Sorry, Craig can’t come to the phone…

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This article was published 01/09/2020 (2200 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If you’re confused about the complex, forward-backward timelines and action sequences in Christopher Nolan’s movie Tenet, you’ll want to have a talk with Craig Sharpe.

You may just have to wait a few weeks to get him. Sharpe is planning to watch the movie 120 times to break a Guinness World Record. But by that time, he may be the guy who can authoritatively untangle the film’s complex timelines.

And there will be no fudging of timelines when it comes to observing Guinness’s tenets. Breaking the record required that Sharpe start attending from the very first night — last Wednesday — because the clock is ticking.

“The rules from Guinness are: you have from the time that it’s opened and it only counts when it’s a first-run movie,” Sharpe, 47, explains in a phone interview. “The moment it’s available for download or purchase, that window closes.

“But I heard from Scotiabank that it’s going to be there for at least six weeks, and knowing Christopher Nolan and Warner Brothers, it’s not going to come out on video or on demand in six weeks.”

Sharpe also has to sit through the entire movie, credits and all.

“When they say beginning to end they mean beginning to end,” he says. “All two hours and 31 minutes.”

The current Guinness record for Most Cinema Productions Attended —Same Film is 108, achieved by Joanne Connor in Redcliffe, Queensland, Australia, on March 27, 2019. She watched Bohemian Rhapsody 108 times to achieve the record.

The Tenet running time is considerably longer than the average Hollywood fare, which typically runs between 90 minutes and two hours. And 120 viewings works out to exactly 302 hours of screening time.

As of Monday morning, he had seen the movie 12 times, one-tenth of the required goal. Despite a leg cramp at a Sunday afternoon screening, he remains determined, as well as entertained.

“Personally, I don’t see any flaws in this movie,” he says.

The mission offers the fulfilment of a dream for Sharpe, who caught the movie bug when his mom took him to see Star Wars: A New Hope at the old King’s Theatre when he was just six years old.

“That was the first movie I understood and I was hooked ever since,” he says. He had the opportunity to take in multiple viewings when he worked at local cinemas, including the Garrick, the St. Vital and the Odeon Drive-In.

More recently, Sharpe was working at a local call centre, “doing online support help,” he says. When COVID began slowing the economy, that job disappeared.

“They closed my department down, and from there, the choice was either go back on the phones or I would end up not having my job,” he says.

He chose the former.

“I live with anxiety and depression,” he says. “It got to the point where having people yell at me for eight hours straight wasn’t an option.”

Sharpe always wanted to get into the entertainment business, first as an actor and then as a critic. So making a bid for that profession via this marathon effort was, he says, a step in a more positive direction, even in a time of pandemic.

“I’ve got my normal, natural worries,” he admits. “But I practise social distancing, and I will have my mask. It’s just black with white lettering, with Tenet across it. I’ll be taking jars of hand sanitizer and all that.”

At the end of his effort, he says, “I’ll be able to say that I finally stood my ground and didn’t let anybody deter me. I just finally put my naysayers aside and I just trucked through and I accomplished it. I can say this was my goal: I wanted to do it and I’ve done it.”

The cinema experience, he says, is his happy place.

“The movie theatre brings back old memories and it’s a joy in and of itself,” he says. “Every time I go, I love the atmosphere, the smell of the popcorn, the drinks, the action, the fun and how other people in the crowd react to the movie, whether they like it or not.

“It’s all-encompassing,” he says. “Considering what’s going on in the world, we can still have fun… as long as we are safe and responsible about it.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing