has been skillfully recorded in Mike's Mind Map. One item of note is that we couln't find the club mission statement to recite so I have now added it to the front page of the website!
