If you're a karaoke fan who wants to be a film star, movieoke could be for you, writes Ian Kilroy.

We've all heard tiresome film buffs repeating iconic movie lines time after time. We just know that when nobody else is around, in the privacy of their bedrooms, there they are, looking in the mirror, pointing an imaginary gun and acting like a gangster.

Hasta la vista, baby.

If "movieoke", New York's latest craze, keeps spreading, soon this breed of movie bore will have a socially acceptable outlet for their ramblings. Just as the Japanese pastime of karaoke spread like wildfire across the world, its cinematic sister looks to be on the brink of all-out outbreak.

Go ahead punk, make my day.

The centre of the new phenomenon seems to be the Den of Cin bar, in New York's East Village. Every Wednesday at 9 p.m. wannabe Reservoir Dogs and Dirty Dancers are converging on the small, arty venue to strut their stuff, kung-fu kick and flashdance in front of a large screen. It's the latest and trendiest way to make a fool of yourself.

The woman behind it is Anastasia Fite, Den of Cin's 24-year-old manager. She describes the concept as "karaoke for people who can't sing" and says she got the idea for movieoke from a script she wrote as a film student that featured a character who could speak only in recycled movie lines.

A movieoke night essentially involves a large group of alcohol-

oiled youngsters using DVD technology on a small stage in front of a large screen. Selecting scenes

from favourite movies and turning on the English subtitles, they

perform or improvise the scene for

the amusement of the assembled throng.

They have a small monitor in front of them, so they can follow the dialogue while facing the audience, but often they turn their backs, talk out of sync or go off on tangents of their own.

Blue-screen technology may one day allow bar-room stars to be dropped into the image electronically. For now movieoke is nothing as fancy as that: it's all pretty rudimentary but no less fun for that.

In the experience of the Den of Cin, it's not all dialogue-driven, either. Participants have been known to select scenes from martial-arts movies, dance numbers from films such as Flashdance and, closer to traditional karaoke, big songs from musicals. Just posing on stage also seems to be popular. Anything goes.

Fite is looking into ways of exploiting her innovation financially, but until then entrance to her movieoke night is still free. The takings at the bar make it worthwhile, and for the moment Den of Cin is using a DVD rental store next door for films to draw scenes from.

As you can use only up to 30 seconds of a film without breaching copyright, however, legal problems may soon arise. Another difficulty is that Fite has a competitor: an Irish film distributor called Will Silke has reportedly trademarked "movieoke" and "cinemoke". He aims to compile and market DVD compilations of

classic film scenes in a more sophisticated take on Den of Cin's evenings.

It looks as if the idea is really taking off. It might only be a matter of time until you see it hit a town near you. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.