.
DOODLE WITHDRAWN AT FELLOW BLOGGER'S REQUEST
.
Now, I used to collect football cards as a kid, so I understand the collector’s fever gripping my son’s brain. The pleasure of having a Bryan Robson in Manchester United away kit must be akin to finding a ‘legendary’ Pokémon card like Groudon in one of those foil packets. I also think, of all the card collecting phenomenon, Pokémon is the most harmless and has the most charm.
But, fuck me, £2.49 for 6 bits of printed cardboard? Surely someone is taking the piss here?
Maybe you know you’re losing your inner child when you consider these cards to be a complete rip-off. However, I do think this is ruthless exploitation of that autistic bit of all male kids’ brains that addicts them to collecting.
Cousin Ed just passed on his Pokémon collection to Frankie. At nine years old, Ed has now outgrown them. He had collected over 600 cards. That’s £240 worth of bits of cardboard. Christ, he could have bought a used Nissan Bluebird down Hackney with that! And gone banger-racing. Admittedly that’s probably illegal, but you get my point. It’s the futile cry of all parents as they see their kids piss money up the wall. And that, whatever shite is being pushed at kids, will never change.
Another incident is more sobering in retrospect (certainly not at the time). Adam and I had both popped a Strawberry and went to a pub that I forget the name of (although I do remember that it was located in the shadow of a large flyover). Our game that night was ‘don’t tell anyone we’re on acid! Let’s see if they guess! What a giggle!’
Some bloke in Smiths - the joys of Google image search
Working in Farringdon is a curse for a boy who likes his food, as I do. There are just so many good eateries around here. I’ve gained a stone in weight since my previous agency moved here (my new workplace is just around the corner from my last).
The most damaging factor has been having Smiths of Smithfield around the corner. Curse that place and its bloody pies! (Not literally dripping in blood, although that may well be the next step for meat-loving foodies.)
Smiths’ pies are excellent – lovely pastry and substantial filling with delightful gravy. They’re also most sought after. The pies are generally sold out by 12.30pm, so you have to get there early. Sadly, most of the time we don’t. This has led to pie-rage incidents, generally involving my former art director Kev. The worst instance was when there were two pies left and we ordered just in time and then the waitress forgot our order and we had to WATCH SOMEONE ELSE EAT OUR PIES! You can imagine the fury we both felt. If Kev had been armed, he’d have gone on a killing frenzy, summarily executing the waitress and riddling the upstarts eating OUR pies with bullets. Luckily, he wasn’t armed and just complained so that we got free drinks. Hurrah!
Fritz and I were left almost open-mouthed with the shock of how truly dreadful this cinematic experience was. I think the most generous thing either of us could say was that there was a good movie hidden in there somewhere, but it was wearing extremely good camouflage.
The weird thing was that it was so bad with the amount of elements that did come straight from the cartoon strip, including Valerie’s letter almost verbatim. The best bits were when the film did stick to the cartoon strip’s script.
But these bits were in too short a supply. Evey is no longer a woman driven by hunger to work as a prostitute. She's on her way to a date with a lovely cuddly later-revealed-to-be-gay man (played by Stephen Fry). The ideology of anarchy espoused by V in the graphic novel is removed, as are numerous other elements.
I suppose the idea of a terrorist in a wig and Guy Fawkes mask always ran the risk of being preposterous on celluloid. But it wasn’t the premise that had people in the cinema giggling. It was the often clunky dialogue and the plot holes. Not to mention the heavy-handed cross-cutting.
An example of this was the point where Evey is ‘reborn’ in the rain. This is cross-cut with V emerging from his cell at Larkhill amid flames – roaring like a muscle-bound Frankenstein’s monster. The edit was obviously necessary in case we missed the point.
Another irritation was product placement. The JVC plasma screens everywhere were a bit at odds with the British white supremacist regime. Mind you, I suppose Hitler allied himself with the Japanese, so why not this future fascist government?
Having loved the comic, I suppose I am open to the charge of comparing it with the film unfairly. But I think, if anything, I’d have enjoyed it less if I didn’t have the bits of Moore’s writing to hang onto. It’s just a crock of shit. Or, as V may say, a vertiginous vat of venal vapidity.
