Watch This Old SBS ‘At The Movies’ Episode And Try To Control Your Feelings
Five stars.
As you’ve probably heard by now, Margaret and David are hanging up their boots after 28 years at the helm of At the Movies because the world is, at heart, a cold and loveless place where nothing beautiful can last. They’ve just released a quick video saying goodbye to everyone, and the little bit at the start where Margaret almost loses it will tear at your heartstrings like the ending of Toy Story 3.
Footage of the pair’s legendary bickering over the decades is disappointingly scarce online — someone needs to make a supercut of that — but this ancient 1999 episode of At the Movies back when it was on SBS, helpfully uploaded to YouTube by user Stickytape and Rust, will more than serve as a salve for that desolation you feel at the news.
There’s so much to love here — the daggy SBS intro music, Margaret’s chessboard cloak thing, the fact that David seems to be an immortal, ageless sixty-year-old — but it’s also a quaint reminder of how At the Movies used to spend less time reviewing Avatar and more time picking apart obscure French-language musings on death and eroticism that were filmed through an orange peel or something. Like the pair themselves, the show has changed a lot and stayed remarkably similar at the same time.
It’s gonna suck without these two around.