The Endless Night

Hi Tom. Just read your pieces on Breaking Bad and Stephen King. Great stuff. Was wondering if you've read Horns by Joe Hill, Mr. King's son. I highly recommend it and would love to hear your thoughts. Happy Holidays and such.

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 01:19:42 +0000

Hi Benny,

Glad you liked the articles. In all honesty, I wasn’t even aware that Joe was a writer, let alone that he’d had a book published already. I’ll definitely be giving it a read as soon as I find it and will most likely do a piece on it if it’s as good as you suggest. Thanks for the tip and season’s greetings to you also.

Breaking Brilliance: Why You Need To Watch The Greatest Show On Television

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 22:45:00 +0000

AMC’s Breaking Bad is a tale of methamphetamine, murder and morality in New Mexico. What begins as the story of a terminal cancer patient seeking to provide for the family he knows he will soon be leaving behind gradually evolves into an unflinching exploration of inter-family relations, the innate mental struggle between the id and the superego and the subjectivity of happiness. What should, on paper, be a story of increasingly ridiculous circumstance instead becomes more and more unsettlingly realistic as it unfolds. It has drug lords, a fabulously-amoral lawyer and a multi-million dollar drug empire fronting as a fried-chicken franchise. It is poignant, touching, unsettling and capable of holding you in breathless suspense for as long as it likes. But, above all, it’s very, very good.

It began back in 2008 as one of the flagship shows for the fledgling cable company AMC, which had just begun to branch out from being little more than a home for old movie re-runs by developing independent tv shows with some of the brightest young show creators in the business. What began as little more than an interesting and intelligently-explored concept has swiftly become the best show on television; at least according to metacritic.com, which takes review scores from critics and visitors alike to create an average rating. While user ratings have never fallen below 9.3/10, critics were less convinced by the show initially and the first season averaged an uninspiring 74. But once the show was established, it began to find its feet; the second season scoring a much more impressive 85 with the third rising again to a rarely-matched 89. The fourth season received a score of 96; putting it joint second in the website’s all-time list with season six of The Sopranos and behind only season four of The Wire, making it the highest-rated show currently running. And its transformation from unrefined lead to pure crystal was far from accidental.

The show began as the story of how Walter White, a once-promising chemist turned high school teacher, turned to cooking crystal meth as a way of providing financially for his wife, partially-crippled son and infant daughter after the terminal cancer he has contracted puts him in the ground. With the unintentional help of his DEA agent brother-in-law he discovers Jesse Pinkman, a local dealer and cook who so happens to be one of his former students, and forms a partnership that lasts the entire run so far. How the two begin making meth and money and how they rise up the dealer’s ladder is the crux of the story; how they feel about it and cope with the emotional reactions to their increasingly-drastic physical actions is the subtext. And how the subtexts are allowed to smoulder quietly is a large part of the brilliance of the show. Vince Gilligan’s direction and control of the series has always been first-rate; long pregnant silences featuring almost as much as dialogue and carrying no less weight. And the quality and bravery of the discourse is unquestionable; it fluctuates from monosyllabic mutterings to meaty monologues and invariably serves only to heighten the incredible tension and realism of the show. An early example is the speech Walt gives a former love interest, seen via flashback, about the chemical breakdown of the human body and its corresponding elements, and how science can account for everything bar what makes us human; the soul.

But while the potential of the show was undoubted, initially it wasn’t much better than anything else. The pacing was questionable, there were a couple of extraneous and uninteresting subplots - Marie’s kleptomania being the most obvious - that needed streamlining and while the characters may have been breaking bad, they weren’t really breaking new ground. Jesse Pinkman in particular started off as very two-dimensional, a dropout addict too afraid of life to make a success of himself that smacked of every anti-hero you’ve ever seen in The OC, One Tree Hill and suchlike. And the supporting characters weren’t offering much either; Tuco, the crazy drug baron that basically boiled down to a Mexican Scarface without the scar and Badger, the bumbling comic relief drug addict were the main examples. And while the characters did occasionally surprise you with behavioural anomalies, anomalies was all they were.

It was the introduction in season three of a memorable triumvirate of new supporting characters that provided the catalyst for the chemical reaction that turned a bubbling beaker of promise into 96.4% purity perfection. The brilliance of these three lies in just how difficult it is to pigeon-hole them characteristically in any way shape or form; their portrayals are ever-shifting and constantly evolving. Chilean drug lord and 21^st century Colonel Sanders Gustavo Fring is portrayed in turn as a polite, humble and likeable businessman, a ruthless crystal meth despot and a loving surrogate brother; with his true character always lurking just out of sight in the murky depths of his expressionless gaze. His ex-cop bodyguard, enforcer and hitman Mike appears largely to be a silent button man devoid of all emotion; at least until we see him taking a balloon to his young daughter in the park and later putting a worried Jesse at ease with a simple statement of solidarity. And the shameless scumbag lawyer Saul Goodman is a joyously-corrupt link to the Alberquerque underworld, but the lengths he goes to for his clients make him much more than a generic tera-bastard crook.

But not even the most carefully-constructed character carry any depth on screen without the right actors to portray them, and some of the performances in Breaking Bad have been nothing less than monumental. Foremost among these is that of Bryan Cranston, who you probably won’t recognise as the dad from Malcolm in the Middle, who lends a weight and gravitas to the increasingly-complex role of Walter White that few other actors seem capable of. The manner in which he translates his character’s transition from a mild-mannered family man to an utterly ruthless antihero is regularly breath-taking. Aaron Paul has also superbly attributed a growing weariness and apathy to former meth-addict, cook and dealer Jesse Pinkman. But it is Giancarlo Esposito who has stolen much of the most recent season as the aforementioned Gus Fring. His controlled and understated performance at times lulls you into forgetting why Walt and Jesse have spent the last season and a half fearing for their lives at his hands; the flashback sequences of recent episodes revealing a level of humanity viewers could never expect from such an implacable antagonist, yet with nothing more than an almost-imperceptible widening of the eyes you realise that the façade is over and business is about to pick up. To suggest he should win an award for the astonishing majesty of his performances would be an understatement, they should build statues of him for this.

The final, and perhaps main, reason for the success of the show is Vince Gilligan, its creator and overlord. Ultimately, Breaking Bad is his baby and, like the manager of a football team, he takes responsibility for whether it flies or flops. The themes that it deals with are mature, fascinating and utterly unconventional for a major television programme, the primary one being the subjectivity of happiness demonstrated by the two main characters. Was Walt actually happier as a simple family man in an undemanding yet unfulfilling profession, or is he happier now as a powerful yet still unrecognised genius with an amassed fortune that he cannot spend? Was Jesse better off as a low-level cook and dealer with little to no daily troubles or as he later becomes an increasingly-valued part of Gus’s criminal empire with the weight of numerous personal tragedies to deal with? There is also the question of how far a man will go to protect what is important to him; whether he will sacrifice his values, his beliefs and even his life for what he considers valuable. Gilligan pulls no punches when answering these questions, and he does it in an incredibly innovative manner. Even the show’s intro sequence is hugely abbreviated, allowing as much time as possible to cram in storytelling.

But the main reason to watch it is that it keeps getting better. The finale of the season 4 was mind-blowing in its brilliance; an utterly jaw-dropping conclusion to the gripping cat-and-mouse game of death between Walt and Gus Fring. With the recent announcement that season 5 will be the last one, this is as good a time as any to settle down and enjoy the previous four before this majestic series draws to a close next year. And if the previous ones are anything to judge by, it will be going out in some style.

The Surreal Majesty of Stephen King

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 02:49:00 +0000

There was once a time when I didn’t like Stephen King. Actually, ‘didn’t like’ never really covered it; I disdained his work, sneered at his legacy and scoffed at every positive remark thrown his way. With the naivety and elitism garnered from being both young

(19)

and an English student that considered himself the intellectual superior of all but one of his tutors, I ignorantly assumed that such a popular writer – the foremost of my and many other generations – must be catering to the lowest common denominator of readership in order to attract such a wide spectrum of fans and could have no more literary talent than John Grisham or Michael Crighton, Dan Brown or J.K. Rowling. And just how seriously could anyone consider ‘horror’ a literary genre? But then something happened to change my attitude towards him, and I suppose the world in general, completely; I read one of his books.

I very nearly didn’t though and my irrational pig-headedness would almost certainly have dissuaded me from ever picking up one of my own accord. No, this is just another thing that I owe to two of the main influences of my life; my father and Bruce Springsteen. While browsing our hometown library one day, my dad picked up a copy of King’s The Stand, read the blurb and had a quick disinterested leaf through the opening pages when something grabbed his attention, a couple of lines from Jungleland by The Boss. The lines from Jungleland; if you don’t know them, you should. And if you don’t know who The Boss is, stop reading now; you aren’t welcome here. Anyway, purely because King had thought to use these lyrics in the story, he decided to give it a try; no mean feat as the reworked version he picked upcomfortably exceeds 800 pages. Upon finishing, he gave it to me and said that he thought it was good and definitely worth a read. I never took my dad’s word as gospel but he was right often enough to be irritating, so I opened it up and gave it a try too. And almost immediately, I was hooked.

The Stand is the book that is most beloved by King’s readers, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Opening with the near-entire destruction of the human race by a deadly manmade super-virus, it is a post-apocalyptic exploration of faith, hope and the inherent nature of man. King created characters in nothing more than a paragraph that resonated with humanity far more than any of those found in any number of crime thrillers, only to strike them dead in the following sentence merely to lend gravitas to the severity of the catastrophe. Those characters that did form an important part of the story weren’t given quirks to convince you of their personality, like The Da Vinci Code’s Mickey Mouse watch, they were just given license to be themselves; to interact with their surroundings and whatever survivors they could find. And even in this most surreal of worlds that they existed in, they reverberated with a liveliness and realism that I’d never really experienced before. King painted masterful pictures of their movements in only a few swift strokes, a far cry from the pages upon pages used to describe the shade of colour belonging to antique armoire that I had come to expect from Dickens. Having already written the most ballsy opening to a novel I’d ever read, King pulled absolutely no punches in the furthering of the plot; no-one was safe from the repercussions of this plague and the dark man who had risen alongside it. And while now, after a further three reads of the book, I’m not entirely sure that the manner in which the antagonist meets his demise isn’t a bit of a copout, I still can’t find fault with any other aspect of the ending. In short, the book was and is a complete masterpiece and it infected me with its own version of Captain Trips; the overwhelming desire to read all of King’s other works and discover just how wrong I’d been about him.

Over the last decade I have become one of King’s Constant Readers. I won’t go so far as to say that his every work is perfection, far from it. Of the large amount of his works that I have read, I was largely unimpressed by Carrie, Cujo,The Eyes of the Dragon , Cell and Under The Dome and I hated The Tommyknockers – which he apparently doesn’t even remember writing due to his monumental cocaine intake atthe time. And there are aspects of some of his other novels that I thought were either handled incorrectly or could have been vastly improved; the end of The Shining just feels wrong once you’ve seen Kubrick’s film, the first 100-odd pages of It are fairly ponderous and the nature of The Crimson King at the end of the epic Dark Tower series - surely he should have been kin to the scourge of Derry in It, especially considering the nature of his supposed half of Mordred? - all spring to mind. But even when you find yourself underwhelmed at the end of a Stephen King book, you still find yourself at the end of a Stephen King book; never have I even entertained the idea of failing to finish any of his work. His prose is far too involving for you to really concentrate on anything else until it relaxes its grip on you. And when he gets it right, well… hold on to your fucking seats. Personally, I would list The Stand, It, From A Buick 8, Lisey’s Story and Duma Key in any list of the best novels of the last 50 years.

The true wonder of the man though is his incredibly unconventional, personal and innovative style. Though all of his work at least features one surreal, not-of-this-world aspect, King is not only capable of making you believe in these wondrous, fantastic and horrifying unrealities but also of drawing you

(through the Unfound door)

inexorably into them and holding you there, just inches away from whatever awful scene he is setting so that you can see, hear, smell, feel and taste exactly what it is that he wants you to. And it is this that makes him such a spellbinding storyteller; taking these crazy ideas from the font of invention in his head that would usually seem laughably farcical, and turning them into epic novels that make you sleep with all the lights on and hang towels over your mirrors to avoid seeing the creature hiding in them.

It should also be mentioned that some of his finest work can be found in his collections of short stories and novellas, which is incredibly rare. Different Seasons is a particularly good example, a collection of novellas including Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, Stand By Me and Apt Pupil; all three of which have since been turned into major Hollywood movies(Apt Pupil stars Ian McKellen and was directed by Bryan Singer, which landed him the budget and cast that helped make The Usual Suspects such a memorable film). These adaptations of his shorter works are generally much more successful and acclaimed than those of his novels and King is renowned for selling the rights of these tales to upcoming screenwriters and directors for just $1. Some other memorable short stories include The Langoliers, N., 1922 and The Mist, which was also adapted into a movie by Frank Darabont of The Shawshank Redemption fame.

So I urge you, if by chance you haven’t already, to immediately read one of his books. Not for me, because we’ve already established that I’m an elitist pig with no regard for the common man. Not for him, because he’s taken millions already to drink from the well of his back catalogue and God knows he can’t need your money. No, do it simply because you owe it to yourself; because the world seems a better place once you’ve discovered him.

Can anyone beat Jon “Bones” Jones?

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 03:07:00 +0000

At UFC 140, on Saturday Dec 10^thin Toronto, Canada, Jon “Bones” Jones faced unquestionably the toughest test of his young MMA career when he defended his UFC Light-Heavyweight Championship against former champion Lyoto “The Dragon” Machida and he passed it in what is rapidly becoming an ominously-predictable fashion. He took on a man once considered, as Jones is now, to be almost unbeatable in the Octagon and dumped him to the mat bloodied and unconscious in the final minute of only the second of five five-minute rounds.

Yet it was Machida that won the opener. Utilising his karate background, he made light of Jones’ astonishing 10.5” reach advantage and comfortably eluded his trademark array of elbows, punches, kicks and knees; the types of shots that put away fellow former champions Mauricio “Shogun” Rua and Quinton “Rampage” Jackson in devastating fashion earlier this year. Closing the distance with body kicks and exploding with flurries of punches, he achieved the unthinkable and outstruck Bones, even wobbling the champ with a shuddering straight left.

And when the second round began to pan out the same way, it began to feel like a shock was on the cards. Commentators Mike Goldberg and Joe Rogan began to speculate on the possibility of Jones panicking and suffering from an adrenalin dump that would leave him tired and more susceptible to Machida’s unconventional attack. But great champions always find a way to win, and Jon “Bones” Jones could well go on to be the greatest in UFC history.

He switched up his attack and brought the fight to the floor with a thunderous takedown. A Greco-Roman wrestling background is just another of the attributes Jones possesses and he utilised it to set up a vicious slashing elbow that busted his opponent’s forehead wide open; indeed the cut was severe enough for referee Big John McCarthy to halt the fight for the doctor to check it. And while it was resumed only seconds later, the turning point had already arrived. After fighting back to his feet, Machida was unable to re-establish his rhythm and was dropped by a fierce left hand. Jones decisively seized the opening and locked up an unconventional yet deadly standing guillotine choke that quickly put his opponent to sleep. And while The Dragon undoubtedly provided more of a test than any of his former opponents, Jones was never in any real danger of surrendering his belt.

So the question is, who can beat him? The 2011 World MMA Fighter of the Year has defeated three of the top five challengers in the light-heavyweight division, all former champions themselves, in the last nine months and has finished them whilst barely breaking a sweat. His next challenger seems likely to be Dan “Hendo” Henderson, the 41-year old former Strikeforce 205-pound champion, who came through a clash for the ages with Shogun at UFC 139 to presumably set up a title shot. While Henderson’s right hand contains the one-punch knockout power to finish any fight, the chances of him actually landing it seem slim at best when you consider that Jones has a longer reach than anyone in the entire UFC and is an incredibly capable tactician. And his chances get worse the longer the fight lasts; Hendo was so tired in the fifth round against the notoriously-unfit Shogun that he was barely able to move, while Jones is seventeen years his junior and has only been into even the fourth round in one of his three championship fights.

Probably the only test Jones is yet to face is that of being put on his back by a top-class wrestler, and the division’s two best meet on January 28^th in Chicago at UFC On Fox 2. Rashad Evans and Phil Davis are both accomplished amateur wrestlers and will be confident that they have what it takes to win the title; indeed Rashad has been set to challenge JBJ for the belt twice already, only for injuries to curtail his plans. But with Jones having a solid Greco-Roman background himself, his languid figure will be difficult to take down and even harder to keep down.

If he successfully navigates title defences against these opponents, he will have disposed of every creditable challenger in the light-heavyweight division and will most likely be no older than 25. Tradition suggests that he should look for pound-for-pound challengers from other weight divisions. While the jump up to heavyweight could see him giving away as much as 60 pounds to his opponent, his 84.5” reach and striking arsenal would be a match even for the lethal boxing ability of current champion Junior dos Santos and there is no doubt whatsoever that Jones is a far superior athlete and much more complete fighter than anyone in the division. A super-fight against long-time Middleweight champion Anderson “The Spider” Silva is a fascinating prospect, but seems far-fetched when you consider that Silva is already 36 and that the hugely-anticipated bout between himself and Welterweight champion Georges “Rush” St-Pierre has still not come to fruition despite being touted for years. Put frankly, it is hard to imagine a truly-dangerous challenger for Jones in the short, middle or long-term.

But one of the many reasons that MMA is such a fascinating and involving sport is that upsets happen, and they happen regularly. Nearly every time a man has seemed unbeatable in the UFC, someone has come along and shocked the world; GSP upset Matt Hughes at his peak to win the Welterweight title before immediately surrendering it to Matt “The Terror” Serra when he seemed set to rule the division for years (although he has since gone on to do so anyway). Lyoto Machida himself was knocked clean out by Mauricio Rua when he seemed frankly unhittable, let alone unstoppable. Only the greatest pound for pound fighter in the world, Anderson Silva, has never been dethroned and even he was only minutes away from a unanimous points defeat at the hands of his bitter rival Chael Sonnen in 2010.

So it may be that Jones is shocked by future hall-of-famer Dan Henderson if they soon meet as expected, it may be that he tastes defeat at the hands of his former friend Rashad Evans if they finally square off or it may be even be years before someone figures out how to beat him. One thing is for sure though; it’ll be well worth following this astonishing young man’s career to find out who it is.

The Promised Land

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 01:17:00 +0000

Let’s face it, modern life is rubbish. Pulp devoted an album title to this sentiment, so it must be true. Occupation, worldwide recession, the Eurozone crisis, a Con-Dem coalition government, prevalent racism, The X Factor, widespread drug addiction, mass unemployment, Coldplay, billionaire oil barons ruining football, the Daily Mail, widespread famine and pestilence, endless Hollywood remakes, Russell Howard, devastating natural disasters, the McRib, chick lit, the Halifax adverts, Michael Bay; the list goes on and on and on. The world peaked in the early 70’s, it’s been downhill ever since and it’s only going to get worse.

Now imagine a place where it’s not only considered safe to send 10-year olds off into the wilderness on voyages of discovery, it’s actually the social norm. Worry not about male pattern baldness, the middle-age spread or the onset of menopause; in this world people stay the same age for over 14 years. There are no moral shades of grey; just red, blue and green. There is a god, and he can be caught and owned; as long as you have obtained a flute that doesn’t exist and a nice collection of plates for him anyway. That’s right, there is a promised land and it is inhabited by kick-ass monsters called Pokémon.

No matter your desire in life, you’re free to go wheresoever you want and always at your side is your faithful adoring pet. But your pet can breathe fireballs, create earthquakes, control the weather, heal itself and use mad telekinetic powers! Sure, it may only be able to remember four of these abilities at a time but what it lacks in memory, it makes up for in variety. And just when you think the little bastard couldn’t get any cooler, it only goes and disproves Creationism in front of your very eyes. Evolution ftw!

You never work a day in your life and all you have to worry about are a couple of preening, possibly-incestuous losers and a cat that speaks like Joe Pesci hatching hare-brained schemes to steal your beloved pet that invariably end in abject failure and you whooping the bejeezus out of them mere seconds after their admittedly-sweet musical introduction.

Some irritating gimp catches your eye, runs over to you and starts blathering on about how comfy his shorts are; you whip out a 14 foot monster, utterly annihilate him and make him pay for the privilege (not actually gay sex). Some girl squeals about you touching her while were you clearly at least ten squares and half a screen away but instead of getting dragged off to prison and being brutally raped in the showers, you settle the dispute immediately with an impromptu battle; there’s no nanny-state PC bullshit here.

You decide to go explore a new country but airline fees are beyond ridiculous and ferry journeys take ages; so what, you have a Garchomp that can fly at mach speed and a Wailord that doubles up as a cruise liner. You get lost in a jungle miles from civilization and you’ve never watched a Bear Grylls programme in your life, but no matter; you have a Vanillice to eat, a Squirtle to provide water, a Scyther to clear a path through the foliage and a Charizard to pwn the unholy fuck out of any wild animals that decide that you’d make a nice late-afternoon snack. And best of all, you can compress them all into a ball the size of a testicle; convenient or what?

Most impressively of all though, these pocket monsters can sustain limitless damage at the sole cost of occasional fainting; they’re so badass they almost never die! No expensive cremations, laborious back garden hole-digging or repeated toilet-flushes over here. The worst thing that ever happens is suspiciously-young grandfathers forgetting their douchey grandson’s names , but even that works out nicely as you can just rename them ‘Cunt’ or ‘Tupac’ for puerile comedy value. And even if one of these super-powerful monsters goes batshit crazy and tries to destroy Tokyo, a small boy with a yellow mouse will invariably turn up and save the day.

So if you wanna be the very best like no-one ever was, if you gotta catch ‘em all or if you just want to be in a place where the world doesn’t constantly revolve around endless reality television and pre-pubescent pop stars; you know where to go, friend.

Great Film Quotes - Fight Club

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:19:00 +0000

Every time I watch Fight Club, I become a little more convinced that it’s the most important movie of the modern era. The reasons for this are as varied as those for being rejected from Project Mayhem -too fat, too old, too… blonde. David Fincher’s innovative directing is a primary one (the repeated single-cell image flashes of Tyler before he’s even introduced as a character are a stroke of particular resonance) the performances of the stellar cast lending astonishing weight to characters quite unlike any in the history of film is another and indeed the fact that Hollywood actually made this counter-cultural denouncement of all that it stands for suggests that, despite the current trend of pointless remakes and endless sequels, there is still hope for the film industry ; whosoever approved a film in which the main concept is the total and utter destruction of almost every aspect of capitalist society clearly has a pair of balls so astonishingly massive that you could admire them from space. But possibly the main reason is the sheer brilliance of the dialogue.

There are many classic lines in the film; the first two rules of fight club being an obvious example with “I felt like destroying something beautiful” and “You have to consider the possibility that God does not like you. He never wanted you. In all probability, he hates you” being rarer gems. But the crowning glory is the subject of this article.

It arrives about halfway through the film, just after Edward Norton’s unnamed narrator and Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden board a bus. The two notice a Calvin Klein underwear advert that amuses them; “Is that what a man looks like?” asks Norton’s character. Durden sniggers and replies, “Self-improvement is masturbation. Now, self-destruction…”

This short sentence cuts to the core of what the film is trying to tell you in a clear and concise manner. The idea that self-improvement, the model of aspirational behaviour in Western society since Kurt Goldstein’s theory of self-actualisation was published in 1934 and the point of life itself to many, is nothing more than a base and pointless act of self-gratification was completely unprecedented and highly controversial; the unvoiced suggestion that the real answer lies in its polar opposite even more so. But it is a central theme throughout the film and is echoed in the suggestions that the things you own end up owning you, that only after disaster can we be resurrected and that it’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.

Most of the dialogue in the film is faithfully lifted from the Chuck Palahniuk novel on which the film is based, but this line is one of the few lines that was changed. It originally appears in the form, “Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer. Maybe self-destruction is the answer.” The way it appears in the movie is a more confident, declarative version of the line, removing any question from Durden’s belief in the message. It is also clearly a more explicit and risqué version and this is indicative of the movie’s slight deviation from the plot of the book as well, in which Tyler fails to achieve his ultimate goal. The sight of buildings crumbling to the strain of The Pixies ‘Where Is My Mind?’ is a far more joyous affair.

Not everyone shared this view on the film’s release though. In fact, it was critically panned by many of the critics that reviewed it. Roger Ebert gave it a rating of 2/5 and described it as “cheerfully fascist”, the LA Times as “a witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophising” and the New Yorker as “a laborious and foolish waste of time.” Many of the younger critics saw it in a much more favourable light though and the film currently sits at #13 in the IMBD Top 250 Films with an average rating of 8.8. In its brave and uncompromising manner, Fight Club captured the imagination of a generation and nothing explains the manner in which it did so better than this gem of a quote.

Serie A Reborn

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 02:43:08 +0100

After a players strike over payment issues resulted in a one week delay, last Friday saw the new Serie A season get underway at the San Siro as champions AC Milan drew 2-2 with Lazio with all four goals coming in an incredible twenty-one minute spell in the first half. The following night saw Napoli, who secured a Champions League place with a surprise third-place finish last year, win 3-1 at Cesena in another entertaining game that also saw a red card and an early contender for miss of the season from Napoli’s on-loan Inter Milan striker Goran Pandev. And Sunday night saw his parent club downed 4-3 at Palermo in the best of the lot; a seven goal thriller with three of them coming in a frantic last five minutes. The seven matches played on Sunday afternoon saw a total of twenty goals, taking the opening weekend tally to 35. Serie A is back baby, and it may just be better than ever.

Over the last decade, it seemed that the glory days had passed Italy’s top division by like the wink of a young girl’s eye, with Serie A being seen as the poor cousin of Europe’s most prominent leagues. If you wanted exciting, fast-paced football, you watched the Premiership. If you wanted technical ability and the best players in the world, you watched La Liga. If you wanted surprise results and an unpredictable top 4, you watched the Bundesliga. And if you wanted a healthy helping of turgid, defensive football with a side of match-fixing? Well, there was just one place to go. And this was a great shame, because from the truly great AC Milan side of the late 80’s right up to one of the most memorable finishes to a league season ever in 2001/02 you could see everything that was good about football on Channel 4 sunday afternoons.

Back then, Serie A had brilliant footballers in Marco van Basten, Roberto Baggio, Gabriel Batistuta, George Weah, Ronaldo, Zinedine Zidane etc; it had great teams, with an Italian side appearing in every Champions League final between 1992 and 1998; and it had entertainment. The aforementioned end to the 2001/02 league season incredibly saw Lazio fans cheering the two Inter Milan goals at the Stadio Olimpico and booing the four scored by their own side in their desperation to see the Milanese team lift the Scudetto ahead of bitter rivals Roma and the incredibly-unpopular eventual winners Juventus on a final day where all three sides were all still in the running.

But then it all went wrong. The great players who had almost exclusively graced Italy for a decade began to drift away; Zidane to Real Madrid in 2001 with Ronaldo following him a year later as the Galactico era began and many others continued the exodus to Spain. In fact, in the two decades since the FIFA World Player of the Year award was established in 1991, Serie A contributed seven out of ten winners to the first and only one to the second; conversely La Liga produced three in the first ten years and eight in the second. As well as this, the infamous match-fixing scandal that saw Juventus stripped of the 2004/05 and 2005/06 championships and relegated to Serie B in punishment, as well as AC Milan, Fiorentina, Lazio and Reggina hit with point deductions for the 2006/07 season, severely impacted on both the quality of the league and the outward perception of it from neutral fans. And the league itself just became boring to everyone bar die-hard fans; the title was won for five consecutive years by Inter Milan and only two sides out of the established elite secured Champions League qualification in the same timeframe.

But last year, everything seemed to change. There was an end to the air of dour inevitability about who would finish where as a side other than Inter won the Scudetto for the first time in seven years, Sampdoria were relegated after finishing fourth the previous season and Napoli and Udinese both cracked the top 4, having done so just once between them in the past decade. A new breed of talented young players emerged over the course of the season that alerted major European clubs; Alexis Sanchez was signed from Udinese by European Champions Barcelona, Chelsea target Javier Pastore moved from Palermo to nouveau-riche Paris St-Germain for £38m and Manchester City manager Roberto Mancini admitted an admiration for Fiorentina winger Alessio Cerci, Udinese veteran Antonio di Natale and Napoli trio Ezekiel Lavezzi, Edinson Cavani and Marek Hamsik, who will all face his side in the Champions League tonight. But most importantly, the league suddenly looked entertaining again. There were a number of absolutely jaw-dropping matches; Udinese won 7-0 away at eighth-placed Palermo, fifth-placed Lazio drew 4-4 at champions AC Milan and runners-up Inter beat sixth-placed Roma 5-3 at the San Siro. There were also twice as many games that were won by a four goal-or-more margin than the previous season, two of which featured a bottom eight side embarrassing opponents from the top eight. To the casual observer, it was a long-overdue return to somewhere near the glory days of old.

And this season should be even better. While the league and their respective sides will miss both Sanchez and Pastore, both Juventus and Roma have shown their determination to regain their places in the Champions League this year by investing heavily in a number of talented youngsters; Arturo Vidal and Eljero Elia moving to the former while Fernando Gago, Bojan Krkic, Erik Lamela, Simon Kjaer and Miralem Pjanic have all arrived at the latter. Napoli have shown their desire to fend them off by retaining all their best players and adding Gokhan Inler and Goran Pandev to the squad and Palermo have retained the young Uruguyuan striker named Abel Hernandez and Slovenian midfielder Josip Ilicic, who are both capable of making the fans forget about all about Pastore. And with the opening weekend matches averaging a staggering 3.5 goals per game, it seems that Serie A is back in business at last.

Arsene Wenger: Championship Manager?

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 21:55:00 +0100

When I was growing up, my father and I played a lot of Championship Manager. Because we were normal, self-respecting football fans and because Champ Man was brilliant, if occasionally infuriating, fun. From the first ever instalment up to the birth of Football Manager, rarely would an evening go by in our house where one or both of us didn’t spend at least an hour on the current incarnation. Often, we’d both play; one of us hunting for the next Cherno Samba while the other prepared for the following day’s respective school or work, and then swapping over. And sometimes we’d just sit in on the other’s game for a while to see how they were getting on.

I have some fond memories of my dad’s games. I remember him signing a then-unknown James Beattie for his Norwich side, and Beattie going on to score over 50 goals in that season. I vaguely remember Alexander Zickler revelling in a free role in his Bayern Munich side and scoring over 30 goals to secure him the Bundesliga and Champions League double. But the game of his I remember best is one in which he was managing River Plate in Argentina.

I think it was just after the halcyon days of the deadly Pablo Aimar/Javier Saviola axis, maybe just creeping into the time where Andres d’Alessandro was the big name there. Whenever it was, to my great amusement he’d compiled a squad that was completely saturated with attacking midfielders. Out of a small group of around 18 players, he had managed to amass 6 or 7 of them, and could come nowhere near fitting them all in his side. A couple of them were versatile enough to play on the wings, AM L/C or AM R/C, and one, the splendidly named Camel Meriem, was a coveted AM/F R/L/C but most were just plain AM C’s and all but one of them sat on the metaphorical bench. When quizzed about his unconventional transfer policy, he wasn’t really sure why he signed so many of them and was as amused as I was about it; as if it was as much a subconscious inclination rather than a concrete decision. In any case, the ‘collection of attacking midfielders’ slipped into Hepburn family lore and became a running joke over the years that we would raise occasionally. I certainly never expected it implemented in real life.

But last week, when my father sent me a text message to say that Arsenal had reacted to their 8-2 defeat at the hands of Manchester United by enquiring about Yossi Benayoun, it struck me that it had indeed come to fruition, and on a fairly grand scale at that. No less than Arsene Wenger had adopted the Brian Hepburn philosophy of football and had begun to collect attacking midfielders with little interest in addressing any of the other deficiencies in his squad.

If you’d asked a cross-section of pundits, neutrals and Gunners fans at the end of last season where they felt Arsenal needed to strengthen to mount a serious title challenge, you would have received a fairly consistent set of answers.

-An experienced goalkeeper to compete with, or succeed, Szczesny.

-An aggressive, dominant centre back to partner Vermaelen.

-A combative ballwinner in the Keane/Vieira mould to anchor their vastly talented midfield.

- A centre forward to provide genuine competition for van Persie, and successfully replace him when he is inevitably injured.

Perhaps there is only one man who would have answered this question with, “Two undeniably talented and highly-promising wingers with no immediate end product”. That man, however, is Arsene Wenger and his first two signings of the summer were Gervinho and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain for a total outlay of £22.7m. And, with the exceptions of Carl Jenkinson and Joel Campbell for nominal fees and the return of Ryo Miyaichi from loan, that was it until August 30th. Before the deadline passed, he brought in 5 players, 4 of them direct replacements for players he had allowed to leave; Andre Santos for Gael Clichy, Mikel Arteta for Cesc Fabregas, Yossi Benayoun for Samir Nasri and Park Chu-Young for Nicklas Bendtner; the other being German international centre back Per Mertesacker.

Whether these players represent financially and technically inferior like-for-like replacements is entirely subjective. The more pertinent point is that Wenger saw no reason to address any area of his already-unbalanced squad before the start of the season, other than bringing in an additional two attacking midfielders to complement Theo Walcott, Tomas Rosicky, Andrei Arshavin and Nasri, later Benayoun. And as 4 of the 5 other signings merely filled additional positions that had been vacated over the summer, the only area of weakness he ultimately addressed was in central defence.

In fact, approaches for yet more attacking midfielders, Lucho Gonzalez and Yoann Gourcuff, have been confirmed by Marseille and Lyon club officials in the last week and the club were also recently linked with moves for the mercurial Lille winger Eden Hazard and Sochaux playmaker Marvin Martin. And while it seems likely that the club would have signed two of these ahead of Arteta and Benayoun if possible, the time spent chasing all of these players would undoubtedly have been better spent on securing recruits in more pressing areas for concern. French holding midfielder Yann M’Vila was a major target but a deal could not be concluded before the close of the transfer window; one can’t help but think that a successful resolution would have been more likely had his move been prioritised ahead of Gervinho and Oxlade-Chamberlain’s back in June.

As a result of the transfer activity, Arsenal’s midfield is worryingly imbalanced. Even the bulk of his central midfielders are more inclined towards creativity than disruption; none of Jack Wilshire, Aaron Ramsey or Arteta seem likely to warrant a ‘Tackling’ stat of 10 or more, whereas Abou Diaby is of the box-to-box variety. Alex Song is the only recognised DM C in the squad and Arsenal have already paid the price for their lack of depth in this department. In Song’s absence through suspension, youngster Emanuel Frimpong started the home game against Liverpool and was sent off at 0-0 as they slumped to a 2-0 defeat; in the 8-2 thrashing at Old Trafford, Francis Coquelin deputised alongside Ramsey and Rosicky in the centre of the park as the Gunners failed to contain a rampant United side.

Maybe Arsene is just as unaware that he is neglecting other areas of his squad in favour of AM C’s as my dad was. But ultimately, my father’s stable of flamboyant attackers went on the secure him the Argentine League title and victory in the Copa Libertadores; undoubtedly in highly entertaining fashion. After a well-documented barren spell of 6 years, Wenger will be hailed as a miracle-working visionary if his young side secure the equivalent Premiership and Champions League trophies this season. But you and I will know where he got the idea.