accies1874

We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) - Cinema My favourite film from my favourite working director. Probably my favourite film from the 2010s. Probably my favourite actor/actress around at the moment. Projected in 35mm. Delightful. Actually, maybe “delightful” is the wrong word for this… A calling card of Lynne Ramsay’s work is her silent protagonists. They create a sense of mystery around them, particularly their relationships with other characters, which then draws me into their actions and the filmmaking even more. It must be difficult being the lead performer in one of her films due to the lack of dialogue you have to work with, but they pull it off every single time. In this, we see Tilda Swinton’s Eva at different points in her life, but that all needs to build to what we see in the most ‘present’ of the timelines. The film is about her reflecting on her behaviour as a mother, so she needs to convey liberation prior to having kids, anxieties while pregnant, frustration when her life grinds to a halt, apprehension when she begins to believe that her son might not be so good. These emotions all pretty much disappear after The Incident, so Tilda Swinton’s performance needs to help the audience understand her vacantness in the present day. The casting of Ezra Miller has also aged impeccably well. I’ve never read the book so don’t know how the story is told in that, but what I find interesting about the non-linear aspect of the film is that could also, to a certain extent, be perceived linearly. Like I said, it’s all about Eva’s reflection on her own behaviour, so you could consider all of the non-linear aspects to be the memories that she is struggling to escape from. That’s also conveyed by the red that permeates so much of this: red lights her face in many scenes, her house and car are vandalised with red paint, she gets that paint in her hair, there are flashbacks to her at a tomato festival, and continuing the tomato theme there’s also a shot of her hiding behind shelves of tomato soup. This gives a sense of her inability to escape what happened in the past (both her and Kevin’s actions) and could also be a way to draw attention to the idea of what parents pass down to their kids (blood is thicker than water). Parallels are drawn between Eva and Kevin like showing one of them dunk their head in water before turning into the other, or where they both comment on the other’s unforgiving way with words. In a certain sense, it could be comforting to Eva that there was nothing she could do to raise a better child, but then there’s a nihilism to that which is perhaps even worse due to her blood resulting in such trauma in the town. The subjective point of view of the film means that you wrestle with Eva’s regrets just as she does, but there’s a psychological ambiguity that comes from her being an unreliable narrator. Sometimes Kevin’s demeanour will change within a shot or an edit (the latter I’d put down to an editing mistake if it were a lesser film) and the Cool Dad, played by John C. Reilly, doesn’t see or believe some of the shit Kevin gets up to (bringing to mind domestic horror like Rosemary’s Baby). Guilt makes her mind play tricks on her and you feel that as a viewer. I suppose what is also interesting is why she’s reflecting. She didn’t want to have the kid, she didn’t want to be the one to raise the kid, she didn’t want to move out of New York – yet she’s the one who has to live with all of this regret, not the Cool Dad who encouraged Kevin’s archery, watched him angrily kill folk in games and turned a blind eye to his troubling behaviour from afar while the mother at home had to deal with it. All that pressure piled onto someone non-consensually. The way Tilda Swinton’s and John C. Reilly’s performances contrast is perfect; her in full-on starey mode and him in full-on friendly John C. Reilly mode. To provoke all of these thoughts and ideas without much dialogue is why Lynne Ramsay is my favourite director currently working, though her gap between releases is not good. She makes films that remind you why people make films as opposed to any other medium. It’s just class to have someone so great hail from Scotland. I also doubled this up with a showing of Ratcatcher which means that I’ve now seen all of her features on the big screen after seeing Morvern Callar a few weeks ago. Think Greta Gerwig is the only other director with 3+ films that I’ve seen all in the cinema.

Think I'm gonna end up missing this in the cinema but it's one that I'll likely seek out when it comes to streaming. The trailer definitely seemed up my street.

Someone on here said that Alexander-Arnold was the worst right-back in the league - it's best to just ignore their opinions on him.

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.