Favourite Weekend

We parkrun at Forest Rec this morning and reunite L with her winnings from Thursday. I run with the Lad and we are a bit slower because after doing a long run yesterday my legs don’t wish to career along at his preferred pace.

It’s the FA Cup 3rd Round this weekend and I am one of the fast reducing number of people who still see this as their favourite weekend of the football season. 17,000 turn up to see Derby host Premier League Southampton, around 10,000 less than turned up for the league game with Bristol City the other week. What are these people on? It’s a classic cup tie and Derby come from two down to draw two all. Can’t wait for the replay which is sure to be on TV.

In the evening we make a visit to Broadway.

The Favourite is about Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) who rules Britain from 1702 to 1714. The film portrays her as bit of a sad person plagued by ill health, a recluse and a part-time lesbian. She’s possibly sad because of her 17 failed pregnancies for which she has to show only 17 rabbits representing each one that ended in either miscarriage, stillbirth or a very short life. This I suppose might be enough to make you seek solace in your own sex. 

Or possibly sad because of the political turmoil she has to precede over, not that she takes much interest in ruling the country and leaves most of the bickering\blackmailing\murdering etc to her Prime Minister Sidney Godolphin (James Smith) and the opposition leader Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult).

She does opt to raise taxes to pay for the war with France on the advice of her ‘lady in waiting’ Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), Duchess of Marlborough, the wife of the general who commands the army. Mostly because Sarah is not only in possession of the royal ear but also the royal bed.

However Sarah’s sexual obligations to Anne are curtailed when Sarah’s cousin, Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), arrives on the scene as a chambermaid intent on shagging her way up the social ladder. Abigail was once an aristocrat herself until her father allegedly gambled her (and lost) in a poker game. I hasten to add there is no historical record to support this nor for that matter Anne’s rabbits. Although with the whole film supposedly being a riotous comedy sticking to the facts is probably not strictly necessary.

It doesn’t take Abigail long at all to oust Sarah from her role in delivering special services to the Queen while at the same time, conveniently for him, Harley is trying to get Abigail to persuade the Queen to stop financing the war. He strikes a deal with Abigail by offering her marriage, which will restore her status, to his friend Masham (Joe Alwyn) who Harley refers to as ‘c*** struck’ with Abigail.

Abigail though is not so struck with Masham and she consummates their marriage by nonchalantly jerking off her new husband with a look of disgust on her face before wiping her hand on the bedclothes.

Quite where Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark, is throughout all this we’re not sure.

All in all it’s an excellent period romp and all great fun, although obviously not good clean fun. The film boasts three excellent female leads which may stop people pointing out there are not enough female lead roles but probably not. In what is looking to be a very thin year for films it will no doubt pick up an award or three as well as educating everyone with new and varied uses of the ‘c’ word.

Afterwards we revisit the Hockley Rebel which despite being a Tiny Rebel pub still hasn't had proper Stay Puft on. Tonight they do have Sloe Stay Puft which is sadly Stay Puft ruined.

(Saturday 5^th January)

Weekender

We get up at lunchtime then I head to the paper shop with Doggo before meeting L and MD on the park. L then cooks up a full English while I breathe some life into the ailing computer.

I tried to get on the track this evening but apparently there isn’t a session this week as some paracycling is on. Whether this is watchable or not I’m not sure as nothing has been advertised. I have, at least, provisionally booked for next Sunday.

Instead we head over to Derby to Quad where they have Denial showing a week ahead of Broadway.

Denial is based on a 1996 legal case between Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz), an American professor of Holocaust Studies, and the historian David Irving (Timothy Spall). Irving sues Lipstadt over her book ‘Denying the Holocaust’ in which she accuses Irving of being a Holocaust denier and falsifier of history.

The trial is held in Irving’s native England where the burden of proof is with the accused not the accuser. Basically she has to prove that the Holocaust happened. Easy right. Not so.

Lipstadt, a runner and a dog lover (so you have to like her), engages a top legal team to fight her case. This actually means that she doesn't in the end have to prove anything as her legal team totally take over. So she can pretty much get back to her running and dog walking for the next few years as the process rolls along.

In fact solicitor Anthony Julius (Andrew Scott) and barrister Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson) treat her more like a naughty child than the one accused. They quarrel about how to approach the case with Lipstadt wanting to take the stand herself and bring in Holocaust survivors to testify while Julius prefers to simply present the facts. So off they go to try to find proof of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Denial must have been a tricky film to make when you consider the topic, the potential for emotional bias and the fact the majority of the viewers either knew or could accurately guess the outcome of the trial. Which does not leave much scope to build meaningful tension but overall I think overall they did a decent job.

In court, Irving, serving as his own lawyer, has an answer for everything but not usually a very convincing one. So things progress as you would expect and hope until Mr Justice Gray (Alex Jennings) throws the defence team slightly off balance when he asks whether Irving might not actually be lying as they claim, if he genuinely believed the Holocaust didn’t happen. It is the one moment of ‘almost tension’.

Denial is easy to watch, informative but perhaps just lacking that vital dramatic spark that would have made it great.

Afterwards we drop into the pub formerly known as The Chequers in Stapleford which is now called the Old Rock but is normally a no go area due to its seemingly constant karaoke. They are now serving four real ales and are promoting this fact with a Real Ale Weekender. All their ales are local ones apart from their regular beer which is Doom Bar. Nought out of ten for imagination there then. 

I do have a decent pint of Scribblers but it’s nothing I can’t get elsewhere. They are going to find it very hard to compete with the constantly impressive range across the road at the Horse and Jockey but good luck to them. I will pop in again sometime.

(Sunday 5^th February)

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)