Master and Commander, Question Time and Euro 2008

PARSLEY'S COMMLOCK
Film Review: Master and Commander: The Far Side Of The World
Caught up with this on a satellite re-run. It stars Russell Crowe as Captain 'Lucky' Jack Aubrey. I remembered it getting rave reviews so I was interested to see whether it had deserved them. It was certainly 'good value' at 2 hours, and full of exciting swash-buckling stuff.

An English ship is ordered to stop French ships moving into new seas, so Aubrey duly tries to oblige only to be nearly wiped out by a 'new' kind of boat. There follows a long sequence of attempts to even up the score against all odds.

The film's a mixture of gruesome reality (amputation, hand-to-hand combat) and bizarre romanticism (Aubrey and his doctor best mate play note perfect classical music). However, it's engagingly done.

It's bizarre that old black and white films have taken on 'archive' qualities in depicting history, whether John Mills is climbing arctic mountains or leading escapes from Colditz. It leaves me feeling 'self-conscious' about modern attempts to show history on the big screen. I would say this was a reasonably worthy effort.

It also made me think about how human life throws up new vistas of skills and talents and then they drop away with the passage of time. Around 150 men were manning the ship, covering everything from weapons and repairs to food, navigation, and more. But when ships stop being made out of wood and have engines in them the master seaman becomes an anachronism. Similarly people that are used to CDs are now finding it's their turn to be regarded as being as strange as the vinyl freaks by the generation that are growing up with iPods and downloading.

I also thought about Captain Picard of 'Star Trek:The Next Generation'. He got his crew on the holodeck for a virtual adventure of real seafaring. There were lots of Star Trek parallels in this film. I could map the physician to Mr Spock as he was more interested in discovering new species of animal than he was with destroying ships.

Overall review: thumbs pointing gently up. A convincing and seductive world of ships and seamen, with enough stylised excitement to keep action film fans happy. Not too much cerebral stuff to worry about.

TV Review : Question Time, BBC1 26/06/08
Full marks for barefaced cheek to Yvette Cooper, Treasury Minister and wife of Ed Balls. She is one of the people accused of suspicious behaviour over MPs' allowances. When the question arose on this programme she managed to be coquette-ish and not blush and implied it was nothing to do with her.

You see it turns out that when MPs make a small fortune out of expenses and allowances, it's not because they are bad people. Rather it's these rules that they are following, quite slavishly it seems, even when these rules are on another planet in terms of behaviour you might expect from any public servant.

A member of the audience asked if she and her husband had both claimed for a London residence when they obviously shared theirs. She said that the rules said that they should, but they had only claimed half each. She implied they'd broken the rules by not taking as much as they were supposed to! How she could keep a straight face and how someone didn't take her to task over it I don't know.

If these so-called rules allow for a complete abuse of their position then the rules are wrong and it is outrageous for Yvette Cooper to hide behind them as if she has nothing to do with it.

The show was also noticeable for the presence of transvestite Grayson Perry. Resplendent in full female makeup and attire, and refreshing in outlook, he made some of the more interesting contributions. It's a shame Leigh Bowery isn't around, as I feel he could have confounded expectations about how people are supposed to look on the show the most.

Sports Review : Euro 2008
How refreshing it is for England not to be involved in this competition. Penalty shootouts don't seem remotely as excruciating when England are not involved. We also haven't been required to suspend disbelief and imagine we have a chance to win when we don't.

There has been plenty of enjoyable soap opera, with the plucky Turks, under their Big Daddy Fatih Terim, pulling off an amazing escape against Croatia, only to see their energetic play be unsuccessful against the solid Germans. Meanwhile the Dutch were playing superbly only to be beaten by the Russians under their Dutch coach, who was at pains to explain that he wasn't betraying his nation.

Couldn't help laughing at the ITV coverage where they were plugging their show of highlights of the final, as if interested people weren't going to have watched it live on another channel.

At time of writing the Germans and the Spanish still have to battle out the final, but it's been a good natured and enjoyable sporting affair.

parsley@gardenrecords.com [www.gardenrecords.com]