First movie of the millennium: I love those goofy bastards

The first movie I ever saw in the new millennium was There's Something About Mary, and I do not have a problem with that. There were worse ways to greet the 21st century.

We were out in the middle of nowhere, somewhere on the shores of Lake Tekapo, at midnight on 31 January 1999, and me and my best mates were all tripping our butts off. We'd tried to get into a bar in the town, but it was overpacked, so we went out to nowhere to see in the big day.

(And yes, I know the 21st century doesn't actually start until 1 January 2001, but that pedantry got boring more than 25 years ago, and the mental leap from years that begin with 19- to ones that start with 20- was always bigger than the actual maths.)

And when the clock ticked over to midnight, there was no Y2K apocalypse, although I did see some weird lights in the sky over the Southern Alps in the middle of the night, strange flashes through the mountains, which can be 100 percent attributed to the drugs.

We ended up crashing at my little sister's place in a town called Fairlie, that was as far as our sober driver would take us and that was fair enough, because we must have been goddamn nightmares.

It was well after midnight, and I couldn't sleep, so I stayed up and watched up and watched the millennial fireworks and lasers as the rest of the world caught up with the new century, and none of it was as impressive as that Strange Days movie had promised. 

I also watched some broadcasts from Europe that were utterly incomprehensible and were genuinely doing my head in, and the only movie that my sister had on tape was, for some reason, There's Something About Mary, and so that's what I watched in the early hours of the new century.

And it could have been so much worse. It's an utter trifle of a film, but it's also bright, colourful and gloriously stupid. The main characters are gorgeous as fuck, and its central message was that maybe we shouldn't be total dicks to each other, and that's a message we could have listened to more in the past 24 years.

The drugs wore off and life went on, but I've still got that message imprinted on the inside of my skull, because it was my first message of the millennium.

(The first song I ever heard in the 21st century was a Robbie Williams tune, because we had to listen to the local radio station to be certain of the time, and that's what they played in the immediate aftermath, and I don't have anything more to say about that.)