Tag Archives: rating

This afternoon in the company of my friend Mark I escaped the dull, drizzly wi-fi-enabled noughties and timewarped to July 1983 through the magic of the cinema. A time when Thatcher (Mrs) ruled with her iron handbag and wonky finger, when Tony Blair had just entered parliament, and when, if memory serves, we must have been packing up to move house. We were leaving leafy, suburban, right-wing Broxbourne for Oundle, a genteel town in the Northamptonshire countryside infested with posh young toffs. (No, I didn’t go to the public school.)

The film This is England opens on the last day of the school term. (Because we were moving away from the area, I remember that day vividly. How odd.) It’s non-uniform day, and the main character of the story – 12-year-old Shaun – is picked on as he’s wearing less-than-trendy flares. His dad was killed in the Falklands. The film shows his life over the next few weeks, and to say any more would spoil it.

It’s funny, disturbing, scary and violent. Thomas Turgoose, the actor playing Shaun, is pretty amazing. The hair stylists, make-up artists and fashion designers in the production team deserve awards for their dedication above and beyond to reproducing the hideous fashions of the day. I pity the actors who suffered for their art and actually had their hair done like that. I will overlook the two shots in which (adopts nerd voice) modern satellite dishes were clearly visible (reverts to normal geek voice).

If you like your films gritty, realistic and tattooed, you’ll like this one. It’s superb. (Expats: apparently it has a limited release in the US in July.)

Avaragado’s rating: twiglets

From December 1999, for a year, I wrote a journal. Not on paper, don’t be silly, but not online. I have it on disk somewhere and I haven’t read it since I wrote it. It covers what has been, so far, the most bonkers year of my life for a number of reasons; sadly the margin is too small to contain them.

Writing the journal was hugely cathartic. I sat where I’m sitting now, often into the early hours, unburdening myself, if that’s not too pretentious for you. It is far too, uh, honest to ever be published in full. I probably talk about you, by the way.

It seems such a long time ago now. It seems like yesterday. I’ll read it again one day; but not yet.

So, Notes on a Scandal. Insanely good. Funny, touching, and for me marginally uncomfortable (but I should like to point out that my journal contains no stars of any hue). Screenplay by Patrick Marber, aka Peter O’Hanrahahanrahan from The Day Today, now a proper grown-up writer with awards and stuff.

Judi Dench will be fighting Helen Mirren for the Oscar, I think.

Avaragado’s rating: two new potatoes

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first: I don’t like the theme tune. It is much better than the awful Madonna theme from Dire Another Day (do you see what I did there?), but fails to pass the Bondness threshold.

That’s a shame, because everything else about Casino Royale is pretty much spot on. There’s no campery, over-reliance on gadgets, mwa-ha-ha-take-over-the-world-with-my-big-laser plots or scenery chewing, unlike in yer Brosnans or yer Moores. It’s very much as advertised: back-to-basics, raw, gritty, violent. A bit like yer Daltons or yer Connerys, but with fewer wigs and not, you know, in the 1980s. And just generally better.

I was never one of those nay-sayers who scoffed at the casting of Daniel Craig as Bond, none of whom could come up with reasons better than “he’s a bit ginger”. They forgot that Bond is supposed to be English, and yet has been played by a Scot (Connery), an Australian (Lazenby), a “Welsh-born Englishman” (Dalton) and an Irishman (Brosnan). And that Felix Leiter, that old fraud, has been played by about a million different actors, both white and black. And ditto Blofeld, etc.

I’ve decided that most Bond films take place in their own universe, independent of all other Bond films. This works, apart from some disparities (such as the multiple appearances of Jaws and J.W. Pepper and others, a few references to Bond’s dead wife, and more), and it’s the only way to avoid cranial implosion regarding continuity. This film blows away any attempts to do so anyway, since it shows the start of Bond’s 00 career and yet has Judi M rather than harrumphing old Bernard M, and is of course set in the present.

Oh, enough Bond geekery. Wikipedia has it all, you know.

Avaragado’s rating: salty water

Jumping straight into my top five films of the year, The History Boys.

Now I don’t remember school being quite like that in the 80s, but then I went to a comprehensive.

Hang on. I’ve just remembered one particular teacher. But apart from him (and that was just gossip), it wasn’t like that.

We did have a day trip to Cambridge, but not for formal interviews – just a snooping session, friendly chats, that sort of thing, to see whether we were interested in applying. Our head-of-year drove the three of us to Cambridge in her mini; the only details I remember from that journey are, bizarrely, joining the A1 (from a country lane, slip roads were for wimps) and listening to Bohemian Rhapsody at full volume. It was the first and only time she ever seemed human (the rest of the time she just clomped around school in her very sensible shoes being grumpy).

I went to see Downing and Magdalene. The tutor we saw at Downing told us he knew one of the students from our school at the college, “Judith Mel-hyoo-ish, yes, I know her well.” Not well enough to know how to pronounce her surname, though. I remember we had lunch there with some undergrads, but not much else.

At Magdalene I chatted to a tutor in his little office in the ramshackle tudor buildings behind Magdalene Street. I decided I preferred Downing; one reason, I remember, was that Magdalene was then still males only. Insert your own jokes here.

Our teacher took us for a cup of tea at the University Arms before we went home.

And then, of course, I went to Kent. But that’s another story.

Anyway, the film’s great. If there’s any chance of your seeing it, do. That would please Hector. “Your seeing it.” It’s a gerund. He likes gerunds.

Avaragado’s rating: rubber chicken and rice, I think