When I look back at my life (says old man Bastow, at an ancient 29-and-a-half), most of my fondest memories involve cinema.
That occurs in a number of ways. There are the memories of simply going to the cinema: ninth birthday trip to see What About Bob; the Jurassic Park premiere at Greater Union on Bourke Street when people crawled up the aisles screaming and the staff stuck a life-sized velociraptor in one of those honeycomb-style 'holes' in the foyer ceiling; watching Blair Witch Project at the Tidal River outdoor cinema only to find upon leaving that a bunch of surfer dudes had hung the little stick figurines all over the campsites, doing a bang up job of scaring everybody shitless.
Then there are the ways in which the cinema infected my day-to-day life, such as the prolonged period around the age of about eight in which I decided was Peter Venkman, to the point where my parents gave in and went along with it, and Dad made me a proton pack out of a cereal box, some Duplo blocks, and the vacuum cleaner hose (all spray-painted silver, and attached to my back with bright red suspender braces); the whole sorry/amazing saga probably laid the foundations for my later obsession with screen accurate cosplay.
But most of all, and particularly around this time of the year, I start to reminisce about my family's near-psychotic dedication to seeing "The" Boxing Day movie of any particular year.
I can't remember exactly when it began, though I do remember the highlights of our deranged rush to the cinema come December 26th.
Typically we'd pile into the car and roar through the deserted streets to either Hoyts Northland or the Rivoli in Camberwell.
If Atticus and I acted up too much in the back of the Renault (such as our predilection for making incredibly realistic vomit noises into our Slurpee cups) then there'd be a stern serve from Dad as he wielded the steering wheel like Jean Alesi and tore down Burke Road.
In 1997, the pot of gold at the end of the Boxing Day rainbow was James Cameron's Titanic. The song was everywhere by then, but we sat tight and waited for December 26th to take that voyage.
The film seems so hokey now (god knows how they've made its stereoscopic conversion work, given that the animated passengers in aerial shots looked like Lego men even then), but I vividly remember the hushed silence that gripped the Rivoli cinema as Rose and Jack said their frozen goodbyes; you could have heard a pin drop. As soon as Jack dropped into the icy depths, a sole female voice at the back of the cinema choked out a loud sob, and then suddenly everybody was howling along with her.
It was quite a remarkable experience (topped only recently by the massed audience "Ohhhh" that accompanied the first reveal of Pandora's bioluminescence in another Cameron vehicle, Avatar, which I incidentally also saw - by myself, sob sniff - on Boxing Day).
After that, the next big Boxing Day family event was the rolling out of Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings trilogy.
We went so berserk over those films that Atticus and I insisted on buying a set of plastic swords immediately after the screening, which we then took down to Tidal River and practised our best Legolas impressions with (we also saw The Fellowship Of The Ring another two times at the outdoor cinema).
By the time the trilogy had ended, my parents' relationship was on shaky ground, and in 2005 we saw the first of Walden Media's The Chronicles Of Narnia films.
Mum and I, having both grown up with the books, were so excited; Dad, who had an innate distrust of Lewis' Christian allegories thanks to his agnostic father, had to be dragged into the cinema. (As for Atticus, I think he'd well and truly discovered Virgil Donati by then, and was probably just thinking of paradiddles.)
When the film was a bit of a disappointment, Mum and I were gutted, and Dad - never having liked the books to begin with - couldn't understand why we were upset by its missed opportunities.
That was the last Boxing Day movie we ever saw as a family unit.
Despite that, I've tried to keep the dream alive, and am ploughing ahead into this year's Boxing Day line-up with gusto (despite the fact that my newfound role as film critic means I will have seen most of them anyway).
Coming out on top of the pile is Steven Spielberg's War Horse, which - as an owner of at least three books of Spielberg film theory and a signed photo of the maestro - will surely send me back to the glory days of Boxing Day movies with the family, even if I go by myself. The 12-year-old who wrote to the director has been waiting for this day for seventeen years.