Cinemania

The girls are all away again but I've been looking after myself better than I usually do in these circumstances because I'm in the midst of one of my periodic fitness fetishes, this time centring around the vague ambition to do a triathlon. In fact it is only the cycling I am doing at present because the swimming will have to wait on the lessons I have booked for September and a calf strain is still keeping me from running. I'm even eating well and enjoying doing a bit of cooking with my trusty wok. Sharon will be amused if she reads that in view of my noted love of cookery television and incongruous absence from the actual kitchen. Current favoutites are The Hairy Bikers on their good-natured food tour of Great Britain.

But it is not all exercise, good food and good sense. I am indulging myself with wine and film, taken together. Thanks to the combined wonders of the satellite dish and the hard disc drive I watched a bizarre mishmash of films over the weekend.

  The Magnificent Ambersons - a film principally famous for not being Citizen Kane which is a pity because it's rather bloody good. That Orson Welles had rather more talent than was good for him.

Next came a film I would not have chosen to watch - Kill Bill Volume II - but it was on the movie channel just as I finished with the Ambersons. I'm afraid Tarantino leaves me cold as a rule, perhaps it's my age. So I was pleasantly surprised to find this quite wry, albeit gory. Perhaps I should try Pulp Fiction again.

Then when Kill Bill had finished came another unlooked for treat, Team America World Police. I had seen this before but had forgotten how ridiculously funny it is. Completely indiscriminate in its targets, it has no political bias that I can detect merely a complete disregard for all that is blithely assumed to be decent. Most excellent.

There is more. Sunday night started with There Will Be Blood. This has pretensions to being a great film. It is not quite that but it is very good - a sort of Giant with balls. Daniel Day-Lewis compelling. I followed it up with another movie that is definitely not great but very interesting - Oliver Stone's Wall Street. Stone has rather more than a penchant for the melodramatic but this is nowhere as silly a film as, say, JFK or as nasty as Natural Born Killers. Michael Douglas' portrayal of the all too believable Gordon Gekko is an impressive realisation of attitudes which those of us who had a glimpse into money markets in the 80s can confirm were prevalent. A certain type of knob-head still regards Gekko as a hero but the famous 'greed is good' speech is generally lazily misquoted and wilfully misread. Watch it and note Gekko's wholly correct denigration of the board of Teldar Paper. I understand Stone's latest effort is a hagiography of Hugo Chavez. Oh dear.

Monday had a very varied menu:

A Man For All Seasons - proof that stage plays can make great films. All young lawyers should be made to listen More's speeches - perhaps then they would understand the morality of legal practice.

1984 - I found this very disconcerting. The actress playing Julia kept taking her clothes off and since I remember her playing Susan in Swallows and Amazons this just seemed wrong.

The Baader Meinhoff Complex - had seen this previously but enjoyed (is that the right word?) it again. A grimly effective evocation of terrorist angst and 70s grime.

No Country For Old Men - an uncompromising and worthy adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel - given how highly I rate McCarthy this is great praise.