I'm in the middle of writing a letter to my good friend Martin Currie in Edinburgh, whose birthday it is next Monday. I hope the missive reaches him in time. I have a tendency to ramble.
I don't propely know what prompted the recollection below but these things do happen when you're around Martin. Except maybe he wasn't even there. It's simply the sort of bizarre occurence that you stumble across in any city from time to time. So I wrote this to my mate Martin who I love dearly and miss a great deal ...
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| South Clerk Street, Edinburgh |
Here’s a
thing about South Clerk Street while I’m on the subject. Maybe you were with
me when this happened because I can’t think of any other reason to go into a
pub on South Clerk Street – it was across the road from where the ABC Cinema used
to be or was it the Odeon?
There was
time to kill because the movie wasn’t starting for a while. Whoever it
was, we went for a drink in the pub. Shortly after we got settled at our
tables a moderately anxious looking man entered the rather deserted pub and
started hunting – not quite frantically – for something he had lost. He
checked every chair, table and down the back of the red PVC (I doubt it was
leather) benches running along the walls. He clearly had no success.
Running out of options he approached our little group then spoke in a quiet,
secretive voice; as if was looking to buy or sell Class A drugs.
"Sorry
to bother you”, he said. “You haven’t seen a snake anywhere, have you?”
One of us
said “a snake?” feigning composure, as if it was the most natural question in
the world.
Another
asked, “What kind was it?”
I like to
dwell on the underlying assumptions of that question; as if maybe we had indeed
seen a snake wandering around the pub or enjoying half a pint and a cigarette
quietly in a corner, disturbing no one and we wanted to be sure the guy
searching for his lost snake was genuinely connected to and could correctly
identify the particular snake with which we’d been discussing the weekend’s
football not half an hour before. Or maybe we thought there might have
been more than one snake in the pub – different types - and we wanted to make
sure we returned the correct species to its owner.
Anyway,
he said it was a” wee python”.
I’m sure he said it was a python and that it
must have slipped out the carrier bag he’d brought with him into the pub.
He held up the empty pollie bag to show us. In his mind it may have been
some kind of proof. Then he said “it must be somewhere” before heading
back out the door. I think we looked nervously around the pub, sipped our
drinks casually – maybe a wee bit too casually in case any one of us thought
the others suspected we were more than mildly hesitant about sitting in a pub
that might have pythons of any size slithering around the furniture – then we
decided it was time to drink up and make our way – early or not - to the cinema.
I read Peter Bradshaw's two-star review of the film in today's Guardian. I didn't agree with all of the Guardian critic's analysis although I do think his two-star rating is much nearer the mark than an Oscar nomination. As often happens I felt compelled to comment on the views of someone writing in my favourite newspaper.
Should I be worried that I'm one of those people who leave below the line comments in response to newspaper articles? Probably. But at least I don't rant. Here's my attempt at a measured and reasoned response to Mr Bradshaw's original review.
I may be in a minority on this one but here goes. There are huge problems with the movie but not, I think, those Peter Bradshaw describes.
I didn't think it was dull (at least when it's in Iraq) but it certainly is derivative. We have a SEAL training camp straight out of An Officer And A Gentleman, a wedding dance from The Deer Hunter, a touch of Hurt Locker here, a bit of Zero Dark Thirty there. I think too that Bradley Cooper does well with the raw material he was given and I quite took to Sienna Miller's return to centre stage. Overall it struck me as a technically competent but pretty average American war movie of a very old and completely illusory type.
The super-size failures, however, are the script and directorial choices that led to the creation of this sanitised, delusional fantasy. Mr Eastwood's team has given us Chris Kyle's ghost written autobiography as some kind of cinema verite. I've no doubt that Kyle was a brave - if self-declared "redneck" - soldier of the type Republicans cherish. But there's not a hint anywhere in the movie of the more complex reality we can find behind the words of any unreliable, first-person narrator including Chris Kyle. That means, for instance, verifiable facts such as spending nights locked up in jail or trouble with booze or the legal dispute with Jesse Ventura don't feature anywhere in the movie to spoil the director's picture of a righteous warrior; not to mention Mr Eastwood's re-imaginings of events in Iraq e.g. the first kill in the movie has a boy added that doesn't even feature in Kyle's own autobiography presumably to give the film character's arc the contrast the movie needs via the incident with another boy and a rocket launcher later on.
And the truly fascinating, genuinely interesting and more complex reality of Mr Kyle's life and death - on American soil and not at the hands of the Iraqi "savages" he disliked so much but murdered by a fellow American at a gun range - gets reduced to one line of white text as the screen fades to black at the end of more than two hours of historical revisionism.
There's an interesting movie to be made about that Hellish American tragedy but American Sniper isn't that movie. It's Green Berets for the 21st Century - more subtle in its assertion of American exceptionalism, more nuanced in its story telling, more aware of the forces reigned against such simplistic readings of events but just as deeply delusional.
Fortunately, no one will watch American Sniper in two years time and five years from now no one but the cast and crew will remember it was made.