jeff leopard

Absolutely, that's the bottom line, right there. I've accepted that we lost to a premiership side and looked like we have potential, but need a lot of work still. i'll mentally bury the fact it was 'them' deep deep down, and come to terms with that when i have my breakdown, which could be years away.

ouch. it was there for the taking, we got dicked, we were the fall-guys and it smarts. it was an exciting game though, we must have looked pretty good in the eyes of the public. we showed some skill, huffed and puffed but couldn't quite manage it. I'm not gutted though as Saints will have the laugh last this season, after what could be an exciting and 'glorious' run in. and next season pompey will have a whole new team and we'll be a bit better (as long as we remain one of the most "financially stable" clubs in the country). and if we'd played chelsea it could have ended very badly for us, if they had been a decent prem team, they could have kept on scoring the minute perry came off, finish with a rugby scoreline. so that's something to be thankful for. but phuk em, its going to end badly for them, one way or another, we will laugh last

in which case, we musn't give them a massive boost by rolling over and dying. if you offered me 0-1 now, i'd bite your hand off (metaphorically).

-ing on very thin ice.

Cos if they d1ck on us (which I think they will) and then go out of business, we still go through. What a hilariously hollow and impotent act that would be.

After saving up all last season, I got a solid coach at the start of this season and was underwhelmed for the first half a dozen games or so, but the team are now starting to look pretty decent. For my next coach, I’m taking a different route, I’m going to spend 3 or 400,000 on a 30 year old with good leadership and experience, have them play as captain for a couple of seasons and then promote them up to coach. It should work out much much cheaper in the long run.

SNIP!

They were giving a running commentary on this on Solent, slating the stewards for just standing there and watching.

I’ll do a screen grab of the running order and post it and a spotify link on here later tonight (as I no longer that the power to pm). Its huge, btw.

Star Trek Eye-candy which promises much but ultimately left me empty and slightly nauseous. Young JT is too brash and flippant to be likable, and its full of very expensive cgi which looks quite nice, but it’s never remotely believable. There’s a great line of dialogue early on when young Kirk is told, ‘Your father was the captain of a starship for 12 minutes and he saved 8,000 lives including yours, I dare you to do better’. But that was the only moment that got me vaguely excited. It was a pleasure to see Nimoy in action, but I would rather hear him singing this. 5/10 Taken A poor (and racist) man’s Bourne, and a slightly less annoying and paedophilic version of Man on Fire. The message seems to be aimed squarely at American parents, ‘if you let your kids leave the country, don’t be surprised when they get kidnapped by filthy Eastern European immigrants and sold on to even filthier and thoroughly evil Arabs’. Liam Nielson is great though as the awkward and clingy father who gets to kill his way across Paris in order to rescue his daughter who is following U2 on tour (yes, I know she deserves to die), and for the first hour or so I was willing to suspend my disbelief and its all good fun. But as it goes on it all becomes very predictable and by the end I was passed caring. USA! USA! USA! DON'T MAKE ME COME OVER THERE AND KICK YOUR ASS! 6/10

It makes The Hurt Locker look very ordinary, and laughably clichéd.

Still chasing two titles this season. The younglings dropped their first points on Thursday, but considering they were 3-0 down after half an hour, getting a 4-4 draw away to last season’s champions was a great result. We’re top of their league by a single point and a healthy goal difference. The big news with my seniors is that our nearest rivals have recently changed owners and are now utter rubbish. Owners are coming and going on a regular basis, leaving us as the strongest team on paper by some distance. We played the one side who looked pretty decent on Sunday and spanked them 8-1, so the league title should be ours for the taking. We’ve also got a very good chance to finish the season with a 100% record, although I think we would benefit from having one more season in league 6. But if we’ve gotta go up, then we’ll give it our best shot, but probably come straight back down again. But still , it’s all very exciting.

If you’ve not seen it already, I strongly recommend ‘Downfall’, all about the last couple of weeks of the war, set in ‘the’ bunker. It also tells the story of the battle of Berlin which hadn’t been told before in a film. The Berliners really got shafted from all sides, and I guess for years most people’s reaction would have been ‘I’m glad they did’.

To be fair, the last episode of Edge of Darkness did decend into a faintly redicolous low buget bond film, but up to that point it had been excellent. The best British series I've seen is I Claudius from 1976. Sex, violence, insanity, baby-eating, more sex, blood, porn, power, blood, blood. And more sex. John Hurt as Caligula is just priceless.

Interesting post. How about a mini-series on the Suez crisis, its largely been brushed under the carpet, but it was the moment that the British and the French realised they were no longer super-powers, which has had a massive effect on both national identities. It also would have volumes to say on Iraq and Afghanistan. And think of the great War Cabinet scenes with the PM off his face on speed, ‘ere mate, where you from and what you on?’ The key thing would be to focus on the human drama and not let it get swamped by iffy, cheap cgi. We don't have a Spielberg or massive film/tv industry to fund such a project.

I’m watching the last few episodes of the final season of Deadwood. Brilliant stuff, almost Shakespearian in feel, but with regular nudity and a record-breaking use of the C word. Such a shame it got cancelled as it improved no end after a slightly underwhelming first season. Once its finished, my life will go back to being completely pointless.

Time of the Wolf (2002) The truly shocking thing about The Road was that, unlike other post-apocalyptic films, humans weren’t turned into monsters by powerful viruses created in labs, or radiation from passing meteorites, or nuclear war. Instead, the monster was always inside the man and all it took was hunger and fear to bring it back to the surface. This is all present in Time of the Wolf, made by Michael Haneke (Funny Games/Hidden/The White Ribbon) at the start of the last decade. Whilst The Road was set ten years on from the end of society, where everything had been stripped to the bone and buried in dust and ash, Time of the Wolf is set in the immediate aftermath of an unspecified catastrophe. What makes it so unsettling is that everything appears to be normal, but just beneath the surface everything is already changed, the notion of society has dropped away and within a matter of days civilisation has been replaced by mob rule, blood sacrifice and crazy religious beliefs. Set in rural France, a wealthy middle-class family flee to their summer house only to find it occupied by strangers pointing a rifle at them. After a typically Haneke-ish act of sudden, off-screen violence, the surviving family members are left roaming the countryside, trying to stay alive. As in The Road, the protagonists bet everything on the vaguest and flimsiest of plans, they wait in a railway station with other refugees, in the hope that a train will come and they can somehow bribe their way onboard. There is nothing to suggest that anywhere has been untouched by the crisis, or that the situation is going to do anything other than get increasingly worse. The people waiting form a microcosm of society, and this being a French film, the group soon splits along racial and national divisions. Like Lord of the Flies with adults, Night of the Living Dead without the zombies, its ultimately a thriller without too many thrills, but a fascinating art-house companion piece to The Road, nevertheless. 7/10

What an idiot! He should have stabbed her in the throat.

In Rainbows 2 is worth a listen too, its about 30 minutes worth of stuff that didn’t make it onto the first album, and whilst some of the tracks sound a bit b-sidey, it has some absolute corkers - 4 Minute Warning being one of their best ever tracks IMO.

In Rainbows - this is that strange and wonderful musical beast, the album that gets better with each listen. For a while people who’s opinion I rate have been whispering that this is Radiohead’s best album, and I’m starting to concur.

Mmmm, i wanna see this. I currently trying to write about French revenge cinema, which is all about exposing the very precarious fault-lines in French society, and how phuqed up the country is. And it sounds like the prophet is set on the front line of Frances cultural crisis. Remember kids, if in doubt, persecute an Algerian.

denied! oh well, i'll check it out at home. The Road In the opening voice-over of The Road, the father states, with a world-weary matter-of-factness, “Each day is greyer than the day before and growing colder, as the world slowly dies”. The line hits like a sledge-hammer and sets the scene perfectly for a very impressive version of Cormac McCarthy’s incredible book. The film’s had a bit of a kicking from lots critics who compared it unfavourably to the book. And whilst it softens certain aspects (the whole culture of baby-eating is removed, which is a shame as it’s a great metaphor for the ‘end of humanity’) it is probably the bravest and bleakest Hollywood film I’ve ever seen. The scene where the father teaches his son the best way to kill himself if he’s about to get caught by bad guys is shocking, again, in the matter-of-fact way it’s played. It’s only in the last 20 minutes or so when you feel like the filmmakers are turning the emotional screws on you, I must admit my eyes did get a bit sweaty, but like a real man, a did all my sobbing deep inside. To its credit it doesn’t attempt to explain why society collapsed, or ram the environment message down the audiences throats. But it’s an all too believable warning from the future. And whilst doesn’t quite maintain the constant level of dramatic tension that makes the book so compulsive, it does a better job than I dared hope. And the scene where the boy, and his new best friend, ‘the puppy of hope’ travel back in time to convince all the world’s leaders to start being nice to the planet and make everything better works surprisingly well. 8/10

I love The Devil’s Backbone. A couple of excellent Spanish horror films if you haven’t already – The Orphanage and [Rec] – and if you fancy something much darker where all the monsters are human and there are no heroes whatsoever – Funny Games and Irreversible. I’m intrigued, what’s it called? I watched , early 80s rape-revenge film made by Abel Ferrara who went on to make King of New York and Bad Lieutenant. Despite the tiny budget, the film looks great, it wastes no time in getting the rape out the way (a mute girl gets raped twice in the same day – doh!), and adds lashings of black humour and bright red blood to the victim’s subsequent sexed-up killing spree through New York. Great exploitation fun, although not especially pc. 7/10 Nasty…dirty…sexy!

:D:D:D:D a hilarious swing and a miss Actually, I’ve been called many things but an Echo journalist really takes the biscuit. In the long-run, and in my opinon, the skates winning a cup game against a quality top flight side would feel pretty hollow, when what they really need (apart from cash) is league points. Like it or not, premiership survival is still easily within their reach, and as long as they stay up its unlikely they’ll be allowed to go out of business. I agree that, with the squad they currently have, a win against Saints wouldn’t mean a great deal to the players. But whether they manage to avoid relegation depends on whether they can find the will to keep on giving a club that’s treated them so badly the 110% needed from here on in. When I talk about full house I’m not referring to money, but to the kind of home support that small ramshackle grounds can give, when filled to the rafters. At this moment of do or die for poopey, a win against Saints would be a huge shot in the arm for the fans. And much as we love to hate them, their fans have it in them to get their team to safety. At the moment they’re angry and probably spend way too much time fighting amongst themselves (remember how that felt?). A win against us would unite them like nothing else on earth. That's my point, and that's why this draw isn't great news for the club.