On Friday night a bunch of us piled over to Somerset House to watch a Jack Black double bill as part of the Film Four-sponsored outdoor movie festival.Now, I’m not the most rabid Jack Black fan in the world - truth be told, I can find him pretty annoying, though I liked him in High Fidelity - but the opportunity to sit on cushions in the courtyard of Somerset House with friends, drinking beer and enjoying films on a balmy summer night was too good to pass up.

Unfortunately, things didn’t pan out like that.

There were friends, old and new - Steph, Chris, Helen, Mark, Leena and Jasper.

There were cushions, newly bought from Primark at lunchtime, and surprisingly comfortable (or at the very least, insulating from the hardness of the cobbles).

Somerset House itself proved to be a good venue for films: we found ourselves a good spot towards the back right (good access to the beer tent and bathrooms, but infuriatingly close to the concessions tent, so that the smell of frying onions taunted us all evening) and the acoustics of the courtyard weirdly worked, making the soundtrack of the film neither echoey nor distant.

There were definitely films, though the quality of them is up for debate, and it’s fair to say that the enjoyment of the evening had more to do with the experience than the cinematography. I’d seen School of Rock before, which was OK, in a formulaic nonsense kind of way. But Nacho Libre - newly released that night - was something else entirely. It was like Jack Black, bouyed from the previous successes of SoR and his role in King Kong, had managed to convince the studio to let him go his own way, use his own sense of humour in this new film. And while there were moments of mirth, a lot of it was just…blah. Undoubtedly funny if you’re 14 and giddy from school holiday and fart humour, but notsomuch if you’re in your thirties and have been sitting on hard cobbles for the last three hours.

Which brings me to the final point: the evening, though summer, was not balmy. In fact, some may say it was positively soggy. Yeah, of course it rained: we were sitting outside watching films - of COURSE it chucked it down. Luckily, being British, we had all come prepared with brollies as well as picnic blankets, and Chris sorted us out with very fetching Film Four raincapes which covered at least individuals and cushions.

Still, we were definitely more than moist, as the skies opened and the films trudged on. Though to be fair, that could have had more to do with the pints of beer we kept spilling - they were in these stupid flimsy plastic glasses, which got tipped over at the slightest gust of wind. Grrrr.

Still, I had a great night - photos are inevitably on Flickr - though, as I said, more to do with the experience than the films themselves. Thanks to Biscuit Eyes BeerEyes for organising it. Here’s to more suitably silly evenings in future.
Now, on a totally different note, I’m off to Hamburg for 36 hours. I’d usually just take hand luggage, but I now have to figure out how to pack with these security alerts in place. Hmm…