accies1874

Threatened to be a bit like a few other Everton games this season where they started excellently but gradually lost any attacking threat before eventually conceding, however they seemed to get their act together after half-time and put in a really effective counter-attacking performance.

Sorry, is this your best experience or worst?

Each one has been worse than the last

Despite not being very good, I did think that we had two or three really nice passages of play in the first half and Scott Martin's 45 minutes on the park was a joy to watch. Henderson was a lot better in the second half when he moved inside and Lewis Smith was impressive. Everything else? Not much fun.

35. Silver Haze - Cinema Weird one. There are plenty of touching moments between Franky (a poor nurse who was burned in a fire when she was young) and Florence (one of Franky's patients with severe mental health issues) as they start their relationship and Franky begins to get introduced into her life, but both women's pasts result in outbursts of anger either at each other or at the supporting cast who drop in and out on a whim. Their relationship goes from tender to toxic without you really noticing, which makes sense for each of them but combined with the flitting between characters or stories I'd forgotten about it meant that it felt quite unstructured to me. That said, the focus never left Franky and her place among these stories, so I never quite lost interest but it wasn't as impactful as it could have been. 37. And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine - Cinema Quite funny watching this the day after I watched Civil War as it touches on a lot of similar themes regarding information and visual reporting, including alternative angles of photos taken from war zones or disaster zones which show photographers swarming round 'natural' events, often horrific ones, to show the world something that is very real but the different perspectives make seem very fake. I wasn't just reminded of Civil War though... It's a documentary about photography/videography, pretty much the entire history of the camera which is of course wedded to the past ~150 years of history itself. That's a lot to take on for a 90-minute film, though does make for an engaging journey through society's relationship with consuming and sharing images. I think it's somewhat helped by the fact that the many questions posed are explored in greater depth in other films, so I was quite happy being reminded of more interesting stuff - even if that was unintentional. There is a voice-over but it really just relies on showing us the development of social networking, entertainment and news (and entertainment-news) through archive footage and modern videos you might recognise, including the brilliant Guy Goma BBC interview which got a big pop out of me - maybe even the most I've ever laughed in a cinema. Those viral videos will provide laughs, but it is very much a removed observation of society.

I wrote about my Worst Ever Cinema Experience last year. Now that @CraigFowler is One of Us it would be good to know if he remembers this: I'm tempted to say that the best ever was the second time I saw Past Lives last year as I watched a wonderful film in the cinema with no one else there, but I'm gonna go with when I saw The Lighthouse in 2020. It just seemed to be everything I love about cinema wrapped up in one screening where I forgot where I even was for a couple of hours. You Were Never Really Here in 2018 was also a brilliant experience, but I think I'll be speaking about that film soon so I'll leave it for another time...

Will have a couple of others to post later, but just wanted to get Civil War out there... 36. Civil War - Cinema God I loved this. So much of the cinematography resembles the photographs being taken by Lee and Jessie with a lot of still, though not necessarily stationary, shots that are perfectly framed to observe the USA that has gone to shit. Whether that's depicting innocuous that shouldn't be there or something horrific, it's a great way to give you an insight into this world as well as the characters and themes. It has the crisper look that Men did (Rob Hardy has shot all of Alex Garland's films) which still looks a bit funny to me, especially with greenery, however what I find interesting about Garland is that he's someone who went from a writer to also directing yet his last three films* have all had a distinctive aesthetic that have served the story. Annihilation recreates the otherworldliness of the shimmer, Men resembles a fairytale and now Civil War has that photojournalist look. *I don't remember it being quite as noticeable in Ex Machina but it's been a while since I've seen that. I think there's been a lot of chat about how Civil War is "apolitical", and yeah that's true to a certain extent as the "sides" are left relatively vague, but I absolutely don't think it's a film devoid of any commentary, particularly on apathy, action and ignorance. That first came to my mind when a gun-toting screwball takes Jessie to see a couple of looters he's got tied up. Jessie is given a choice to get the screwball to let them go or to shoot them, however, weirdly, the scene doesn't really come to anything. That made me realise that Jessie's inaction and us as viewers not seeing the consequences meant that we could remain ignorant to the outcome, but the looters will almost certainly die (which is later referenced by one of the other reporters, Joel) so they're almost like Schrodinger's Prisoners. Shortly after, the four of them travel through a picture-perfect suburb seemingly unaffected by the civil war. When they ask a shopkeeper if she realises that the country's gone to shit, it's not really any surprise when she says that it's easier to just not get involved. She's fine, her business is fine, where she lives is fine - why should she get involved? There are a few instances where questions are posed and we don't get the answers, similar to how Lee says that she views her job as a war photographer: document and let others ask questions. That reflects Lee and Jessie and their struggles with grasping the role of a photojournalist. Lee says that she thought her previous work in other countries would have served as a warning to those back home, so she watches missiles fly overhead with dismay rather than horror. Why should she subject herself to all of this pain? Why does she? Her warnings weren't heeded. "The information-action ratio" as said by some mark named Neil Postman and quoted by Alex Turner. Jessie is the other side of the coin. She's younger, more enthusiastic and feels "alive" when she's on the frontline, but you get a sense of her terror too. I thought of her as the vehicle for the audience, which makes the path she goes down all the more compelling. I was initially worried about the mentor-protégé relationship between them being a bit trite, but it's key to the whole film and goes in interesting directions. Morality in war - does it exist? Do we believe it exists? What about morality in war correspondence? Or war films? It's got these ideas within an exciting and tense mid-budget film. I thought it flew past. It's a road movie, kind of a hangout movie, but in the same vein as a lot of other post-apocalyptic films (which this essentially is - especially zombie flicks) where moving from moment to moment with a group of characters ratchets up the tension with every interaction. There's a constant sense of dread which comes to a head in the final act. The sound is unbelievable. I don't think that it uses music in its big set-pieces, instead opting for natural sound effects or silence which makes it all the tenser. The sound of bullets cut through the silence similar to how a horror would use a jump scare to startle you, but where they often feel cheap in that genre this feels completely earned and in-keeping with the film's paranoia. The final big scene then bombards you with all of the sound of gunfire that was previously isolated, but it manages to remain focused on Lee and Jessie among the chaos. I shouldn't really be surprised that I liked it so much given how much I loved Annihilation and Ex Machina, but Men, while I thought there was plenty of good in that film, did show worrying signs of a filmmaker beginning to sniff his own farts. Civil War is a true return to form for Alex Garland.

Glad to know me and Grado aren't the only ones to mix you up with Michael Stewart

Are BBC journalists reading my posts? https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/68845131

Think it was four or five years ago that Guardiola first teased us with the prospect of an Ederson penalty. You can only imagine the buzz I got when I saw him about to take it. That was Bernardo Silva's fourth penalty for City and the third to go down the middle, Foden had hit two and both went to the goalkeeper's left (which was where Lunin went) and Kovacic had hit one (low to goalkeeper's right). Real Madrid had clearly done as much homework as me - or I work for them...

Worst case scenario, I'd go with Ralston and Fraser as the RWB options. I suppose Johnston could be a "bring him along" selection if the squad size gets increased, but I've not been a huge fan of him from the admittedly little I've seen.

Have the play-off dates been announced yet? Had a quick Google but nothing's coming up for our division.

33. Mothers' Instinct - Cinema Had the screening all to myself for this which made a fairly trashy film more enjoyable. Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway are obviously two great actresses and they get given free rein in their lead performances as two friends and neighbours whose relationship turns sour after the death of Anne Hathaway's son. The whole thing is pretty schlocky which is reflected in their performances, but I suppose the challenge for them was to have fun with that tone while also having their ulterior motives bubbling underneath. Disappointingly, it's thin on the ground when it comes to those underlying tensions. What you see is mostly what you get, so things ultimately fizzle out a bit in the conclusion. That's a shame as there are good things in the film. I know the Utopic American Suburb with a Dark Secret is overplayed at this point (though I still like it), but the costuming, production design and cinematography do a good job of depicting that setting. There's an artificiality to the pastel colours of the costumes or sets, something that also reflects the conflict between Celine and Alice. It could have easily fallen into the Crazy Mother/Wife trope, but it's established in a pretty ham-fisted argument early on that the whole thing is about a loss of purpose when your environment forces you to exist as an extension of other people (your husband and son). 34. Close Your Eyes - Cinema Almost three hours long, but I found it to be completely mesmerising, despite the fact that it's pretty much just the main character, Miguel, talking to other people. It loves its dialogue and performances and is happy for the audience to just drink them in. I knew nothing about it going in, so I wondered at first if it was gonna be a mystery as it establishes that an actor went missing while shooting a film directed by Miguel, and starts with a scene from that film set in a 20th century country estate, however that setting is then replaced by a bus stop in modern day Madrid which encapsulates the film's perception of the past and present. Despite it being clear early on that how we access the past is gonna be a cornerstone of the story, it manages to take that idea in interesting directions across the near-3-hour runtime which also results in a lot of questions about identity too. Scenes fade black on a regular basis, almost like someone is closing their eyes to access a new memory. Music is used incredibly sparingly, though, as is often the case with films light on score, the music played by the characters becomes more effective. That lack of score adds a sense of immersion to those dialogue scenes, making the Now feel even more genuine in a world full of artistry and entertainment.

Yesterday was one of the best performances I've seen from him. It's just a shame he didn't take his chance to score, as he's apparently the Premier League player to take the most shots without a goal (according to the Totally Football Show on Thursday, anyway).

I'd replace Williamson with Hewitt just so we can swap the worst hair with the best.