A couple of events that, if they don't totally clear my mood of pessimism, do at least cheer me up a tad.
As you know my favourite axiom is that pop will eat itself and I have applied this tediously and often to Twenty20 cricket - you know what I mean, that 'speeded-up' version of beautiful old cricket wherein sides now take two hours to bowl twenty overs. What a crock. Well, anyway what should come riding over the horizon on a white charger other than the revenging knight of a fabulous test match. England conceded more than five hundred and fifty runs in the first innings yet somehow conspired still to defeat New Zealand on the back of a pyrotechnic innings from Johnny Bairstow. Quite brilliant. And, yes, I suppose I do have to concede that some of Bairstow's audacity may have been honed in limited overs cricket. That however is not the point.
Not quite so stratospheric but nonetheless welcome was the climax to the Canadian Open golf on Sunday. That is to say a championship played over seventy-two holes. Better still if you want assurance that golf's soul may just be rescuable, track down millionaire John Rahm's press conference before this week's U.S. Open. Modest, grateful and wise. Thankyou.
But let's get away from my sporting hobby-horse. I've watched another film. An odd one this one. Radioactive is a worthy biopic about Marie Curie, played enthrallingly by Rosamund Pike. It deploys with limited success some flashing backwards and forwards from Curie's mature years. It take seriously the boons and the hideous horrors of the taming of radioactivity. It succeeds in making you think but, somehow despite Pike's excellence and the taut direction, it doesn't seem to me ever to be as involving as it wants to be. 69/100.
No comments:
Post a Comment