Trouble ahead

This is, I should confess, not a film I meant to see. I meant to see Harry Potter, but turned up for the screening in the right place at the wrong time — a week early, I’m such a schmuck — and had to take what was showing, which was You Again, with the tag line: ‘What doesn’t kill you...will marry your brother.’ Instantly, I doubted the veracity of this — I can’t put my finger on what made me doubtful, I just felt it in my bones, and called my brother. ‘Jon,’ I said, ‘if I had athlete’s foot and it didn’t kill me, would you marry it?’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘And I’m already married to Mary, as you know.’ I do know this, just as I know that, if you can’t trust a film’s tag line, there may be trouble ahead.

• From magazine issue: 13 November 2010