Another Earth - The best film I've seen in ages, possibly ever

Some films are just films.  You could watch them on a black and white portable running off a car battery and they would still work.  And then some films remind you of everything that's great about going to the cinema.  Every scene is a work of art, and Another Earth is one of those.  Ruth and I went to see it at the Arc in Stockton last night.

The film starts with a car crash which is ironic because we were nearly run over twice trying to get across the road into the Arc.  Somebody called Pam in a Merc tried to run us over in the middle of the green man, but luckily we made it.

When the film started there was one man in front with a squeaky chair who kept moving about, and one lady behind us who seemed to be going for the world record for the noisiest and longest opening of a bar of chocolate in history.  Other than that there was only a transfixed silence in the room.  There was a mild sex scene later on in the film, and the three middle aged men in front of us, felt it necessary to say something to each other during this, to displace their unease, but other than that, not a sound was heard.

In Contact, when Jodie Foster gets wherever she's going, she says they should have sent a poet.  Well, they should have sent one to see Another Earth, because I don't have the words to do it justice.

It's a science fiction story, sort of, but it's not a Hollywood blockbuster.  I can't recall anything at all blowing up.  A mirror image Planet Earth has been found, where there might be another one of each of us.  It was a little bit reminiscent of Moon and Contact, although last night made me regret even more not seeing either of those at the cinema.  As for a cinematic experience it was very close to Once.  There was no hollywoodisation of the central pair of characters.  Failure to Launch it was not.

I've said recently that I don't like films that are like the World Staring Championships, where people just sit around in a room and talk, or don't even talk, they just look out of the window.  This film has cured me in one evening of my need to see stuff blown up by men in orange jumpsuits.  The placing of some fresh flowers in a vase, the leaving of a toy somewhere, the sweeping of a floor or the scrubbing away of graffiti.  All these scenes were just like poetry.

There were parts about sadness and loss and grief, parts about preparing to go on a journey into the unknown, parts about learning to live with disappointment and unfulfilled potential.  All life's lessons were in there. 

Every scene was magical  It's probably one of those films which if I was studying A Levels I would come away from and say how it works on so many levels.  But I'm too old now to know about levels, what I do know about are emotions.  And it pushed just about every emotional button I've got, and it also left me needing some extra buttons for emotions I didn't even know I could have..

The science wasn't really explained, which was just as well, because two Earths that close together would probably cause some lots of cataclysmic weather disruption and people getting their car tyres and arms melted a la The Core but thankfully there wasn't any feebly cobbled together attempt to explain away the science, like in 2012, where the neutrinos were mutating the planet into oblivion.  The science was just left out, and the result was an absolutely gripping human drama.

There are about a hundred separate scenes in the film that you could write a book each about.  The constant shots of the earth and the moon, the silence, the moving voiceovers, the changing decor of a girl's bedroom,  a game of Wii boxing, a house being gradually tidied up, a chance meeting in a shop with a former school mate, a writing competition, families trying to move on from tragedy.  Nothing I could ever say would do it justice.  Ruth and I were awake between 3 and 4 this morning discussing all the things in it that just blew us away.

If you can, go and see it.  It's probably not showing at the cinema, so when it comes out on DVD, buy it.  It won't be as good as at the cinema, but just watch it anyway.

It's another one of those films which are shown at the Arc, which you just wouldn't get to see at the multiplex.  We've already seen Jack goes Boating and Sound it Out there this year which were unforgettable.  We also saw Deep Blue Sea which drove me mad with its miserable central relationships, 50s wallpaper and grating violin music, but I'd sit through that a hundred times if I had to for the chance to see Another Earth again.

Wearing matching tops, falling down stairs and picking up Bishops

Last summer I did a Coast to Coast bike ride with some other people, and it went quite well.

We didn't follow one of the routes devised by those nice people at Sustrans.  Instead we made up our own, and it started at Walney Island and finished in Saltburn.  The whole thing was the Chief's idea, but me having ridden a bike quite a lot I soon got involved in the planning and before I knew it I had agreed to be the map man, riding in front and looking for the way.  Before we went, I did a risk assessment, and I decided that there was some, but even sitting at home in a bungalow wrapped in bubble wrap and wearing no socks carries some risk, so I decided to go for it anyway.

It didn't run entirely smoothly, but thankfully none of the mishaps ended up being terminal.  I organised a bike bus to get us over to Barrow on the Thursday night, and they sent a bus which couldn't get up hills, so it took almost as long to get to Barrow as if we rode there.

As we sat around in the pub in Barrow having curry and beer the night before the ride, I looked around at the 14 of us, many of whom don't ride bikes, and I felt very, very afraid.  I looked at Ruth and Suzanne and Graeme, and they looked at me, and then we looked at the others and I thought, this is going to be a disaster.

But it wasn't.  I did a few practice laps of Walney / Barrow before we set off because I didn't want to start the ride by taking a wrong turn into Tesco car park.  This paid off as I took us the right way, and before long we were on the coast road out of Barrow with a massive tailwind going along at 16 mph.  And I looked behind me and we were all in matching tops and it was like being in a team again, like I used to be at school, and it was great, and also worringly easy.  I'd spent months telling everyone how hard and slow cycle touring can be, but this wasn't either of those things..

The beauty of designing your own route is that you can go in a straight line if you want to, and the lack of zig zagging and the use of A and B roads instead of tiny little minor roads with massive hedges on both sides meant that we made it to our lunch stop at Cark in good time.  The sun was out and we had beer and sausage sandwiches, and it all seemed a bit too easy.  Then after lunch we went through a lovely flat bit and we could see hills but we didn't have to go up any, and the only bad bit of the whole day was getting into Kendal, as it has a one way system that doesn't work, as well as lots of roadworks.  Oh, except for Adam falling in a ditch and Clay crashing into a wall, but they were only small blunders and not full-on You've Been Framers. 

So Friday night we sat around outside the Youth Hostel having a few drinks and congratulating ourselves and then we went out for yet more curry.  After the curry I went in to watch Brazil get knocked out of the World Cup by Holland and all was right with the world, until I got a phone call to say that Graeme had been hospitalised.

He had been trying to slide down a banister which sounds fairly innocuous until you saw the banister and the concrete staircase next to it.  I've seen bobsleigh runs which look less scary.  Anyway, he did a few commando rolls down the concrete stairs and managed not to kill himself but only just.  He had an ankle like the end of Misery and a wrist to match.

So off he went to Lancaster to the hospital and the next morning over breakfast I was just saying how lucky he was not falling on his head, and just as I was saying it, Jen fell on her head.  The sound of a small thin person falling over was surprisingly loud.  I suppose when we pass out and we no longer have any muscular control, all we are is just a big bag of water, so it was quite reasonable to make a big bang.  Off she went to the hospital and hopped into the bed that Graeme had just hopped out of.

Some people seemed to be wavering at this point about going on, as things were turning into a slasher movie.  I just wanted to get out of Kendal before any more of us got picked off by someone in a Scream mask.  This was harder than it sounds because the one way system is more of a closed loop that goes round in round in circles with no exits, but eventually we did manage to get out of there.    

I even found a short cut which trimmed 3 miles off the route, but unfortunately the short cut took us up a massive hill.  There were more hills after that, and it was all taking longer than the day before so lunch had to be sandwiches and pop sitting on the floor in the car park in Sedbergh as there wasn't time for lazing around at the pub.  After that, the route became more undulating and there was a lovely stretch through Dentdale to Dent followed by a long and steep climb through and past the Dent Head Viaduct where Frances was waiting to cheer us on at the top. This was followed by a fantastic 7 mile descent into Hawes. I started off at the front on this but was overtaken by almost everyone on the way down.  Most people achieved personal best fastest times ever. I didn't, mostly because I kept the brakes on out of sheer terror.

I was flagging by Askrigg but Ruth bought me some Sprite and a pie with lots of pastry but no filling from the very friendly local shop for local people and we pressed on to Leyburn.  Once in Leyburn we checked in to our dreamy B&B (Eastfield Lodge) which had a magic shower and in only 4 minutes I felt full of life again. Kendal Youth Hostel it was not.

As a group we met up at the Golden Lion in the evening (staff and food were both great,  I had Pork Medallions) and we discussed subjects many and varied including Derek Nimmo as Mr Spock and the statue like goalkeeping of Peter Shilton. As a special magical bonus Argentina got knocked out of the World Cup, and we got to see Maradona looking fat and bemused on the sidelines, instead of out-jumping Shilton for once.

Day 3 got off to a bad start, as I couldn't find Ruth in our B&B and this held up the start.  The wind was horrendous, but thankfully behind us, and off we went again.  After Bedale I started to relax because from there I knew the way and I didn't need the map anymore.

We passed quite close to home, but didn't go there and in Stokesley we picked up a Bishop and he beat us all up some hills in casual clothing and when we got to the top of the Moors we could see the sea, and it was a beautiful sight because the sun had come out, and once I could see the sea, I knew we'd make it, and we did and I felt quite emotional at the end, because I'd found the way from Sea to Sea, and all the hospitalisations that had happened weren't because of me.

It was lovely group to ride with because nobody moaned about anything, and this was helped no end by taking a big happy Welshman along with us, who just kept marvelling at the scenery.

And apart from the hospitalisations, we were lucky.  Because we never had to ride into the wind or in the rain at all.  We had to ride up hills and some of them were big, and it was still an achievement to do it.  But it did help our morale that conditions were favourable, because I have been on cycle tours that descend into farcical river bed bike-dragging in torrential rain and this was not it.

As some famous golfer once said though, the more I practice, the luckier I get, and we deserved our bit of luck, because it was the most overprepared and well-supported Coast to Coast ride in history.  We had not only driven the route in advance, but we had spares for the spares and backup for the backup and even a spare bike, which was just as well, since John Munro turned up on a rustbucket with an orange chain and some sort of soft cheese for tyres.

We had Bob following us round in a giant van full of water and innertubes and we couldn't really go wrong, and we didn't.  And I got to be in another team photo wearing matching tops.  Which hadn't happened to me since I was at school.

Here it is:

We also managed to raise about £3600 for the Great North Air Ambulance as a result of the ride which was a great effort by everyone.

We did have to call a couple of land ambulances out during the ride, so our account wasn't entirely in credit with the ambulance people, but you can't have everything. 

On the left are the ones that finished in Saltburn.  John Munro had to go home early and a couple of the others were in the hospital.