Running Embargo

Although L still proclaims that her back is much better, thankfully she doesn’t intend to test it out at Parkrun today. She’s put herself on a running embargo for the whole of October, which is nice and sensible.

In the afternoon Derby make incredibly hard work of beating a Sheffield Wednesday team who gift Derby a penalty and a one man advantage as early as the 5^th minute but they crawl home to a 2-0 win eventually.

In the evening Daughter joins us at Broadway to see a film. 

Jo Nesbø’s book ‘The Snowman’ made for a weirdly complicated read, so how will it transfer to the big screen? Unless they’re simplified it probably badly, if they’ve made it even more complicated then very badly.

Harry Hole (Michael Fassbender) is the man chasing the Snowman, a serial killer who has the time to make an actual snowman at the scene of all his crimes. As a detective, Hole is a loose-cannon and an alcoholic who probably wouldn’t have had a hope of detecting anything had the killer not chosen to send clues personally addressed to him.

The Snowman has issues from childhood when his mother drove intentionally into a frozen lake and drowned while he escaped. Hole has issues too, his drunken behaviour has broken up his relationship with Rakel (Charlotte Gainsbourg) but they remain 'friends' largely because Harry gets on so well with her teenage son Oleg (Michael Yates) not that effective childcare seems to be a particular forte of his either.

Hole’s newbie detective partner Katrine (Rebecca Ferguson) has issues too (of course) centring around her father, another unconventional boozed up cop (Val Kilmer), who we see in flashbacks.

Her big moment is springing a honey trap for publishing mogul editor Arve Støp (JK Simmons). A man who has a disturbing habit of photographing women he’s only just met. Yet while the film contains the contractual obligation of a full frontal Michael Fassbender topless scene, the female topless scene photographed by Støp seems to have been cut during the editing. Which is disgracefully unPC. 

Needless to say the crime eventually gets solved, only after considerably bloodshed and with no great thanks to a fascinating piece of police kit known as the EviSync, which seems to do everything for the police bar actually solve the case. The only problem is it's about as portable as a tumble drier.

It’s a watchable thriller, if a largely nonsensical one where it’s difficult to keep track of who’s chasing who and why. To be fair to Fassbender, he makes a good drunk but the real stars of the film are the wintery landscapes of Oslo and Bergen.

There is more crime later when we charged £5.90 in the Lord Roberts for a bottle Leffe Blonde. These things usually sell for around £3. We are so disgusted we move on to the Peacock and the OP.

(Saturday 21^st October)

You Only Have To Forgive Once

I have a dog show today over at Newark as the winter season arrives and the events move indoors.

On the first course I forgot the course and we get eliminated after starting really well. Time to sack the handler. The verdict from home - poor little lamb, meaning the dog I assume. No sympathy for the handler.

On the second course MD demolishes the course by having loads of jumps down. Time to sack the dog.

On the third course I again forgot the course. Time to sack... hang on, the handler somehow retrieves the situation and manages a scrappy clear round which ends up to be good enough for 3^rd place overall.

The wait for our fourth course seems to go on and on... we are not going to make the early film showing we had planned. Having done our weekend race on Friday and therefore not having one on Sunday the plan is to get a rare Saturday night out. We can make the  8pm instead as MD and I soon crash out of our final run.

At Broadway they have Nottingham Brewery’s excellent Centurion ND on, which is what we take in to get us through the adverts. I didn’t realise I hadn’t had this one since I started trailing, so it’s number 104 on the list.

 
Tom Sherbourne (Michael Fassbender) is war veteran returning from WWI to Australia. Haunted by the experience, Tom is intent on withdrawing from the human race completely and he accepts a job as the lighthouse keeper on some desolate island somewhere off the coast of Australia called Janus Rock. 

Before he departs he is given a send-off on the mainland where he meets Isabel (Alicia Vikander), who sees something she quite likes under his ridiculous WWI moustache. Well I guess the post-war man market was probably a bit depleted, so she quickly expresses a desire to get withdrawn and desolate with him on Janus. The only problem is the lighthouse has a wives only policy, so they quickly get married.

It’s an odd match with Vikander very much the toy girl here. In real life she is 28, eleven years Fassbender’s junior, but here she looks about 18 whereas he looks every day of his real age. Which is somewhat sinister for starters. 

Still they start married life on the island and we get treated to scenes of idyllic sex as the waves lap furiously up against the lighthouse. My partner says filmmakers are incapable of making a film with Fassbender without putting a sex scene in for him but in his defence it was Alicia Vikander. What's the guy supported to do? Well, he could at least look like he's enjoying it.

Fassbender’s facial expression doesn’t change much from sad/gloomy during the whole film even when he is getting down to it with Vikander. She at least gives pleasure a go and, after this film, they became a ‘real life’ couple. So she obviously wasn’t faking.

Isabel gets pregnant but has a miscarriage. Then she gets pregnant again but has another miscarriage and it is at almost this exact moment that a rowing boat is seen bobbing up and down close to the lighthouse.

The boat contains a man who is dead and a baby who is not. It is later revealed that the man was German, as if this explains why he would leave his wife, put his baby into a rowing boat and head out on to the ocean before eventually ending up at a lighthouse a hundred or so miles from anywhere. There is no attempt to explain how the husband died while the baby survived this journey.

Isabel’s urge to have children is so great that rather than ask her husband to move back to the mainland where she could get some decent antenatal care, she persuades him not to report the incident, to bury the dead man and to steal the baby to raise as their own. Erm, somewhere of course there is likely to be a grieving mother? No matter, the infant Lucy is raised by them.

 

Four years later, Tom comes across a memorial for a missing man and baby which leads him to find out who the real mother is, namely Hannah Roennfeldt (Rachel Weisz). It really makes you wonder why nothing was in the local paper at the time or perhaps a few ‘missing’ posters? Why did no one say to the lighthouse keeper ‘seen any random rowing boats Tom?’ but implausible plot twists are de rigueur here. Tom promptly goes off to send a note to Hannah to let her know her baby is safe. Pillock.

Then the police gets involved and it all quickly boils down to a murder\kidnapping trial and a nasty custody battle over poor Lucy aka Grace who doesn’t know which mummy to turn to. Well she does and it’s not a popular choice.

There’s still time for more implausible plot twists as Isabel inexplicably puts her husband in jail for the alleged murder of the man in the boat and the film ends up tying itself in such a knot with its own twists and turns that the ending makes even less sense than what has gone before it. 

You’ve probably guessed by now that I didn’t enjoy it that much.

The tagline of this film is ‘you only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day’. I have forgiven my partner for taking me to see this.

Afterwards it is ddisappointing to find that Flipside no longer run the Golden Fleece and the Fleece disappoints on the beer front. I end up ordering a Stout from the Marston's offshoot known as Revisionist not realising it was a ‘craft’ beer e.g. keg. I’m not sure whether to count this in my beer total but L says I should as I count bottles.

The Lincolnshire Poacher is better and has Titanic Cappuccino, so oddly it turns out to be good night for the trail with three beers added.

 
(Saturday 12^th November)

Going Gentle

Doggo (and I) are warned about the state of his elderly legs before setting foot on the park this morning. There is no mention of my elderly legs. I go gentle with him, he goes gentle with me. MD does his own thing.

In the evening, bored with the food at Broadway we decide to skip it and go for a curry later. We still take in a film though and succumb to the hype of Twelve Years As A Slave.

It’s 1841 and Solomon Northop (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is a free black man living with his family in Saratoga, New York. He is portrayed as the model of upmarket respectability, so it’s quite baffling that he suddenly accepts an offer to do a short our as fiddler with two white men he’s just met, without even seeming to tell his wife where he's going.

This takes him to Washington, where one night whilst socialising with his new colleagues, he is suddenly taken ill and wakes up in chains.

He has been sold to slave traders, renamed as Platt and is on his way to Louisiana where he will spend the next twelve years working for different owners. All of this happens pretty much within the first fifteen minutes which is a shame. The director seems over keen to get us to the beatings and whippings that are to come, of which there are many.

Once in Louisiana you only need to know one thing. That all black slaves are good folk and all the white owners are evil people, end of story. This goes for the woman as well, Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender) is a nasty chap but his missus (Sarah Paulson) is arguably worse.

Solomon’s first owner Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch) does show compassion for a while but even this doesn’t last. 

Of course there has to be one token good white guy and Brad Pitt (naturally) saves the day by getting word back to Solomon's family and subsequently in 1853, Solomon is rescued. The mechanics of this are also glossed over.

The long bit in the middle, the slavery bit, goes on forever and is nothing we haven’t seen before. We all know that slavery was a horrible dark chapter in American history but all this has been done to death before. The uniqueness of Solomon's situation, his kidnapping and later release are mostly absent here.

At least he got out and got to write a book about his ‘experience’, most of the rest of the slaves were in it for keeps. Perhaps this is why I don’t feel anything much for him throughout the film.

I was hoping for more from the film. 

 
Afterwards we have one in the Lincolnshire Poacher before succumbing to the Old Peculiar at the Peacock. We end up in the Noor. 

(Saturday 1^st February)