China versus North Korea

It was game five at the Canberra Stadium tonight (my fourth thanks to a puzzling attack last Tuesday of what doctors don't call 'the wobblies').  The traffic queued for a couple of kilometres ahead of the parking sites as we turned off the highway at Belconnen, confirming that tonight's game would be best attended of the group stage games in the nation's capital.  I reckon it's likely to be the best attended game of Canberra's contribution to the Asian Cup. As we made our way to the entrance, where many hopeful ticket buyers were arrayed in lines before the box office, a voice announced - a little forlornly - that only 30 tickets remained.  When, maybe a minute later, the same voice announced all tickets had been sold no one in the lines seemed inclined to believe her and move.  

Inside the ground, packed with thousands of the most polite football spectators I've ever encountered, the game was seven minutes old and China one goal ahead by the time we reached our spots.  We were surrounded by Chinese Australians most of whom were wearing what looked like the same one-size-fits-all red T-shirt bearing the legend - in English and hanji characters - GO CHINA.  Looking around the stadium it was clear someone was doing good business that night.  There were thousands of people wearing t-shirts.

The game ended in a victory for China, which pleased the vast majority of the 20,000 spectators.  North Korea gave the opposition a run for its money in the second half and only the woodwork denied the Koreans the draw they probably deserved.  I have one more game to go here in Canberra, which is Iraq v Palestine next Tuesday then it's up to Sydney on Friday for the first of the knock-out games that lead to the final.  

Go Socceroos, although after the loss to South Korea I hae ma doots ... as we say in the old country, where we know everything there is to know about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

See how Spike's garden grows

Spike, cat and corn

It has been a while since I was anywhere near Spike's veggie plot so I was hugely impressed when Spike and the cat gave me a guided tour today.  We - which is the Royal We - have corn, beans, chillies, capsicum, shallots and rhubarb growing strong in the small space at the back of the garden Spike cleared earlier in the year.  We shall eat well by the time summer draws to a close.  

Had we moved to Geelong this harvest would not now be in the making.  All sorts of signals confirm the rightness of that decision.

American Sniper

I watched Clint Eastwood's American Sniper last night.  Woke up this morning to read it has been nominated in the Best Picture category of this year's Oscars.  How fond of Clint the members of the Academy must be to go that far off track.  

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.

14 seconds is all it takes

I attended game 13 of the Asian Cup tonight accompanied by Colin Tulley, an associate of Spike's father and dedicated supporter of Glasgow Celtic FC.  When I first saw Colin approaching my car from the other side of the Glassworks car park in Canberra I knew it would be him.  Who else that evening would be wearing the green and white hoops of a Celtic strip?

Oddly enough, when we were seated in the Canberra Stadium waiting for the match between United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to kick off, Colin introduced me to a few of his football-loving friends who were also present.  I was suddenly surrouded by a sea of Glasgow accents, friendly men of my age and their adolescent or twentysomething children.  All diehard Celtic fans.  Any one of them could have been dressed like Colin.  Naturally, in the spirit of footbll bantering males, each was advised I am a supporter of Partick Thistle.  None laughed openly but there was an expression on their faces somewhere between jocular pity and sympathy for the terminal illness from which I was suffering.

There was no rain tonight.  It was a perfect evening for playing and watching football: blue sky, warm sunshine, decent crowd reported to us as 7,992 people.  

The UAE took all of 14 seconds to score the first of their 2 match winning goals.  Blink and you'd have missed it.  Lots of fun.  Looking forward to my next match.  China v North Korea.  Never done that pairing before.

Gone Girl

I watched David Fincher's Gone Girl today.  It has left me more than a little flummoxed.  Principally, I guess, I'm wondering what my reaction - broadly unimpressed by the content, alienated by the story's implausibility and irritated by the clunky, hole-ridden plot - tells me about my tastes (or lack thereof).

One of my first thoughts after watching the movie all the way through to its self-satisfied ending was the sentiment summed up best, in my opinion, by Charles Rennie McIntosh who wrote, "there is hope in honest error; none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist".  That sense of (my own) nagging doubt was strengthened by the conclusion to the generally supportive and positive review of the film by Xian Brooks in The Guardian.  He wrote, 

"Gone Girl, finally, may be no more than a storm in a teacup. But what an elegant, bone-china teacup this is. And what a fearsome force-10 gale we have brewing inside."

I enjoyed enormously (if that's not an odd term) David Fincher's Seven, so what is it, I wonder, bothers me about his latest film?  Not its moral ambiguity.  That much I'm sure of.  And not its fabrication, for sure.  It's about as well constructed a film as I've seen in a long time - beautifully shot (albeit in cool and alienating tones), well acted by a well-cast crew of actors (the stars are very good but the supporting cast adds real depth - Tyler Perry is revelatory, Kim Dickens as the lead investigator is excellent and the two television 'journalists' are delicious).  It's well directed.  

So what don't I like?  

It feels hollow and heartless.  I have never been a fan of nihilism and this movie has a cynical misanthropy that reaches all the way to the core of its being.  I worry too that it's predicated on a world view that asks us to believe most people are either stupid, gullible or fatally indifferent to reality.  I get that it's a satirical look at marriage in modern America.  At least I think that's what I'm being offered.  But I don't rally want to buy into that world view.  

I can see the roots of Hitchcock that support this modern dystopian fable.  And it's no great surprise to read that some of the team that brought us Gone Girl intend to re-make Strangers On A Train.  But, I just think, no thanks.  It's not simply that I don't want to live in their world. I'm not even interested in visiting. 

A storm and a tea cup

I submitted one of Spike's photographs of our visit to the first game of the Asian Cup to the Guardian's "Witness" section of  'were you there?' photo albums.  My favourite newspaper added me to the (admittedly small) mix today.  Fame at last.  Or not, as the case may be.  But I like Spike's photo, I enjoyed the experience of being at the game and - as anyone who knows me would not be surprised to read - I'm very pleased with the smart arse caption / title I gave to the photo (repeated as the title of this post).  The Guardian asked for a description which I've added below.  I've corrected my original typing mistakes ... vanity, vanity - thy name is Douglas.

"Huge thunderstorm hit Canberra just before Asian Cup game between South Korea and Oman. No shelter for most of the 12,552 spectators. Emergency panchos, umbrellas and for this Scottish resident of Australia's capital a Panama hat bought in Curitiba, Brazil during last year's FIFA World Cup. South Korea deserved winners of good game. Dougie Herd drinking tea. Photo by Spike Deane. Stylish pink poncho NOT by Armani."

And ... action

The true extent to which I am an unapologetic movie tragic is this admission of guilty pleasure - that I sought out and followed live updates of the mildly ridiculous - maybe much more than "mildly" ridiculous - Golden Globes ceremony.  I follow it liveevery year. Hell, I even sometimes enjoy the speeches (although, to be honest, there were fewer gems this year than in years gone bye.)

It strikes me as a bit odd of me that I have opinions about which people or films ought to win.  I mean - in the first and most obvious instance - frankly my dear, [the universe] don't give a damn 'bout what you think Douglas.  And secondly, ever mindful of how Joaquim Phoenix was so brilliantly pinned for pomposity by the hosts, the whole idea of awards ceremonies is so absurd ... and yet.  No less absurdly - one cares.  It's satisfying to me - even though I have nothing whatsoever to do with its making - that The Grand Budapest Hotel was recognised.  I would have liked Ralph Feinnes to have won Best Actor award even though I've not yet seen the winning performance by Michael Keaton in Birdman (and I have very little doubt that when I do see it I shall be no less captivated than were the voters of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association).  Silly, silly Douglas.  No less absurd than the event itself, perhaps more so.

The stars of the evening were, as we had all hoped and expected, the ever-brilliant hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler.  My favourite among their many perceptive jokes was their subtle, pointed but still fond dig at Hollywood with George Clooney at its centre.  Hadley Freeman references this joke in her good article in the Guardian Online here:

“George Clooney married Amal Almuddin this year. Amal is a human rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case; was an adviser to Kofi Annan regarding Syria; and was selected for a three-person UN commission investigating rules of war violations in the Gaza Strip. So tonight … her husband is getting a lifetime achievement award”

That and other observations stand in such contrast to the ways the women in the industry, who make hundreds of millions of dollars for the production and distribution companies, are scrutinised, assessed, praised or denigrated on the red carpet.  I doubt that any of the men run such a gauntlet.  But that's the point Hadley Freeman makes better than I ever could.

As absurd as the whole three ring circus may be I'll still seek out the Oscars and, if anything, care about the results more deeply.  I know that not a piece of it all - the Globes, the Oscars, the whole great caravan of movie makers, comic singers, dancers and players amounts to Humphrey Bogart's famous hill of beans (see Casablanca) but - beyond all its absurdity - in this harsh and sometimes hurtful world we live in it somehow matters more than I can say.