Sweet Nothings

We’re currently in the middle of the BFI London Film Festival, and I thought I’d better make an effort this year and catch a couple of films. This is trickier for someone who holds great stock in reviews, as I’m reluctant to pay to see anything that I know nothing about. And of course the really high-profile movies sell out instantly.  Still, I managed to nab tickets to the gala screening of Miral , Julian Schnabel’s new film centered around the Israel-Palestine conflict. This being from the director of the astonishing Diving Bell and the Butterfly and starring Freida Pinto, currently “hot”, as I believe they say in Hollywood parlance, after the success of Slumdog, I had quite high hopes. Not to mention that at £17.50 a pop, this gala screening would surely include a swanky drinks reception and the chance to mingle with slebs and that. Well, there certainly was a drinks reception, but not one to which the hoi polloi were invited. Furthermore, there were two screenings in ...

Please forgive the appalling self-indulgence - this is an article about my South African experience that was written for an in-house newsletter. I got far too carried away and failed miserably to stick to a reasonable word limit, and it will not be included in its full-length form in the newsletter because - the editor-in-chief assures me - it was just TOO DAMN HARD to cut it down whilst still doing it justice. That's what I choose to believe anyway. She also told me the word "gullible" isn't in the dictionary, how strange. So here it is in all its glory, and obviously this is copyright (c) Ben Gould, 2010 in case anybody was thinking of appropriating it (stop laughing at the back). Some sections may have appeared in similar form in blog entries at the time - deal with it. ........................................................................ My favourite World Cup-related memory is of a high school food technology lesson back in the summer of 1994, during wh...

So Peter Boatman, the bloke in charge of the firm who wrongly supplied unlicensed taser guns to the police, one of which was used in the final stand-off with the murderous yet bizarrely popular nutjob Raoul Moat, has just killed himself. The Daily Mirror's headline this morning? MOAT KILLS AGAIN FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE Brilliant. This in the same week as the segway chairman guy's tragic death in - but of course - a segway-related accident. It doesn't appear as if Mr Boatman killed himself with one of his own tasers - although to be fair, he might have tried that already. It probably just didn't work.

I would love to do a detailed review of Winter's Bone , this season's critical darling movie which I went to see last night. Unfortunately, whilst I did indeed pay for my ticket, took my seat and watched the first half hour or so,  wherein the basic premise was established (teenage girl living in Midwestern wilderness and looking after her semi-comatose mother and younger siblings must find her absent dad who's put their house up as a bail bond), I did not manage to catch the whole thing. Don't get me wrong, I was there in my seat for the duration. It's just that getting older appears to have bestowed unto me the ability to nod off whenever I find myself in a cinema after a certain time of night. It doesn't matter how entertaining the film is, nor how noisy. I managed to snooze during Inception  and even near the end of Star Trek , for goodness sake (and I love Star Trek). So Winter's Bone unfolded for me in a somewhat hallucinatory fashion as I drifted...

It's not often that the Pope and Mick McCarthy appear in the same sentence. After all, one is the revered figurehead of a powerful organisation, and the other is some old German dude. But this post deals with them both. Bear with me. So, the Pope is touring Britain at the moment. You may not have been aware of this, as they've kept it fairly quiet. Anyway, he was giving an address at Holyroodhouse earlier (was there a shortage of spaces when they named that place?) and made some interesting remarks which appeared to be associating atheism with Nazism. Well, I say "interesting". I must admit, my instinctive reaction was "Fuck off", but this very quickly transformed into utter give-a-shit indifference. The Pope is completely irrelevant to me and my beliefs, in the same way that he is irrelevant to the vast majority of Britons, including much of our ever-dwindling Christian population, most of whom aren't actually Catholics. The only aspect of his li...

Read a really good article the other day about introversion and extroversion. I've lost the link, so apologies for the impending glut of paraphrasing, but the basic point was this: if an extrovert can be seen as someone who is energised by the presence of people (and indeed finds it boring to be alone for too long), then an introvert by definition is tired out by others. This in no way means introverts are misanthropes or loners - on the contrary, they (oh ok, we) can enjoy socialising with close friends or partners, and be perfectly outgoing and chatty while we're at it. But we find it an effort to do so, and after a few hours start we longing for some quality time alone. And don't get us started on parties and other situations where we suffer prolonged exposure to people we don't really know! It may sound daft, but I'd never previously considered how introversion and shyness might differ from each other, and it does explain an awful lot. Because, while I'...

My flat is on the southern side of Palmers Green, which means I live in the borough of Enfield despite probably spending more time in the shops and cinemas down the road in Wood Green (in Haringey, as any fool knows) than I do in my own borough. However I am embarking upon a vague quest to be more of an active part of the community - this includes visiting the library, buying second-hand books in charity shops, and taking part in a 10K “fun run” in Enfield in a few weeks. I also attended the Enfield Autumn Show on Sunday lunchtime. The place wasn’t exactly busy when I attended, and I felt rather sorry for the local schoolkid bands playing on the main stage in front of about five people, one of whom may only have been there because their wheelchair had got stuck. There was plenty of entertainment on offer, though - funfair rides and inflatable gubbins to keep kids entertained, punch and judy shows, entertainment all day on the main stage and a smaller “alfresco ballroom”, plus regular...

I've never been a huge fan of horror films. Due to chronic lack of popularity, I didn't spend lots of evenings in darkened rooms full of friends trying to prove how hard and unshockable they were in the face of the latest gore-fest (obtained via dubious means from the Bewdley's sole video store). Still, I understand the attraction of being scared - despite being something of a coward, I enjoy the adreneline rush of rollercoasters, particularly the palpable relief when the ride is over that it didn't get stuck upside-down on that big loop, or collapse, or explode, etc. In the last few years, the much-discussed Torture Porn genre seems to have become the norm for mainstream horror. My experience of this sort of thing only extends to the first Saw movie, which I actually found fairly clever and tense. Despite this, though, I've had no great desire to see anything else, especially the seemingly endless conveyor belt of Saw-quels . Meanwhile, there are smaller films be...

Saw a preview of Scott Pilgrim vs the World last night. Yes that’s right - a review of a film BEFORE it’s properly released! TREMBLE at the novelty of my opinions. So? Meh. It’s alright . Nothing wrong with that per se, lots of films are perfectly enjoyable without coming close to greatness. Unfortunately, the buzz and trailer for this, combined with Edgar Wright’s track record, very much suggested this would be an eye-popping game-changer of a movie. Depending on whether I bought into the concept or not, I was expecting it to be a film I’d either fall in love with or absolutely hate. The fact is, I enjoyed bits of it and appreciated some of the one-liners without ever being able to immerse myself. One reason for this would be unfamiliarity with the source material - adaptations always lose something in translation and I’d guess the comic books go into more detail about the backstories of Scott, Ramona and the Seven Evil Exes, something which Wright understandably sacrifices in o...

I’ve heard The Suburbs being referred to as a return to form for Arcade Fire, which implies that Neon Bible was somehow a poor album - to me an astonishing accusation. While I wouldn’t objectively try to claim that the latter is better than the wonderful Funeral, the fact is I can listen to the likes of Intervention and No Cars Go over and over with no noticeable diminishment of pleasure. Bold, epic songs dealing with all manner of Big Issues, what’s not to like? Well, seems like some considered those songs to be overblown and empty, which left Arcade Fire in an interesting position - as big a cult band as could possibly be, never likely to break into the mainstream and in slight danger of losing a section of their fanbase, not to mention some of their humanity, due to a perceived excess of grandiosity. However, The Suburbs should satisfy pretty much everybody. Initial signs weren’t too promising. The title track and Month of May were released a couple of months ago, the latter in ...

Hur hur hur From hearing and reading some of the reviews of Inception I was half expecting a David Lynch-esque piece of free-form art madness. "Don't go for a piss or you'll never keep up!" they warned. For the record, and this is not an attempt to show off, I performed my increasingly regular trick of nodding off for a while in the darkened cinema, thereby missing a whole chunk of action where they dropped down another Dream Level (or something) and yet I still managed to follow what was going on. This is not to say that Christopher Nolan has not made another very fine film, it's perhaps more a comment on just how vacuous the average blockbuster has now become. When one does come along that forces the viewer's brain to engage (and, unlike the rebooted Batman movies, isn't part of an helpfully established franchise), it can come across as far more complicated than it actually is. Nolan's work have never been overly arty - even the mind-melting Me...

From a spokesman for the Department of Education, as quoted on the front page of yesterday's Guardian , in response to allegations that the coalition may be trying to sneakily re-introduce pupil selection in schools: "Ed Balls's leadership campaign is so desperate it is reduced to confecting lies that even a child can see through." Wow, really showing your belief in the potential of the next generation there, guys. Good work.

FINAL SOWETO UPDATE: As it turned out, the tour operator person was very nice about our aborted trip, making various offers to take us out that evening for dinner/drinks. Offers which I kept declining because basically I was still annoyed with them and, no money ever having changed hands, I just wanted to forget about the whole business. Yeah I know, another gift horse stared squarely in the chops. Anyway, it's nearly the end of our trip now and it's often been a strange and fascinating experience. So, what have we learnt? South African petrol stations aren't very accepting of credit cards. Plus they all have attendants who fill your tank up to overflowing unless you specifically ask them not to. They have tomato sauce over here rather than ketchup, which is sweeter and tastes just different enough to be faintly annoying B&B/hostel cooked breakfasts consist of, at most: one egg, two bacon strips, one tomato and toast ONLY. There's normally plenty of cereal ...

Hmm , so it turns out we're not trundling round Soweto this afternoon after all. For whatever reason our driver failed to meet us at the designated location, or at least he didn't show up after an hour and 15 minutes, and so we decided to cut our losses and leave. I'm sorely tempted to NAME AND SHAME the tour operator in question, but as they came highly recommended by the Rough Guide I'll assume this was an aberration and give them the benefit of the doubt. Just.

So yeah, I was at the World Cup final. Admittedly it wasn't the best game, with the Dutch gameplan seemingly to kick several shades of shit out of the Spanish and hope that Howard Webb didn't give them a red card (having seen some highlights, he could have done so much sooner but apparently a kung fu kick to the chest doesn't merit a red these days). And admittedly we were right at the front behind one of the nets which, due to the many cameramen in front of us, was not the ideal vantage point we'd first imagined it to be. And admittedly you could only really get the full effect of the closing ceremony from high up in the stands, or from watching it on TV, and I only got the tiniest glimpse of Shakira in the flesh. But hey, I was at a World Cup final, which still feels pretty cool. More by accident than design, the last few days of this trip have featured not one but two theme parks - UShaka Marine World in Durban and Gold Reef City here in Joburg. Both of these were ...

Durban is an interesting old place. After our first visit for the semi-final on Wednesday night, we returned yesterday for a proper look around. If we'd stuck to walking the streets of the city centre and visiting the Victoria Market, we'd have seen no more than a handful of other white faces all day. It felt like a proper African city, bustling with hawkers and street traders trying to compete with the modern shops they share the pavements with. The market itself is a much more Indian concern, being part of the district where Durban's large community from the subcontinent is apparently based. I was slightly disappointed not to see more Indian folks around there, but I think the real heart of that community was further north, going into the areas which the Rough Guide only recommends for the braver travellers. I did have lunch in an authentic-looking Indian fast-food joint, a nice enough chicken roti roll which I then said hello to again later that evening. Going back d...

After yesterday's match in Durban, we've now been to seven of the ten World Cup stadia and seen eight matches in total. Thoughts on these as follows: Royal Bafokeng stadium, Rustenburg Basically a provincial athletics stadium which somehow holds 40,000 people (the minimum required for World Cup matches), with no video screens or working scoreboard when we were there. From our seats right near the front behind the goals (for England v USA ), we could barely see what was going on at the far end of the pitch and couldn't see the near touchline because of the athletics track and advertising hoardings, hence we only worked out that Robert Green had let Clint Dempsey's tame shot go underneath him by everyone else's despairing reactions. Plus, as recounted elsewhere, the organisation for the park and ride after the match was an absolute shambles. Frankly, an even worse football ground than Brighton's comical Withdean stadium, which was never intended to be used f...

We've seen several sides of South Africa in our two and a half weeks here. Although the place is vast, the nature of the World Cup being spread out between cities in as many areas as possible and our purchasing of different types of tickets has meant plenty of driving and allowed us to see a decent cross-section of it. On day one we briefly experienced the ultra-posh Sandton suburb of Johannesburg (well, one street on which we queued for 2.5 hours at least), which is as white and affluent as you can get. We also saw a bit of Rustenburg (a city everyone agrees is rubbish), and had appalling experiences both in getting away from the stadium and at our hostel - the latter charging us 300 rand each for what turned out to be newly-built bunk beds crammed in 8-to-a-room, as the owners were attempting to make as much cash from English fans as possible. The knackered manager reckoned he'd been up for over 48 hours, which might have elicited some sympathy if he and his sour-faced wife...

... not for us anyway, we still have two more weeks over here including second-round, quarter-final, semi and final matches involving either Paraguay or whoever ends up beating them, and I'm determined to enjoy myself. But I feel almost duty bound to rake over the ashes of yesterday's limp defeat. Here are a few half-baked theories as to why this World Cup campaign was such a disaster for England: Over-reliance on one player Pretty early on, Fabio Capello sussed out that Wayne Rooney was by far our best and most creative player and thus built his formation and team around him. Rooney was by no means alone in being horrendously below par in this tournament, but he was the one player we desperately needed to be on his game. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold etc Pressure/nerves England did look nervous against the USA but this could be excused as opening-match syndrome, and we still could have won the game against our most difficult group opponents on paper. Then ...