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Sunday 18 March 2018

A Unhappy Warnock

We have a dusting of snow overnight and Derby’s televised match with Cardiff, scheduled for 12 noon, is bizarrely cancelled. Although I’m well surprised that Sky that didn’t make them play it anyway. With both teams already there and the pitch fine due to undersoil heating, who needs supporters?

Naturally Cardiff’s manager Neil Warnock isn’t happy but then he never is. Warnock is convinced the real reason the game was cancelled was because of Derby’s injury crisis. He’s probably right as well. The weather is grim but hardly dangerous or life threatening. In fact everyone shrugs off the cancellation and goes shopping instead because there’s not a jot of snow on the main roads. The club themselves encourage everyone to come spend money in the club shop or their restaurant instead, which are all at the stadium, work that one out...

The really annoying thing is if Sky hadn’t moved the game to Sunday in the first place it would have been played already!

Something else I don’t get to do today is my Velodrome session which is also cancelled. No, not because of the weather although the Velodrome is right next door to the football stadium, John Bishop is doing a gig there and he doesn’t cancel.

Instead my brother and his family pop round to visit the Lad and then in the evening, L and I go see a film.

From the novella by Jonathan Ames, comes You Were Never Really Here. A nice family film...

Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is a war veteran, traumatised  by his past, addicted to pain killers and a hired killer who specialises in retrieving trafficked girls. He has a reputation for brutality but also for getting results, with his hammer. An implement of which he has not so found childhood memories.


He spends his free time between jobs caring for his elderly mother (Judith Roberts) and having flashbacks to his past, as a Gulf War soldier and as the victim of an abusive father.

He is offered a large wad of cash to rescue Nina (Ekaterina Samsonov), the 13-year-old daughter of a New York senator called Albert Votto (Alex Manette), who is missing from home. He locates Nina in an ‘upmarket’ brothel from where he rescues her, killing several security guards and customers on the way. 


Then before he can get Nina back to Votto, he sees on the news that Votto has apparently killed himself. Corrupt police officers then storm his motel room and take Nina off him. They come for him too but he escapes.


He then finds that both his boss and his handler have been murdered in an attempt to track him down. Once they know where he lives they head there, kill his mother and then lie in wait for him. Joe outsmarts them, kills one of them and finds out from the other than the man behind all this is Governor Williams (Alessandro Nivola) who wants his favourite sex slave back and has the power to do it.

Joe gives his mother a water burial and also attempts to drown himself, but a vision of Nina convinces him to save the girl fromWilliams instead.


This is a film where you really need to concentrate, or revise beforehand, as the director leaves you to find your own way but it’s a really excellent film with a great performance from Joaquin Phoenix as the man who is never really there. Although some folk might need a blindfold as it’s a violent film but ‘tastefully’ done with most of the bloodshed off-camera.

Recommended served with a few beers.
(Sunday 18th March)

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