Back when I had a television and video player and the lads were in their early teens, we used to watch movies.
The usual selection formula was: action equals explosions, gunfire more explosions, heroic exploits ... the end. This was simple and easy.
One rainy day, with another gritty action film commencing, it was decided (in the interests of science) we would record the number of people in the film that smoked, the number of characters that died, count the explosions and establish the overall death toll in relation to the number of scenes with kissing.
This proved a hilarious pastime and so began an ongoing process of establishing what we termed the "kiss to kill ratio".
The body count in some of the action films was absurd; particularly those in which the hero somehow managed to create all the mayhem alone with no assistance. These films were fun and made us laugh.
How many helicopters or cars exploding does one film need? How much gunfire could be sustained without running out of bullets?
Most of these films had little or no kissing in them at all. When it did happen, usually toward the end when the hero rescued the woman, it was greeted by us with astonishment.
The other thing we noted was that most of the smokers were the baddies. Sometimes they wanted to take over the world, other times they wanted to destroy it. They never seemed to have thought through the small steps toward the larger goal. Often they explained their evil plans to the hero in detail before deciding to get rid of the good guy in some slow tedious way that was easy to escape from.
These scenes always led to a certain amount of derision on our part. Despite having blown up large swathes of countryside, the baddies would linger and spend time talking to the hero.
On the other hand, the films with kissing and romance very rarely had exploding helicopters and car chases. Instead, the main characters would spend a large part of the film at cross purposes - there would be some reason they could not be together or they didn't know the other person really fancied them.
We would watch these romances gone awry and shout at the screen: "Kiss her you fool!" But no - that was not going to happen until 85 minutes into the film. With the number of advertising breaks in NZ TV programmes, this pivotal moment in the film could actually be hours away and often we would give up.
There was always one small bonus in watching a film to the end - it gave us opportunity to check out the credits and see if anyone called Eric had been involved in some way in the production.
This search had been prompted by an earlier accidental discovery that there are very few people called Eric working in the film industry. Many of the films we watched were found to be completely Eric-less. This seems such an odd fact - it would suggest that if you want to succeed in the film industry and your name is Eric you should probably change it to something else.
Very exotic names seemed to be common as the credits roll, so maybe a longish name with lots of consonants and few vowels is the way to go.
Terry Sarten is a writer, musician and social worker. Feedback: tgs@inspire.net.nz or www.telsarten.com