Sweet Nothings

Can it really be four years since the carnival of football that was the Brazil 2014 World Cup extravaganza? (Yes.) That tournament will be remembered for a cracking group stage full of expansive, attacking football that petered out - with one hilarious exception - into a mealy-mouthed defence-fest during the knockout stages. This negative trend continued into the newly-expanded Euros, whose new faces weren't good enough to play on the front foot but could shut up shop well enough to frustrate the decent teams (and England) and bore the arse off neutral spectators. So what will Russia 2018 bring, besides unprecedented corruption levels? (lol jk) The change in draw format to divide the pots by ranking has largely done away with the usual Group of Death/Big Team Cakewalk scenario, and with some intriguing debutants and a few absent stalwarts (ItaLOL, the NetherLOLs, the US of lAme, etc) we might get a bit more balance and/or novelty value. Here come the group previews! We al...

A couple of years back, the FX channel showed an Australian drama called Underbelly . It was a pretty graphic portrayal of Melbourne's real-life gangland wars, events which were indeed so recent as to render the show unbroadcastable in the state of Victoria for fear of it prejudicing trials which were still taking place. Gruesome as some of the events it covered were, the tone of Underbelly  was rather odd - light and comical in places, and shot in bright, welcoming colours. Pretty much  Neighbours with guns and swearing, as the Guardian noted at the time. The effect, intentional or not, was to make these true events seem somewhat fantastical. Animal Kingdom  does not have this problem. David Michod's film (his name has an accent in it which I don't know how to add in Blogger - apols, mate) is a fictional but extremely down-and-dirty portrayal of the same Melbourne netherworld. It also differs from Underbelly by focussing on one family rather than dealing with an e...