I am not glad that Barnet’s hopes of promotion were scuppered yesterday. I am certainly not happy that it happened in a penalty shoot-out of such simplicity that ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS GO RIGHT LIKE EVERYONE ELSE DID, and you would have scored. At the same time I am not devastated that we will spend another season in the Conference. I have plenty of friends who support Conference teams, no-one I know supports third division no-marks. I can compare our progress with that of Exeter City, or Woking and know whom this effects. Getting back into the third would have been like being given a top flight Action man as a kid, but being told you were not allowed to play with it with your friends.
Also I have not been to Underhill once this season, which should not have an effect but does. I have never been a big watcher of the team but I would always catch a few games a season. This year, which was creepingly successful, I ignored the poor lads. Of course I am glad if they can do it without me (they have to week in week out) but I suppose I like to feel more involved. And frankly our (what seemed to me) half arsed qualification for the play-offs at the expense of Exeter did not seem to deserve promotion. Mind you if you were Hereford, walking into the play-offs with a 19 point lead over Aldershot, you might feel more upset. It would have been nice to go up, and one day we will go back up. But it is not too bad where we are right now.
Like I said to Tim yesterday, the third division is crap and the Welsh can have it.
Pete Baran in TMFD • No Comments
The projector went ker-fluieee when I went to see I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead on Saturday, eight minutes into the feature. The interesting looking new Mike Hodges film, reuniting him with Clive Owen from Croupier was thus denied to me – and truth be told on those first eight minutes I am not sure if I want to go back.
The credits seemed off. The font for he ‘When I’m Dead’ portion of the title is smaller than the first part, and in the perspective style used looked off. Not only that but the idea of using headlights to illuminate the credits was let down by being cheaply animated. Cut to Clive Owen, voice-overing whilst standing on a windswept fenlike beach, uttering cryptic sentences about how much we can know someone. This I suppose is meaningful, and will almost certainly resonate later. Someone is dead, and Clive wants to know more.
Then we cut to the back of a car where Jonathon Rhys-Myers, looking like the breakable fop he always plays, is reading some pretty lousy dialogue. It sounds like dialogue, its full of the kind of non-sequiteurs we half remember actual speech to have, timed badly. The slang is off too: he is talking about his brother who has left ‘the life’ gone hermit. It is probably Clive Owen, but I did not see enough of the film to confirm this. Anyway, JRM gets to a middle class thirty something party where
a) he is the most outrageous thing at
b) well off people have random sex in the spare bedrooms (why does this never happen at parties I go to?)
c) people buy drugs off of him in amounts and for prices which seem widely variant to the current market forces (could be a period film)
d) people dance to music which is obviously different to the anonymous techno on the soundtrack.
JRD does his drug deal and nicks a blokes wallet, to show that he really is deep into this gangster lifestyle and we cut to – Malcom McDowell in the back of a limo, looking rich, looking suave, looking like he is clearly the villain of this piece. And acting scared, the projector dies.
I like Clive Owen, and the moody one liner suggested that something might interest me here. By the direction and dialogue in the car and party were wincingly poor. When Malcolm rocked up to spread a bit of old gangster villainousness, I had already resigned myself to something which was going to try to be both introspective and dully formulaic. The break of the projector initially amused me. It then annoyed me when I realised I had to kill an hour and a half before I met friends to see the next film. But I cannot help but feel a touch relieved. I see a lot of crap, and I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead was shaping up to be in that category. The projector saved me, and I feel like taking the hint. Maybe you should not judge a film on the first eight minutes, but if the alternative is wasting 107 minutes to confirm it being lousy then I’ll take the hint.
Pete Baran in Do You See • No Comments
I HATE MUSICALS3: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Shitty Shitty Bang Bang more like.
Okay, I’ll admit that perhaps that is not the most sophisticated piece of criticism I have ever come up with. (It is equally not the most puerile either). Apparently the stage version is the toast of the London Stage. Hopefully they make this toast in the traditional way by putting the entire cast and crew under a grill and heating until crisp.
Most people will be more acquainted with the film, with its flying car, its detestable moppets and a character called Truly Scrumptious. Truly is not a name. No-one has ever been called Truly in the history of birth registrations. I know this because when I was last at Somerset House trying to trace the birth names of all the members of the So Solid Crew (three Tarquin’s and a Siegfried!) I did a quick check on Truly’s. Zero, zip, nada. Even if the name Truly exists the surname Scrumptious is even harder to find provenance for. Smith’s – well they were blacksmiths. Headon, my surname, is a shortening of Head One, or village chief, imperiousness runs in my veins. Even seeming stupid names like Bedingfield have a simple derivation; the ancestors of Daniel and Natasha were so poor they literally had to go to bed in a field. But how would you get the surname Scrumptious? I suggest the only people who may name you that would be cannibals, and therein would lie the succession problem.
No more sickle selection of songs have been placed together than Toot Sweet’s (a pun that forgets its place), followed by Truly Scrumptious. No more hopeless lyrics have been written than those about the titular car :
“It’s uncategorical
A fuel burning oracle
A fantasmagorical machine
It’s more than spectacular
To use the vernacular
It’s wizard, it’s smashing, it’s keen”
I am not sure what vernacular Dick Van Dyke was using at the time (certainly not one ever used in Britain), but when has keen ever been better than spectacular. Of course these days Keen is a synonym for Coldplay-a-like-mope-wank-rockers, but they were not to know that in the sixties. What was clear, was that Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a lousy idea from start to finish and as such it is no surprise Dick Van Dyke spent the entire production in an alcohol fuelled haze, and still does not really remember making it. I wish I could remember not seeing it.
Tanya Headon in I Hate Music • No Comments