Symmetry, Loss, Letting Go, Life of Pi, Inception and Deja Vu

I went to see the Life of Pi movie last night.  I went by myself which is just as well because it cost me £11.  This was partly because I didn't want to wait an extra half an hour to watch it in 2D.  This would have saved me £3.  I really wanted a coffee too, but that would have been another £3, so I decided to have the 3D instead of the hot milk.

Even the cheap seats at the cinema now cost around £8.  With prices as high as these, I might have to keep going to the cinema by myself.  There's a bit in Trading Places when the really mean Duke brothers give one of their staff a very small Christmas bonus, and he says 'Gee thanks, maybe I'll go to the cinema....by myself'.  Well, now it's not just poor domestic servants that have to go by themselves, the prices are almost reaching personal loan proportions.

In last night's case, going alone wasn't entirely to do with the cost.  Ruth thought the book was garbage, so she didn't want to see the garbage film that went with it.

It was either 10 or 11 years ago that I read the book, I'm not sure which, but one thing I do know is that I read it over Christmas Day and Boxing Day, so going to see the film on Boxing Day had a nice symmetry to it.  I'm a big fan of symmetry.  Earlier in the year I took great delight in going to see Total Recall aged 44, 22 years after going to see the original when I was myself 22.  For good measure I took my 22 year old stepson with me to see the remake.  Numerologists could have a field day with that one.  The only problem being that the remake seemed to have been hit by the recession and instead of going to Mars they had to tunnel to Australia instead.  I was blown away by the special effects of the Arnie original but the Farrell affair just made me want to go to sleep.

Anyway, the film of 'Life of Pi' was pretty good, in places it looked stunning, but overall I think I preferred the experience of reading the book.  In the film, I could have done without the boat, and the phosphorescence, and the special effects and all the jazzy stuff they can do with computers now, the most compelling parts were listening to the older Pi talking.  In fact, I would have probably enjoyed it more, if it was just him talking.

Looking at it from a selfish point of view, it's possible I just didn't actually need this film to be made.  For me the experience of reading the book was such a rich and imaginative experience, that I already had all of it, and more, in my head.

There were times when I found the film very moving, and mostly these parts were created by a man sitting in a room talking to another man and recollecting stories from the past.  There was a point near the end, when I nearly started crying, but I managed to suppress it, because I didn't want anyone else to hear.  I was already wearing stupid 3D glasses over my own, I couldn't cope with any more embarrassment..

The part that got to me was when the older Pi was talking about the point where he and Richard Parker went their separate ways, and he said something like this, which I am paraphrasing terribly.  'Life is all about letting go, but what hurts is when there is no pause, no time to share what we've been through together, no time to acknowledge the passing, before we part'.  He was talking about the tiger, but also about his family, who were lost in the shipwreck.  This is maybe why it's so important for people to be with their loved ones, as they die.  Just to be aware of the process of letting go.

One of the things I love about the film Inception is the part where Leo finally realises that he has to let his wife go, and move on.  He finally accepts that they had their time, but now he has to go.  He has to move forward, and be with his children in the future.

And thinking about the subject of loss reminded me of another of my favourite films.  Deja Vu.  In that Denzel says 'Everything you have you lose', and although it's never explicitly stated, it seems likely that the family he no longer has, were lost in a terrorist attack, which partly explains his determination to change the past.  He makes a comment along the lines of 'loved ones gone in an instant', and his suffering is very much like that of Pi in Life of Pi, whose family are lost very suddenly and without warning.  This must be the hardest loss of all to take.  As miserable as losing someone to an illness is, at least you get used to their absence in increments.  It doesn't just go from all to nothing.

When I read Life of Pi, one of the parts I enjoyed the most were the descriptions of animals, and their behaviours, and this had more resonance with me at the time than the human stuff.  But I think 10 years on, the parts that stuck with me from the film, were the human dramas.  The decision to sell the animals and move to Canada, which took the family away from their home and their country, and Pi away from his girlfriend, and then the loss of Pi's family in the shipwreck, and finally the bonding with, and then the loss of Richard Parker.

I usually find it quite annoying when people in the cinema start talking, just as the credits start to roll, about how the film of their favourite book, wasn't as good as they expected, and how they missed this bit out, or that part was too long, or about how Galadriel isn't as tall as I imagined etc..

But I think that almost happened to me yesterday.  Because I'd already seen the extended edition 10 years ago, in my own head.  And I loved it.

I haven't shouted at the telly this much since the Olympics

Last night Ruth and I watched The Holiday with Cameron Diaz and Jude Law in.  And right there you've got the two main problems with the film.  Those two were in it.

The film would have been okay if it was just a romantic comedy starring Jack Black and Kate Winslet. Their relationship and the relationship between them and their elderly neighbour played by Eli Wallach was pretty interesting, and could have carried a film on its own.

But every time I started to get into Kate and Jack, the scene kept changing back to Cameron and Jude and it was like I was watching a TV where the channel kept changing involuntarily every 5 minutes onto a show I didn't want to watch.

The chemistry between Law and Diaz was non-existent.  I've seen trees in the forest that were less wooden.  To be fair to them they weren't helped by dialogue so clunky it could have been written by George Lucas, but at least Black and Winslet managed to work with the garbage that had been written for them.  I think Cameron Diaz must think she's the female Jim Carrey, because a lot of her acting seems to be just pulling funny faces, and Jude Law, well, if it was my house he turned up at uninvited, he wouldn't be getting in.  I'd be chasing him down the path with a shovel, and if that didn't deter him, I'd set the dogs on him.

And he's not the only one that should have got a good chasing.  Winslet's creepy boss played by Rufus Sewell was another reason why the two of us were regularly shouting abuse at the screen.  It's a good job we weren't watching the film in 3D or I might have got up and starting trying to chin some of the cast for being in my living room.

But thank goodness for good old Kate and Jack, who at least made the experience bearable.

The Five Year Engagement - A stupid title but a good film

My favourite author Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying that all his arguments with his wife boiled down to her being 'Not Enough People'.  All couples could do with some backup in the form of friends and extended families, but we're not all lucky enough to have it.  The ones that don't are likely to spend a lot longer kicking each other in the arse during the course of their relationship than the ones that do.

And like couples in real life, couples in films need backup too, especially ones that are in romantic comedies.  If ever a type of film needed a supporting cast, the romantic comedy is it.  And that's because it's pretty boring to spend an hour and a half watching someone else's relationship implode before being slowly put back together again.  It's nearly always the same.  First they fall in love, then they have a load of problems due to their total incompatibility, then they gradually find a way of living together without punching each other really hard in the face, blah blah blah, the end.  It's dull.  Films are supposed to be escapism.  If I wanted to watch two people arguing for an hour and a half about nothing in particular I could just set up a webcam in my own house.

So anyway, I'm writing this because last night Ruth and I watched the Five Year Engagement, which had Emily Blunt and some bloke in.  The title is stupid and misleading, because the whole film hinges on a couple's decision not to get married because they have to move to Michigan.  This makes no sense whatsoever.  People move around all the time these days.  Half the people I know don't live near where they grew up, and where their families are.  Some of them don't even live in the same country as where they grew up.

But that's the thing about weddings.  Usually you get time off work to go to them, especially when they're your own, and you can go home to get married, or your family can come to you.  There's about a billion internal flights a day in the US, I'd be amazed if it's impossible to fly from San Francisco to Michigan relatively easily.  So why didn't they just take a couple of weeks off, and get married anyway?  He gave up his job and moved to Michigan with her, and they were living together, so they were virtually married anyway.  And she was a student with 8 weeks off every summer, that would have been the perfect opportunity to fit a wedding in.  All her family were English anyway, so she would probably have wanted to get married in England anyway.  Where they lived in the US was irrelevant.

Leaving aside this stupid fact, the film was a lot of fun to watch.  And that was largely because of the supporting cast.  There were some sick and twisted psychology students, a Welsh professor played by Rhys Ifans who was involved in a particularly funny chase, there was a heated argument between Elmo and the Cookie Monster, a bit of mime, somebody getting shot with a crossbow, some blokes going hunting, growing beards, knitting woolly jumpers, and drinking out of a woolly mammoth's hollowed out foot.  In fact, many of the best bits of the film had nothing to do with the central relationship at all.

So for me, it was a bit like Four Weddings and a Funeral, in that it was the interaction of the wider cast of characters that made the movie.  Imagine if Four Weddings had only had the vacuous Andie Macdowell character prancing around fancying herself and Hugh Grant bumbling and stumbling over his words for 90 minutes.  It would have been death.

Similarly, I was once chained to a chair and made to watch 'Failure to Launch' with Matthew McConnohee (I can't spell it properly, I give up) and Sarah Jessica Parker.  What a terrible film!  I probably would have had more fun reading a paint chart for 90 minutes.  But it was worth watching this particular dung heap for an hour and a half purely because of Zooey Deschanel, who played Sarah Jessica Parker's quirky room-mate.  She saved the movie.

And I've found myself, that it's not just in the movies, but in real life, when it's a good idea to have a good group of friends in the picture.  Because even the biggest stars sometimes need a bit of help.

Skyfall - Even James Bond is being affected by the austerity measures

I went to see Skyfall yesterday.  The new James Bond film.  Wow, things aren't what they used to be.

The film was 2 hours 20 long, but it could have been over in the first 3 minutes.  James Bond fell off a train and went headfirst into a river at about a hundred miles an hour.  Do that in real life and you die.  Added to that he'd been shot, so he definitely shouldn't have made it.  It wasn't the only implausible bit of the storyline either.  He also had a punch up underwater in a frozen lake, which went on for about 10 minutes longer than the world underwater holding your breath record, added to which, as I know from watching Bear Grylls, if you fall into a frozen lake, you can't move after about the first 10 seconds because your body completely shuts down.  Apart from these glaring factual inaccuracies, I really enjoyed the film.

It started off like they usually do with lots of people getting punched in the head, and stuff getting wrecked and blown up, but then it all went a bit low tech and old-fashioned.  It was almost like they used up all the budget in the first half, and the last hour was seriously affected by austerity measures.    James Bond used to routinely get helicopters and underwater cars, all he got in this one was a gun and a radio, and he even had to go back to his own house in an old car towards the end and raid the cupboards for something to fight with.

Without giving the end of the film away, it was a lot like watching the 80s TV series the A-Team where BA Baracus has to disable a posse of heavily armed men with a wheelbarrow full of cabbages and a potato gun.  Judi Dench bless her was making bombs out of leftover curry paste and staples and even Daniel Craig was struggling to find something deadly to massacre the helicopters full of ninjas with that arrived on his doorstep.

One thing I really liked about the film was that there was quite a lot of talking in it, especially between James Bond and the bad guy, played by Javier Bardem.  I can't be doing with films when it's a non-stop Transformer-a-thon of special effects, where there's not even a gap long enough between explosions to check whether you've got tinnitus or not.  I especially liked the bad guy's entrance where he started talking at James Bond while he was still absolutely miles away, and I was even thinking he probably should have used a megaphone, or got closer before he started, but I'm sure he had some sort of microphone near him, what with it being a film and all.  I really liked Javier Bardem as the villain.  He managed to convey just the right air of menace and was just crazy enough, without going completely over the top.  He was a lot more like Dennis Hopper in Speed than Heath Ledger in Batman.

Another good thing about the film was that it was very old person friendly.  I've written before about poor old Roger Moore in Octopussy, running around at age 57 chinning circus performers whilst wearing big cloppy shoes and gorilla outfits, but this one was even kinder to old folk.  The last 20 minutes saw the positively ancient pairing of Judi Dench and Albert Finney, trying to run around but being barely able to move, yet still managing to dodge bullets and explosions.  At one point Albert Finney does a brilliant impersonation of a statue, when someone shoots a gun at him and he doesn't even move.  He just waits there while the bullet blows the doorframe he's standing in apart.  At his age, he wouldn't have seen it coming till about 10 minutes after he'd been shot.

As well as watching old people failing to run around on the screen, the audience at the screening we went to were ancient as well.  It was the middle of the afternoon on Orange Wednesday but it looked like a reunion of all the people who'd been at the original Dr No screening 50 years ago.  I haven't seen so many sticks and wheelchairs since I went past the motability store in Stockton the other day.  I was almost getting comfortable in my seat when the old lady with the two sticks who was trying to get to her seat behind me started rocking my seat backwards and forwards like I was on a see saw, just before she fell over and had to be helped up by some other crumblies.

After spending so much time lately working with people who look about 12, I felt like I'd accidentally stumbled on to the set of Last of the Summer Wine.

The old ladies in particular wouldn't have been disappointed, as Daniel Craig in particular looked chiselled and rugged throughout, so chiselled and rugged in fact, he looked almost pixalated.  He did gratuitously get his kit off a couple of times for the benefit of the grandmas in the audience, although it didn't do much for me.  And it wasn't the best Bond film I've seen for Bond girls either, the ones that were in it were either disappointing, or dead.

But as for storyline, and excitement, it was one of the best, and I'd definitely recommend it.  Even if there was no hollowed out volcano with hundreds of people in coloured jumpsuits and a megalomaniac with a massive laser and a plan to takeover the world in it, it was still a really good film.

And much as I still enjoy watching the old slapstick Roger Moore doing his one liners after he's thrown someone out of a window, I'm warming to Daniel Craig.  I wasn't a big fan of his after Casino Royale, and I've never seen Quantum of Solace, but I enjoyed him in this, and I feel like he's lightening up a bit now he's got into his stride.

Looking forward to the next one....

Goldfinger - the low budget remake

I've just had my bones scanned by possibly the most humourless woman on the planet.

I wasn't expecting cabaret or anything, but a bit of friendly banter would have been nice.

Considering I had to unfasten my trousers and have a laser shot at me (which is a slightly unnerving experience) a few words of introduction would have been nice.

It may have been the fact that I've been talking about action movies all afternoon but the above scenario did remind me a bit of the scene in Goldfinger where James Bond aka Sean Connery is about to be lasered in half, and he says to Goldfinger 'Do you expect me to talk?' and Goldfinger says 'No, I expect you to die, but I'm not hanging around to make sure it happens because I'm off to blow the shit out of Fort Knox, and even though it would be a good idea to make sure that any enemies I've got are six feet under before I start, especially if they've got a licence to kill my ass, I'm not going to bother to put the effort in and wait 5 minutes for your body to be cut in half, so I'm off. See ya!'.

I wasn't expecting this poor NHS woman to enter into some sort of action movie role-play with me, my expectations of hospitals aren't that high, but it would have been nice if she'd just passed the time of day  with me, and said something like 'I just need you to lie down on this bed for a bit while I fire a laser at you, it totally won't hurt and it will only take a few minutes and there's absolutely nothing to worry about'.  Just something like that.

I didn't want her to ask where I went for my holidays, or if I've got any pets, like she might have done if she was cutting my hair, but just something.  By the way, I have a theory about hairdressers, which is that they make conversation with you to help ease the awkwardness which arises from touching a complete stranger's head.

And if there's a small amount of unease which comes about from being touched on the head, imagine if you will the slightly larger portion of unease that is felt by being asked to unbutton your trousers, empty your pockets, lift up your shirt and wait for a laser to be fired at you.

Under the circumstances, establishing a bit of rapport with me first would have been nice.  I haven't felt so processed since I went to the all you can eat Chinese buffet at the Banana Leaf in Middlesbrough.  By the time I crawled out of there heaving under the weight of barbecued spare ribs and overpriced drinks I could barely fold myself into the car to drive home....I felt positively violated.

But that's another story...

If Looper's the future, I think I'm off to Dignitas

I went to see Looper last night.  It was set in the future but it was all dusty, and people were driving round in beaten up old cars, and shooting each other with blunderbusses.  This is not the future I want.

I want the future like in I Robot where I can get a big smooth shiny Audi that drives itself, and a personal slave robot who, until he goes mad and tries to kill me, does whatever I ask him to.

I don't want a future like in Waterworld either, where people are going round on boats collecting soil and living on rusty oil tankers.  I want tin foil everywhere, shiny stuff and frickin' lazers.

And that wasn't the only thing about Looper.  To make it almost impossible for him to act the main actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt had been given a prosthetic face to make him look more like Bruce Willis.  I haven't seen such an unconvincing mask since Vanilla Sky.  Even my favourite actress Emily Blunt couldn't save the film.

It was so bloody loud as well.  There was hardly a minute went by without some poor sod getting blown away.  Most of the victims were bound, gagged and hooded and just got gunned down as soon as they landed in the past.  At least there's normally a bit of running about before folk get shot, this was like watching somebody shoot fish in a barrel.

It was totally and utterly humourless as well.  It was like watching Terminator 2 or Back to the Future with all the humour taken out.  Bits of it did remind me of other films but I found that mostly depressing too because they were all films I'd rather be watching instead.

It's rare that I dislike a film before the opening credits have finished but I think I managed it with this one.  And not since Justin Timberlake in In Time have I seen such wooden acting.  They could have got a plank to play Bruce Willis, and by the end I was wishing I'd hit myself with one.  Films are meant to be escapism, but with this one I could actually feel my life slipping away minute by minute.

Ruth mostly slept through it, she said it was such a monotonous shoot-em-up-athon she thought she'd just skip the middle two hundred shootings and just wake up in time for the ride home.

The sad thing is, I generally love time travel films.  I like getting my brain scrambled by shit like the Grandfather paradox, but with this one, I couldn't even be bothered to do any thinking.  I remember going to see Timecop with Jean Claude Van Damme about 15 years ago, and that certainly wasn't the best film in the time travel genre, but it was like Citizen Kane compared to this tosh.

If I had a time machine myself, if I could cobble one together out of bits of old bike and half used tins of paint out of the garage, I could do a lot worse than go back to yesterday, and go see something else instead.....or failing that I could just stick my head in a bowl of custard for two hours.  It would probably be just as good.

Deja Vu - Not knowing what to do and thinking about stuff

I really like the film Deja Vu.  For many reasons, but for a couple of reasons in particular.

Action films are full of dunderheaded action men doing stuff.  Shooting stuff, driving fast, blowing shit up, but not taking a lot of time in between to think about things.

In Deja Vu, there's a bit where the FBI agents sit round in a room, and something they tried to do has gone wrong, and they wonder what to do, and they admit that they don't really know what to do next.  And normally in films you don't see that.  You don't see the heroes sitting around scratching their heads and not really having a clue.  And I really like that.

Also, Denzel Washington liked to catch the streetcar rather than drive his car, so he can do some thinking.  You don't see many action heroes taking a trip on a streetcar just to have a think.  Mostly it's just a blowing-driving-shooting-non-thinkathon out there.  They just know what to do and they do it.  They don't have to go on public transport to mull stuff over.

Another thing I like about Deja Vu is the scene where Denzel gets angry at the Feds who've been lying to him.  I like that ability to get angry in a controlled way that he shows, and it's also why I like Kevin Spacey and Samuel L Jackson in the Negotiator.  I like the way they almost lose it, but don't.

I also like the fact that in Deja Vu some of the main characters actually take a bash at explaining some sciency stuff.  They don't just slip in an aside that the neutrinos have mutated, like in 2012 and then never mention it again.

I also like Deja Vu because it's a redemption story.  It isn't fully explained, but I've chosen to infer that the Denzel character's family were killed in the Oklahoma city bombing, and that's why it becomes so important to him to try and save the woman in the story, because he was powerless to change something in the past, and now he's getting a second chance at redemption.  It's also what I liked so much about Another Earth.  Seeing someone full of regret grappling with a life-changing event, and trying to grab onto a chance at redemption.  Wouldn't we all want a chance of that at some point in our lives?  Some harsh words we could take back, or actions we wish we could undo.  Or decisions we wish we could un-make?

Deja vu isn't a 100% success story.  For example, I don't like the bit at the end, where he takes the murder victim that he's just managed to get un-murdered back to the ferry, just in time to get blown up by the mad bomber.  It seems to me, that if you're going to bend the fabric of space-time to save someone from being murdered, it would be best not to immediately take them on a road trip to where the murderer and a big bomb are at.  I'm only a simple man, but that would be my advice.  Similarly, if  you're going to spend an hour getting Sandra Bullock off an exploding bus, don't take her back to where the hostage money is getting dropped off, she might just get abducted again by the mad bomber.  What I'd like to see one of these days in an action movie, is an action hero rescuing someone from disaster and then buying her a bus ticket and sending her in the total opposite direction to where the bomb and the bomber are, just for her own safety.

I realise this might make a dull ending to a film, Sandra Bullock sitting on a greyhound bus and getting the hell out of harm's way, but it would certainly be the logical choice, and I think it would be nice once in a while to see an action hero make a rational decision, instead of just blundering around blowing shit up.

That's what I think anyway.


Post Script.  I wrote this on Sunday 19th August and later that day the director of the film Tony Scott committed suicide after jumping from a suspension bridge in Los Angeles.  I've just read on obituary and I hadn't realised how many other top films he'd made, including Top Gun, Man on Fire, Crimson Tide, Beverley Hills Cop 2 and many others.  Very sad news.

Come back Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - all is forgiven

I've been reading a book about Introversion this week.  In it, it says one of the reasons introverts need peace and quiet is because they are more sensitive to sensory input than extroverts and they need less of it to become overwhelmed.

In that case, I need to stop going to see movies like Avengers Assemble (worst film title ever) and Mission Impossible 4.  Both of them are just noise, shit getting blown up and people getting chinned from start to finish. I know that Hollywood's a bit short of money these days, I think they must have decided, rather than make 6 super hero films for 6 times the price, they'd just film them all at the same time in New York.  The plot was so non-existently bonkers I may have actually been watching 6 films at once, I wasn't sure.

Right from the minute Scarlett Johansen started kicking people's heads off in the first few minutes of the Avengers I was bored.  In fact, Ruth turned to me after 15 minutes and asked me if I was as bored as she was.  It was a good job I had the foresight to paint eyeballs on the outside of my 3d glasses, or I may have looked asleep.

It was the same last night.  Tom Cruise decides, instead of walking out the prison door which has been opened for him, to go back and chin about a hundred blokes before leaving.  It was just like watching a videogame.  I fell asleep after that, and when I woke up a girl got kicked out of a window and then Tom was running at absolute top speed through a sandstorm.  Then I went to bed.

Part of the reason I've found Mission Impossibles 2 to 4 so disappointing is because I really enjoyed Mission Impossible 1.  And what did that have, that none of the others have had?  More talking, that's what.

All the best bits of Mission Impossible 1 are people talking to each other.  In offices, in restaurants, on trains.  Just talking.  There are one or two action sequences, but they are quite short and involve things like one man dangling on a string for about 10 minutes, or a bit of running about on top of a train.

All the real action is in the dialogue.  And while I'm sitting there fighting to stay awake watching these supposed blockbusters, watching endless people getting punched, it makes me yearn for the days when films had a storyline that was advanced by actors talking to one another rather than by endless carnage.

Another problem I had with the Avengers movie was the sight of New Yorkers running for their lives, while buildings are being blown up around them.  In the innocent days before 9/11 I used to enjoy seeing Godzilla eating the Chrysler building or seeing a tidal wave sweep through Manhattan.  Having seen too much footage of real New Yorkers running away from things in terror, I find I can't enjoy it in the same cartoony way anymore.  Filmakers seemed to go easy on New York for quite a while after 9/11, but now blowing up central New York seems to be acceptable again.  I wonder what real New Yorkers make of it.

I might give Mission Impossible 4 another go later.  It can't be as bad as I thought it was last night.  But if it is, I'm going to watch Mission Impossible 1 again.  I'm going to enjoy once more the sights and sounds of people talking to each other on trains, and in offices, and over the telephone.  And I'm going to enjoy afresh the sights and sounds of stuff not getting blown up.  Because on the whole, I think, in films, as in life, things are better that way.  

Alien Invasion Imminent? Natural Disaster on the Horizon? Get yourself a dog, and you just might live

I watched Cowboys and Aliens last night.  Ruth has been wanting to see it since it was on at the cinema, but I've completely resisted going to see it  because I assumed it would be a giant pile of dung.  Then, when I found out Graeme, Carol and Suzanne were all going to be watching it last night, I thought 'Oh well, why not?'.  Even though they were watching it in Grantham and we were watching it on Teesside, it still felt like a shared experience.  Sort of.

In actual fact, it wasn't half bad.  There seemed to be some gratuitous Daniel Craig getting his top off while getting dripped on from above nonsense, but other than that it was quite engaging.  Another thing I've noticed about Daniel Craig, other than him getting his top off, is that he also seems to really enjoy punching people, because he doesn't just hit people once, he keeps pounding away on their faces until they look like mincemeat. I'm sure it's not fully necessary.

Harrison Ford was in it too, and he seemed on good form.  Last time out, as a geriatric Indiana Jones, he hardly seemed to be able to move, but he looked quite sprightly again last night, he was chinning aliens and all sorts.  I suppose in the style of the later Roger Moore Bond films, I didn't see him do much bending, but he seemed to compensate for this, by riding round on a horse and firing guns all the time.

I think I lost it with the last Indiana Jones when he survived an atom bomb by hiding in a fridge, and when the fridge landed after being blown about 3 miles from the epicentre of the blast, Indy just walked out without a scratch.  I fell asleep after that.

There was a dog in the film last night.  A collie.  And of course he made it through till the end.  There was shit blowing up all over the place for nearly two hours, except for around the dog, where all was calm.  And it reminded me of all those other films, where people are getting rolled over by buses, and are falling into craters in the Earth, and getting melted by volcanos, and there's always a dog, and the dog always makes it.

It made me wonder if I should consider getting another dog.  As insurance against the coming apocalypse.  Will Smith's girlfriend had one in Independence Day and she got away, there was a tramp in The Day After Tomorrow who had a dog, and he was fine, even when loads of people were getting frozen outside.  There  was a dog that was right next to a Sumo man in the middle of New York in Armageddon when he was hit by an asteroid, and the Sumo man ended up down a big hole, but the dog was unharmed.

This dog-friendly habit amongst film-makers probably isn't helped by our tendency, as an audience, to join in  each time and start rooting for the dog.  We're willing the dog to get away, even when in the background New Yorkers are being swept away by tidal waves and aliens and Godzilla, and oh dear, the Chrysler building seems to have fallen on a coach load of nuns again.  Never mind.

The one film that I can remember, which is the exception to the 'dog always makes it' scenario, is I Am Legend.  Sorry to spoil it for you, if you haven't seen it.  The dog's death scene in I Am Legend, is, by the way, genuinely upsetting.  The ending is complete baloney as well, but even though this film has some good bits, I would never want to see it again.  Because I wouldn't want to see the dog buy the farm again.

Yet, I've watched Independence Day, Armageddon and the Day After Tomorrow about a hundred times each.  In these films thousands of people get blown up, crushed, burned, frozen, incinerated, melted and otherwise killed in an endless array of horrible ways, but that never puts me off watching them.

I just keep smiling and say to Ruth 'Oh look, here's the bit where that reporter gets crushed by a billboard, pass me another chicken wing, will you?' or 'Oh look, Jeff Goldblum's boss has just been crushed by a bus, how about a nice cup of tea?'

I even kind of felt sorry for the wolves in 'the Day after Tomorrow' when they were trying to bite Jake Gyllenhaal's legs off.  I mean, they had been swept out of the zoo, and so they weren't getting regular meals any more, what were they supposed to do?

And the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, of course he wanted to eat Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neill.  All he'd had to eat all day was a goat.  That wouldn't even fill me up.

Roger Moore as Bond - get that man a Zimmer frame!

This week I have been mostly watching Bond movies.  The ones with Roger Moore in. They keep showing them on ITV4, a channel with advert breaks so long, you can make a three course meal and cross-reference the other work of the whole cast during one single ad break.  Sometimes the ad breaks are so long, I can't even remember what I was watching.

Anyway, some people aren't a big fan of Roger Moore as Bond, but I think he's ace.  If you're going to be a ruthless killer, at least have a sense of humour about it, that's what I say.

And one additional bonus of watching him, particularly in the later ones, is that he's an encouragement to old and inflexible people everywhere.  He's in his fifties in these films, and even though he can hardly bend, he still manages to cuff aside assailants as if he's swatting flies.

Last night I watched Octopussy (yeah producers, don't bother burying sexually suggestive names for characters deep in the movie, get it in the title, get people's attention straightaway), and he wasn't only able to deck old blokes like himself, he managed to knock out a few circus performers as well, and some of them were extra bendy.  Even they couldn't get the better of him.

He must have been doing some sort of secret martial art, because even though he was up against really flexible people, he managed to fight them all without doing any bending at all, and he also managed at the end to hold onto the top of a plane with two tiny little rails as it was going upside down.  No-one could do that.  

In Octopussy he was really up against it.  Not only could he not bend to start with, they kept putting him in a vast array of costumes, that would have taken away even the small amount of flexibility that he did have.  They had him in a gorilla suit and a remote controlled crocodile suit, and when he had to run fast near the end to disarm a nuclear bomb, they put him in a clown suit with big clip cloppy shoes.  He nearly didn't make it.

Not since Peter Shilton in the World Cups of 1986 and 1990 have I seen someone so ill-fitted to the task he's been assigned to.  As I've no doubt mentioned before, I don't blame Maradona for 1986, or Germany for 1990.  I blame Shilton.  If, as a six foot goalie, you can't outjump a tiny little Argentinian, even if he is using his hands, then you shouldn't be on the pitch.  And as for trying to keep out Germany's penalties in 1990, he was diving in instalments.  I thought I was watching the slow motion replays until I realised it was in real time.  The Germans on the other hand had a young fit lad between the sticks.  Even if our lot hadn't been shinning them over the bar, he probably would have stopped them anyway.  He did at least look athletic.  Shilton needed a winch to get back up after every dive.  He was 40 at the time but he looked older.  I know he was a brilliant goalie at one time, but I think he should have quit sooner.  Like in about 1985.

For the last few years, I've had some problems with arthritis.  I'm nowhere near as flexible as I used to be.  When I was a teenager I used to play rugby and football, and both of these involved diving around a lot and getting back up again really quickly.  Now it takes me about 15 minutes to pick up a tea towel I've dropped on the floor.  And that's the thing I don't get with Roger Moore (and Shilton for that matter).  There would have been loads of young people around at the time.  Have you ever seen those guys doing that Parkmore or Parquet or whatever it is, where they fling themselves from building to building.  I mean, you could go get one of those guys, stop them hanging around outside Morrison's and give them a WaltherPPK or a pair of goalie gloves, and they'd probably do a better job.

Another ace thing about Roger was this.  As well as being able to fight without being bendy, he could also change women's minds really easily, a feat which I have found impossible to this day.  If a woman didn't want to do it with him, all he had to do was grab her by the head, and make her kiss him, and then she would magically change her mind.  I've never actually tried this, and I'm not going to start now, but if I did, I would expect at the very least a smack over the head with a woman's shoe, and possibly a visit from the authorities, but even a non-bendy wrinkly like Bond seemed to be able to get away with it then.

That was another great thing about Octopussy.  Instead of a load of Chinese blokes running round in coloured boilersuits inside a volcano at the end, they had loads of young women in red skin suits running around doing circus type stuff.  It was a visual treat.

One more thing.  Watching the film this time had some extra resonance for me, as there was a rickshaw chase through New Delhi, and from what I could see, between 1983 and a couple of months ago, when I was there, it doesn't look like it's changed much in (although I can't recall being chased by any ninja style assassins, only beggars and tuktuk drivers).

For some reason, probably because he was the most famous Indian around at the time, they stuck Indian tennis professional Vijay Amritraj in the movie.  Ruth said you could tell he wasn't an actor.  Having seen how things operate in India, I wondered if the casting went something like this.

Cubby Broccoli:  Hello, is that the Indian High Council of Film Things?  We'd like to do a movie in Delhi
Indian Guy:  Oh, we have a form for that.  In fact, we have several.
Cubby Broccoli:  That's okay, I'll get my Indian form filling guy onto it.
Indian Guy:  There is one other thing.  If you want to film in India, we'll need Vijay Amritraj to be in it.
Cubby Broccoli:  What, the tennis player?
Indian Guy:  That's him.
Cubby Broccoli:  But he's a tennis player, not an actor.
Indian Guy:  Well we want him in.  No Vijay, no movie.
Cubby Broccoli: Okay, deal.

I'm probably completely wrong about that, so don't sue me.

So there's plenty of good news, it seems.  If old inflexible people like Shilton and Roger Moore can still get employed doing the work that a younger man could do so much more easily, and if Indian tennis players who can't act can get picked to star in a James Bond movie, it appears there's plenty of hope for the rest of us.

Sorry Nicolas Cage - You lost me at the vending machine

I saw a terrible film last night.  So terrible that I had to watch the last 1 hour 20 minutes of it by myself.  Ruth had seen enough after 20 minutes.  And so had I, to be honest, but like Bolivia vs South Korea at USA 1994, that I stayed up till 2.45 in the morning to watch, even though I had to be at work for 7, I didn't know when to admit defeat and just go to bed.

For anyone who doesn't remember that classic footballing encounter, it was a Nil-Nil draw between two terrible teams who were both lucky to get nil.  I think if the goals had been the size of blue whales neither team would have been able to hit them.  The goalkeepers would have got more touches of the ball if they'd sat in the crowd, because that was where the shots at goal mostly ended up.

But anyway, back to the film.  The film was called Justice.  It's about a man played by Nicolas Cage whose wife is attacked and hospitalised by a man in snake skin cowboy boots.  I think my step dad had some of those.  While he's sitting in the waiting room, a man played by Guy Pearce (formerly Mike in Neighbours) comes up to him and offers to get his wife's attacker 'dealt with'.  The legal system will take too long, and he'll probably get off with eleven months, blah blah blah.  This is where it gets absolutely mental.

Even though Guy Pearce has just been openly advertising his rapist nobbling services in the waiting room of a hospital, he then tells Nicolas Cage that if he wants to accept the offer, he has to go buy two chocolate bars out of a vending machine.  Why don't you just give him your phone number, mate?, I wanted to yell.

And so what ensues is what seems like a ten minute walk to the vending machine to get a couple of bars of chocolate.  I'm not as good at suspending my disbelief as I used to be, but this was plainly ridiculous.  I've been in hospital loads of times, and when I say loads, I mean loads.  And generally speaking, although seeing your ailing relative is also quite important, heading for the vending machines is one of the few highlights of being in there.  If this was really how you hire a hitman, I would have hired one every time I've been in a hospital.  There would hardly be anyone left in the Teesside area.  Between 1994 and 1997 my first wife alone spent 70 nights in hospital.  That's enough vend to have wiped out half of Stockton.

And so from there I thought the film was completely nuts.  And it was.  After watching Knowing I'd been prepared to give Nic another chance, but I think he's had plastic surgery or something, either that or he hasn't had the make-up removed after doing Ghost Rider, and his face looks bonkers.  I liked him in Con Air and The Rock (apart from his untidy hair in the former), why didn't he just stick to having a normal face?

By the way, it wasn't just the vending machine scene, the plot was completely nuts all the way through.  These vigilante types had such convoluted ways of doing things.  Like instead of just texting him, or ringing him up, they kept breaking into his heavily fortified house to write things on his fridge in fridge magnets.  It's the bloody twenty-first century, man, what about 3G?  Fridge magnets are so last century!

They even made him start getting the bus to work, instead of taking his car, so that he could wait under an underpass to throw someone off it.  I think the killers in this movie must have been trained by the inverse Time and Motion people, they were completely inefficient.  'Yeah, well, we could just shoot the guy, but then the film will be about 20 minutes long, why don't we have him followed by a remote control helicopter with a poisoned dart attached to the nose, and when he stops at the grocery store, we'll remote control his ass into oblivion!'.  It was that bad.  Not since the end of a James Bond movie, have the means of killing someone being so ineptly conceived and carried out.

So, to sum up, my advice to you is this:  Save your money, and don't see Justice.

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.

Where were you when Bruce was blowing up that asteroid? - A history of my life through movies

For some people, music is like a time machine that can transport them back to a time in the past.  With me it's movies, particularly ones I've seen at the cinema.

I can chart my whole life through the films I've been to see.  

1971 - Diamonds are Forever.  The first movie I can remember seeing at the cinema, with my dad.  I was nearly 4.  I have no recollection of the plot except seeing James Bond drive his car on two wheels.  I don't think I ever went to the cinema with my dad again, as he died shortly after.

1974 - The Sound of Music.  Not its original release date.  One of only two films I can remember seeing with my mum, also went with elderly neighbour Auntie Gertie, whose house was always bloody freezing.  I wanted tobe in the Von Trapp family, and wear curtains for clothes and sock it to the Nazis.

1977 - Star Wars.  The first time I was ever completely blown away by a film on the big screen.  George Lucas didn't need to do all that tweaking years later.  If there were any technical deficiencies, my imagination filled in the gaps.

1978 - Grease.  I had no desire to go see this.  I went with my babysitter Susan who used to spend all her time babysitting us playing the Bee Gees and the Grease soundtrack, to the extent that the neighbours used to bang on the walls.  In the days before advance ticketing we got there to find the first screening of the day was full, so we had to queue for the whole length of the film outside in the sun with no drinks until the film had run its course, and we could get in.  For the record, I liked Olivia Newton John better before she got all tarted up in leather. 

1979 - Superman.  Went to see this with my entire primary school class, including Shelagh Peters, who I'm still in touch with till this day.  I had some national health specs of my own so I looked more like Clark Kent than Superman.  The special effects were rubbish, especially the running and Margot Kidder was too ugly to play Lois Lane but we didn't care, because it was a trip out.  And twenty years later we got Teri Hatcher instead in the TV version so all was well.  

1980 - Flash Gordon.  Another ticketing fiasco.  My mum took me and my brother to see this in the Christmas holidays, but it had sold out and so we went to see Smurfs and the Magic Flute instead, which was abysmal.  We were so disappointed she gave us the money to go back the next day and see Flash Gordon and we sat on the front row, and it was amazing, at least I thought so until I saw it last week and I thought it was camper than a VW camper van.

1982 - Empire Strikes Back.  Got bloody told in Tony Beecrofts back garden that Darth Vader was Luke's father so that bollocksed up going to see this one, but the much darker tone was in keeping with becoming a teenager.  

1983 - Tootsie.  Saw this in Germany.  No bloody idea what was going on.  Dustin Hoffman in a dress.  Bill Murray eating lemons. Me laughing in all the wrong places.  

1983 -Escape to Victory.  An exception to the cinema rule, but notable as the first film I ever saw on VHS.  Courtesy of my step dad, we got a top loading video recorder with a remote on a piece of wire that weighed about 70 kilograms, and this was the first film we ever watched on it.  

1984 - Lady and the Tramp.  Part of my trying to impress Susannah Taylor phase, I was trying to look wacky by going to see a Disney movie aged 16.  Queueing up for ice cream with a load of toddlers just made me look like an arse. Not as good as the Aristocats. 

1985 - Weird Science.  With Katie Oddy.  A totally pointless first date is to go to the cinema only, and not speak, and then say goodbye at the end and not have a clue whether you like each other, and then not see each other again out of indifference. That was me and Katie. 

1985 - Back to the Future.  Took my brother on the train to Leeds to see it.  Incredible.  Right from the opening scene I was hooked.  The scorched tyre marks amazing.  Look how far we'd come since Superman. 

1985 - Ghostbusters.  I remember going with schoolfriends aged 17 and people singing along to the theme tune during the opening credits.

1985 - The Never Ending Story.  I went with Paul Edgar to see this because we had become fans of all things German and this was a Wolfgang Petersen job. 

1986 - Rocky IV.  Saw this with Joe Pasquale style Italian dubbing in Italy, and then took Joanne Phillips to see it on my return to England.  Not really a suitable date movie.  It's basically cars, rock music and people getting punched.

1986 - Out of Africa.  Trying a bit harder with Joanne, by going to see a more chick friendly movie.  I'm not sure if I found it genuinely moving or if I was just trying to be at one with her.  Never seen it since so I don't know. 

1986 - 9 and a Half Weeks.  Trying too hard with Joanne but in the wrong way.  Fell asleep out of sheer boredom, and what a waste of food by the lead actors.  I know why it's called 9 and a half weeks.  It's because that's how long you feel like you're in there for.

1987 - Children of a Lesser God. If you're trying to fight against being dumped by the girl you love, don't go see Childrne of a Lesser God.  A film about two people who can't communicate because one's deaf and the other isn't, doesn't help to bridge the gap.  I knew it was over after this.

1987 - Ferris Bueller's Day off.  I went to see this with Dan Jackson, during our year off together.  Appropriate that I went to see a film about someone having a day off when I was having a year off.  I thought he was so cool then, now he just seems irresponsible (Ferris Bueller that is)

1987 - Lethal Weapon.  Went to see this with Dan and Graham Tyler, who was home from Uni for Christmas.  

1987 - Robocop.  In 1987 you could still go see films for a pound at the Cannon cinema in Halifax.  Went with my girlfriend / first wife Beverley.  Not exactly a date movie.  Probably the most graphically bloody movie I'd ever seen.   

1990 - Total Recall.  Dan was home from Uni and went to see this with him and Beverley, and she drove in our car that we'd just bought.  After Robocop I was now ready for another Paul Verhoeven bloodbathm and I was genuinely wowed by the special effects. 

1991 - Terminator 2.  Again, special effects that could knock your socks off, but a tip for indestructible metal objects.  Stop going to massive industrial complexes where there's loads of hot metal everywhere.  Stay safe in the countryside.

1994 - Timecop and Stargate.  When Beverley was in the Nuffield hospital after having major bowel surgery, they used to let me take her out in the evenings.  Went to see these two films at the showcase,  I remember she was carrying one of those cardboard hat style sick bowls around.  It felt strange being there amongst all the well dressed young people, but it was nice to be out.  

1995 - Apollo 13.  Went to the preview screening of this before the official release, and so there were no trailers.  Incredible how gripping I could find a film where I know the ending before it starts.  The launch of the Saturn V rocket sequence still almost makes me cry to this day. 

1998 - Flubber.  having step children resulted in having to go see this total Robin Williams bollocks.  Not since Smurfs and the Magic Flute with little brother have I been so bored at the cinema.

1998 - The Rugrats Movie.  I paid for the four of us to go see this and to have a Burger King with money I got for having an article published in the Church Times.  What a waste.  Even worse than Flubber.  

1998 - Armageddon.  Went to see this with Ruth the first time we ever had a few days to ourselves when the kids went to their dad's for 5 days. This was more like it.  I still quote it to this day. 

1998 - The Truman Show.  Just before it was killed by the Multiplex went to see this at the Odeon in Middlesbrough.  Full of drunk teenagers, one of which puked on the seat in front of us.  Pungent smell of second hand cheap cider permeated the screening.  

1999 - The Phantom Menace. Spent the evening of our wedding at the cinema.  The honeymoon was delayed due to Becky having to go to A&E after falling off a swing.  I've still got the ticket somewhere, as a souvenir. 

1999 - The Matrix.  Went to see this with Ruth, and it was the last film where I was truly wowed by the special effects.  Now I mostly think they spoil the film rather than make it. 

2001 - 2003 - The Lord of the Rings.  Three Christmasses running went to see this with Ruth and Michael.  Although the films are totally preposterous I enjoyed them.  The worst bit was hearing devotees of the books chuntering about plot inaccuracies during the closing credits, that and that Annie Lennox bloody theme tune woman.

2004 - The Bourne Supremacy.  As well as being an incredible action movie and the best one of the trilogy, I also got to revisit Berlin and Munich vicariously through the set pieces in the film.  

2007 - Hot Fuzz.  Seeing our honeymoon destination being shot to pieces made me feel better about the whole disastrous episode.

2011 - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  As if to rebel against the overuse of special effects, they have made a film which is basically just blokes in rooms talking.  It was like going to see the World Staring Championships, but it was better than Transformers. 

Munich 1983 - Eating lemons and looking at boobies.

Going to Hannover in 1985 wasn't my first exchange trip to Germany.  I went to Munich in 1983 when I was 15.  Again it was the same story, they came over here for two weeks in April, and we went there for two weeks in July.

The English half of the exchange didn't exactly run smoothly.  I had exchanged letters with my exchange partner Josephine, so I knew how tall she was, how many cats she had etc.  This was supposed to help with the ice breaking disaster that is speaking to foreigners when you're 15.

Oh No, they've sent the wrong German!

So in April about 30 Germans came pouring through the ticket barriers at Leeds Station, and one by one we identified our exchange partners and went home.  Eventually there was just one girl left, but it wasn't Josephine.  It took about 30 minutes of hand gestures and pigeon German / English to discover that Josephine had decided to stay at home with the cats and instead they'd sent a sub.  In my case it was Friederike Merdan (or Fri for short), a stripey trousered girl who not only was not Josephine, she didn't know any of the other Germans because she was in the school year above the rest of them, so taking her out in groups wasn't easy, as she didn't really have any particular desire to mix with people she didn't know.

Having fun on the way to Neuschwannstein - notice the bicycle bell balanced on top of a half eaten apple and a tennis ball

I managed to pretty much get by a whole fortnight just by introducing her to people who commented on her stripey trousers, and that was pretty much the end of the conversation, and on to the next trouser admirer.  I did my best with her, and so did my mum, but it was like pulling teeth out of a crocodile's head.

When I got to Munich I had the same problem in reverse in that she wasn't friends with any of the other German exchangers, so she didn't really want to meet up with them.

Eventually after about 3 days, I decided that I knew which U-bahns to take to get about, and so I would be fine going out by myself.  And I went off to meet some friends to see Tootsie (Dustin Hoffmann dubbed over in German).  I didn't have a bloody clue what was going on in the film.  Dustin kept dressing up as a woman and hanging around with Jessica Lange and going on the swings and stuff.  That was pretty much all I could figure out.  About halfway through the film, Dustin's roommate (Bill Murray) is talking to him, and he appears to be eating lemons off a plate.  Steve Hills leaned over to me, and he said 'That guy's eating lemons!'.  For reasons still unknown to this day, this was the funniest thing I'd ever heard, and the rest of the film I couldn't stop laughing.  Unfortunately I was laughing totally out of sync with the funny bits in the film, which the Germans were laughing at.  They kept looking at me, as if I was noodle doodle.  I was.

After the film, I went and got on all the right trams, but then when I got off at Schwabing station, I realised I didn't have a clue which direction to set off walking in.  Never one to give up easily, and without the phone number of Fri's house, I walked round and round and round for 2-3 hours, asking for directions in appalling German.  In the meantime, Fri had called the Police and they were out looking for an English boy in a stripey T-shirt.

I went all the way to Neuschwannstein but all I got was pictures of girls

After a process of eliminating every street in Munich one at a time, I found my way back to Fri's apartment.  She opened the door, gave me quite a lot of abuse, and went off to bed.  It was about 1.30 in the morning.  I should have been back by 11.  Her mum called off the police and I went to bed.

For the next 11 days I barely spoke to Fri, but having learned my way round Munich the hard way, I became happily self-reliant.  Although we didn't speak much, I did regularly see her naked body go past me in the river in the English Garden.  It wasn't officially a naturist resort, but every girl who wasn't English walked around topless, including Fri.  There's a fast flowing river in the Garden, and we used to go in it all the time.  You got carried downstream by the current, and then you had to grab onto a bridge and drag yourself to the bank to get out.  Once or twice I lost my Speedos during the exit from the water.  Unfortunately on one of these occasions I was seen by Helen Winn, and even more unfortunate was that in the cold water my penis had shrunk to the size of a peanut.  Not a good way to impress the girls.

Messing about in the English Garden - with all our clothes on

Unfortunately, on one of these river rides, Stephen Holliday hit his head on the concrete bottom of the river bed, underneath a bridge and he had to go off to hospital to get his nose fixed.  I just had an e-mail conversation with him this week, though, so I'm pretty sure he's over it now, although he's not quite got over being buried in potted plants whilst out of his tree on Apfelkorn in Hannover, but that's another story.

Here we are on the way home.  That's Steve on the left, with the broken nose

There was a German man in the English Garden, who used to go round the park completely starkers, holding two badminton racquets and a shuttlecock, and shouting quite loudly 'Wer spielt Federball?'.  I always tried to decline politely without making eye contact.

As well as dossing round the English Garden, we went on a coach trip to the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Castle at Neuschwannstein, which was incredible.  If only I had better pictures of it, most of the pictures I took were of Pamela Pirie and Emma Helliwell, although I don't know why I bothered.  I should have got more scenery in, because both of them would rather have seen me shot into space than go out with me.

Here's one with me in.  Can't believe I was ever that thin!

On the last night, I spotted Pamela snogging Darren Zimmermann in a doorway and I knew my chances had finally fizzled out to nothing.  Darren was about 3 years older, and he could dance and cut his own hair.  He knew I liked her, and he felt a bit bad that he swiped her out from under my nose, so he invited me out for breakfast in the English Garden the morning we went back to England, and he brought a picnic, and it was the most gentlemanly way for him to have handled being the better man, and I really liked him for that.

Gratuitous Picture of Pamela's legs - thankfully we can both laugh about it now

It was a fantastic two weeks.  I got to travel round one of the greatest cities in the world, completely independently at 15 years of age.  The weather was beautiful, and there were topless girls everywhere.  I even managed to totally avoid playing badminton with a naked man. 

At the end of the two weeks Fri gave me a lift back to the airport, and we parted on good terms.  I think she forgave me for sparking a man hunt, and if the truth were told, I think she'd quite enjoyed not having to look after me much.

It wasn't the perfect holiday, but it wasn't far off.  

My wedding and other disaster movies

I've been married to Ruth now for over 12 years, which is quite an achievement considering what a disaster the first 12 days were.

We got married on a Sunday, 18th July 1999, during the 10 am Sunday Service at St Francis, and then we were due to go straight down to Somerset for 12 days in a cottage.

We had barely finished clearing up the wrapping paper from our wedding presents when we were diverted from our intended plans by Ruth having to take Becky to A&E for an X-ray on a shoulder that she landed on after flying off the garden swing.

Hot Fuzz woz ere

 Instead of the planned drive south, we then spent our first evening as a married couple watching Star Wars 1, the Phantom Menace at the Showcase.  So that was two things gone wrong already.

We went to Somerset on the Monday instead, and by the Tuesday I was suffering from crippling stomach pains.  I couldn't sleep at night, or go to the toilet properly.

By Day 4 of married life, I was confined to bed and the kids were trying to get Ruth to take them home, and leave me there on my own.

Ruth tried to persuade me to go with them, but I was all for sticking it out.  It might get better, I said.

By Day 8 I'd been seen by an emergency doctor, who diagnosed me as having irritable bowel syndrome, which could have been brought on by a combination of pre-wedding stress and eating about 50 pieces of chicken at the party the night before the wedding.

Days 9 to 11 were a bit of an improvement and were spent in and around Longleat, feeding goats, looking out the car window at lions and tigers and having monkeys rip bits off and wee on our car. 

Around 5 pm on Day 12, probably lulled into a false sense of security by having 3 reasonable days in a row, I drove off a kerb during the leaving of Longleat, and I managed to remove the entire exhaust from the already peed on car.  Instead of being attached to the underside of the car, the exhaust was now parked next to it on the grass.  I sat next to both of them, feeling sorry for myself, while Ruth took the kids off to phone for a recovery vehicle.  This was in the days before mobile phones, so she probably had to knock Lord Longleat up to use his phone, I'm not sure.    

Luckily Ruth's brother lived in Wells then, so we managed to crash on his floor for the 5 days it took to get the car back from the garage.  We did have to call off Michael's quad biking birthday party though, because we couldn't get home for it, something he still reminds me of till this day.  Instead of him riding a quad bike, he spent his 9th birthday hanging around the Fleet Air Arm museum, looking bored.

When we did eventually get home, after 17 days away, we discovered that the thermostat in our fridge had died during our absence, and we had to set about disposing of the fridge full of penicillin which we'd managed to grow while we'd been gone.

A few years ago, we were at the cinema watching Hot Fuzz and partway through the film it dawned on us that it had been filmed in Wells.  No wonder so much of it seemed familiar to us.

Towards the end of the film, the market square is the scene of a set piece battle between the police and the elderly gun-toting Neighbourhood Watch, and you get to see, in graphic detail, the town centre of our former honeymoon destination being shot to pieces.

CSI Wells - getting over our honeymoon

Much as I love Wells, there was something cathartic about seeing it being destroyed in a film.  Seeing chunks of masonry getting shot off the public loos where I'd spent hours trying to move on a particularly painful episode of wind gave me an absurd amount of pleasure, as did seeing the local Somerfield getting smashed up by riot policemen with shopping trolleys, and batons.

 We went back to Wells in 2010 and rode around it on our bikes a bit, and stayed in a nice cottage, and got our photographs taken outside the pub used in the film, and we bought some fizzy pop and chocolate from Somerfield, and that along with watching Hot Fuzz about 20 times since, has helped to ease the pain....

Impersonating Rambo and running round Venice with water pistols

The first time I went to Italy was in February 1986, and I didn't need to hire a mobile home for that one.  There was a coach laid on for us.  It was the school rugby tour of 1986.  We even got matching rugby shirts and jumpers made, something I didn't have the benefit of again until 2010 and our Walney to Saltburn coast to coast ride.  

We were based in Padua and we were supposed to play 3 games in a week.  The middle one was cancelled because of bad weather so we just played the first and the third ones.  When we turned up to play the first one, I thought that should have been cancelled aswell, half of the pitch was frozen solid.  I moaned about this for a while, but Jim Collard just said to me 'If you don't want to play, we'll find someone who will'.  So I shut up.

In the event it wasn't too bad because the pitch thawed out quite a bit during the game, and having thirty warm bodies piled up on bits of it helped with the thaw.

We lost the first game, and to be honest we were crap.  We didn't lose by much, but we didn't play well.  After the game, we got told by Mike Lamb and Jim that we were crap.  And I should have just listened.  But opening my mouth when I shouldn't has been a perennial problem for me.  Richard Kilgarrif told me afterwards it was like watching the end of Rambo 1 (First Blood).  It's okay, I didn't blow up an entire small town, but what I did do was give an emotional and incoherent speech about how we'd done our best blah blah blah.  For the rest of the trip Richard used to do Sylvester Stallone impressions at me, 'I did it for my country' and all that in a slurred voice.

It didn't help to shake off the Stallone comparison that we went en masse to see Rocky IV in the cinema while we were over there.  It had been dubbed into Italian and for some reason they'd chosen a Joe Pasquale soundalike for the part of Rocky.  You didn't really need a translation to follow the story though.  Basically Rocky lost at the beginning and then he went and did some training and lost a bit of weight, and then he won at the end.  Simples!

It was a pretty cool trip, because on our days off when we weren't playing rugby, we got to go on trips.  We went to Venice on a double decker train and we all bought water pistols and drank hot wine (vino callo) to keep warm in St Mark's Square, and bought takeaway pizza.  Venice is the best city I've been to for fighting with water pistols, because there's water everywhere so you can always get a refill.  Also, it's the quietest city I've ever been to, because there aren't any cars.  I'm glad we were there in the winter though, because it can pong a bit in the summer apparently.  We also went to Verona, and all I can remember about that is eating more pizza, and finding a scarf on the floor which I decided to keep.

Padua is the only place I've been to where it was cheaper to order a pint of wine, than a pint of beer.  They had some fizzy red stuff at one of the bars.  I had about 4 pints of that one night.  It gave me a hell of a hangover.  There was an ice cream parlour opposite our hotel and they had 30 flavours of ice cream.  I'd only ever seen Neopolitan so this was amazing.  I had about 40 tubs of the stuff while I was there.

As well as blowing my spending money on ice cream I spent a fortune playing an arcade game called King of Boxer.  You had to beat about 10 boxers in a row and if you did, you had to face Violence Joe in the final, and get your head smashed in.  But I hardly ever got through to fight Violence Joe.  All the other fighters were easy, but there was one called Brown Pants and I just couldn't get past him.  I must have spent about £30 trying.  

We played the third and final game just before coming home, and this time we won 7-4.  It was a low scoring affair, and Fraser Maclennan-Pike kicked the winning penalty.  I expect the rest of the team were very relieved to have won, because it meant I didn't need to do any more incoherent babbling in the style of Rambo.  

It's not every week you get to play rugby on an ice rink, impersonate Rambo, eat 30 flavours of ice cream, get beaten up by a guy called Brown Pants, run round Venice with water pistols and watch Rocky IV with subtitles.  We won't see the like of those days again. 

1976 and all that

I hate those books and programmes on TV about mistakes in movies.  The ones that tell you that Matt Damon had his jacket undone when he set off running across some rooftops in Algiers in the Bourne Ultimatum but that when he landed it was done up.  And that there was the reflection of a camera crew in a window on Pride and Prejudice, or that Russell Crowe was wearing a wristwatch in Gladiator, or that the Morris Minor they used in Heartbeat wasn't made till 1973 but the episode was supposed to be set in 1971.

I know next to nothing about making movies but one thing I do know is this:  It's not easy.  I thought Avatar had a pretty rubbish story and I fell asleep in the middle of it, but I'm in no doubt it was technologically a major achievement and I'm pretty certain I couldn't have knocked it up in 5 minutes in my back garden with some leftover green paint and a couple of tall people.  And when James Cameron did Titanic he built a scale model of the ship and made it on some sort of tipping mechanism so he could tip it up at an angle for some of the filming.  

Recently I've seen the King's Speech and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and these were both set in the past in London and I was amazed at the historical detail, like the period cars and place names on the walls etc.  But I'm sure it won't be long before someone is telling me in a BBC3 clips programme that in the Wembley Stadium bit at the beginning of the King's Speech someone was wearing a bobble hat and they weren't invented until the seventies.  That was when I had one anyway.

I admire the effort that goes into films, because most days I struggle to even dress myself, never mind make a historically accurate blockbuster.  And as well as film-makers, I admire writers of history as well.  The writing I do is easy, because I just write whatever old crap comes into my head, but the process of writing historical books, whether fact or fiction must be a massively painstaking process, and the writing part only happens at the end, after tons and tons of research has been done.  I'm currently reading All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings about the Second World War, and it's a narrative of the whole war pieced together from first hand accounts and diary entries and that sort of thing.  And I think it's incredible the amount of work that must have gone into producing it.  But that's not the kind of writing I want to do, because I just like the writing part and I don't want to have to do boring stuff like checking facts.

When I was a child one of my favourite books was 1066 and all that by Sellar and Yeatman, and it was brilliantly funny.  I always remember that in the introduction it said 'History is not what you thought, it's what you can remember'.  At least I think it did.  I haven't checked.  I loved it because it told history with humour and if they had to bend the accuracy of some historical event to get a few jokes in, then they would.

Whenever I write anything, whether it's about going cycling or about growing up or whatever, it's not a balanced historical account of an event in the past, it's what I can remember, particularly if it seemed funny at the time.  For example, when I wrote about going for breakfast at Tan Hill, I spent a disproportionate amount of the ride report talking about the miserable woman with the urinal cubes.  Because she stuck in my head.  Even though it was a beautiful day and there was lots of beauty to describe if I only knew how to do it, I remember her better than the way the flowers looked or what birds I saw.  I don't have a framework of reference to hang these things on, but I can always remember crazy people. 

I often say that I remember the really hot summer of 1976.  But that's the thing.  I don't remember it.  Apart from it being bloody hot, I only remember one thing about it.  It was our first summer in the council house we got after my dad died, and I can remember sitting out in the parched front garden on the yellow grass in a stripey deck chair.  We lived at number 37.  The 16 year old boy who lived at number 18 had got the 15 year old girl from number 53 pregnant.  Our house was about halfway between their houses.  And the only thing I can really remember from that summer is that the family of the girl liked to chase the boy down our street a lot and shout abuse at him.  And I used to sit in the deck chair and watch.  

And from a whole summer that's it!  That's the only thing I can remember.  But I'm grateful for that memory, because it lets me know that I was there.  And if anybody mentions the hot summer of 1976 I can tell them that I remember it, even though I only remember the sun and the shouting.  1977 is a pretty similar story.  The only thing I can really remember is the Queen's Silver Jubilee, and the street party I went to, and the family next door but one (the ones who cut up their internal doors and put them on the fire) who arrived at a party in the height of summer in trenchcoats.  And it soon became clear why when they started shoving sandwiches and trifle into their pockets for later.  They would eat one sandwich and the coat would get another 5.  And I never saw anything like it again until the mad cake woman at the Waterstone's store opening in 1999 who swept an armful of cake into her bag.   But that's another story.....

 People often tell me I've got a good memory, because I can remember things they've forgotten.  Well, my way of remembering an event is to find someone who is doing something nuts and hang the memory of the event onto them.  It may not be historically accurate but it works for me..

Another piggy back ride on the enthusiasm of others

There's a bit in the film Awakenings where an otherwise comatose lady reaches out her hand to catch a tennis ball being thrown to her by Robin Williams.  When he describes this phenomenon to the people around him, Robin (or Dr Oliver Sacks as it was in real life) explained it by saying that she was 'borrowing the will of the ball'.

Well, a lot of the time, I myself am in an apathetic stupor and I would miss things, if it wasn't for the fact that I get swept up in the enthusiasm of others.  This is my own version of borrowing the will of the ball.  Two of the main protagonists in this are Ruth and Graeme.  They've been responsible for a lot of the cycling I've done, just by infecting me with their enthusiasm, and last night they were at it again, but this time taking me in a totally different direction.

Come and see a documentary about vinyl records they said.  It will be great.  Yeah right, I thought.  I can do without that I thought, going out in the bloody cold after work.  Anyway, egged on by the prospect of pizza and coffee beforehand, they got me there.  And I'm so glad they did.

The film was called Sound it Out.  And it's about Sound it Out.  An old-fashioned record shop in Stockton, run by a man called Tom.  Although I love music, I've never really been a big fan of vinyl and it would certainly never occur to me to collect vinyl records.  In our family it was my brother who got the vinyl bug.  Up until a few years ago he had hundreds, if not thousands of vinyl records (he's got a family now, so he's sold most of them, but he does buy and sell records online as he's still pretty knowledgeable about it).

But for me, the film wasn't about the vinyl.  It was about people.  And it challenged my narrow view of the world.  My initial impression of a lot of the people featured in the film were that they were a bit weird, and not at all like me.  They were proud to make a statement about their love of music through the way they look and behave, whereas I don't do that, and I never did.  I never had posters of bands on the walls, and I never dressed like my favourite pop stars. 

As we got to know each of the people in the film, my first impressions fell away and they became fully rounded characters who all had a story to tell, and who were all ultimately likeable.  

And this impression was in no small part created by Tom himself, who treats everyone the same, whoever they are.  During the film, he had some fairly strange requests put to him by some odd looking people, but he spoke kindly to everyone and listened to what they had to say.  And knowing he was being filmed, it would have been easy for him to make some smart arse comment to camera after they'd gone out, but he didn't.  He had time for everyone  And I really liked that about him.

I've recently gone back to working in a shop myself, and I always try to speak kindly to everyone and to listen to them, however odd they might seem.  In this regard, Tom is an ideal role model, as is David, who works in there with him, and does exactly the same.  

I'm always saying that things were better in the olden days, but I don't really believe that.  What I really mean is that there are some aspects of how things used to be that I remember fondly and that I miss, and one of those things is good old-fashioned customer service.  Knowing your customers and treating them as valued individuals.  A lot of modern organisations try to train this into you.  Well, if they really want to know how it's done, they should go see Tom.  Or go see the film.  Or both.