The other night they showed a movie on BBC2 called Pie in the Sky, about a young guy whose passion was traffic broadcasting. His hero (played by John Goodman) was a broadcaster who could, from his helicopter, sense as if by instinct the motions of the traffic, forthcoming jams, etc., and by issuing some profound instructions to the journeying motorists, could unscramble the mess and see everybody home quckly and safely. When the Goodman character came to work drunk, our young hero got to demonstrate that he too possessed this gift.

There was plenty of sexy romance, involving two of my favourite actresses, Anne Heche and Christine Lahti (separately I mean), Heche being his first-love-next-door (literally) and Lahti the older woman who takes him in hand, lucky boy. The one name I didn't catch was that of the actor playing the young guy himself. (Here's the movie website, and his name's Josh Charles.)

One of the pleasures of movie fancying is discovering lesser know movies that you really like, and then watching them gradually become established as really nice movies that lots of other people turn out to like also, and seeing them get four stars in the Radio Times and start to creep into those lists of people's all-time favourite movies, even though when first shown they seem to attract no attention. What I mean is, they attract the opposite of the sort of jibber-jabber that now surrounds the very mediocre (by all accounts – I've not seen it and don't intend to) Matrix 2.

Here are two more movies that I would place in that category, of delightful, but not often talked about, or not in my vicinity: Into The Night (starring Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer), which is a romcom/thriller and Some Kind of Wonderful (written and produced by John Hughes, starring Eric Stoltz), one of those high school romcom/class warfare teen movies, but just done really well, and very charmingly.

Of course it could be that being a London libertarian, all I ever get told about are special effects, SF, slam bang, "I'll be back" movies, and that somewhere else in the politico-social landscape is a great hubbub of girlie conversation about non-special-effects type date-movies of the sort I find I like more and more.