Last Night I Dreamed Of Manderley
Actually that's a colossal fib, I dreamed of no such thing. It might tempt in a few people who think the blog might be banging on about whatever hysterical historical Big Skirt drama it comes from. However, and you might think this impressive and sad at the same time, I did dream of a character vaguely like our C5 manager Dave, asking me what I thought of HR Ops (my new department), to which I replied that it was focussed far more on the payroll calendar than my old job. Art!
Ah, "Rebecca" by Daphne Du Maurier
Because who wants to see an office?
ANYWAY that, of course - obviously! - has nothing to do with today's title, which concerns that caper war film "Kelly's Heroes" which I felt like watching again. I couldn't find it anywhere until I looked in the "W - Z And Boxed Sets" carton of DVDs, because of course - O so very obviously! - that is the logical place to find it. Art!
Across the river but with only one tank left
Let me recount the plot outline to you, because it's relevant. Private Kelly discovers that 14,000 gold bars, worth £12 million, are being stored under armed Teuton guard at Clermont, thirty miles behind enemy lines. He suborns the rest of his motorised reconnaissance platoon and they head off, with three tanks rendezvousing with them en route. Cutting to the end, with the co-operation of a Teuton tank crew, they liberate the gold and escape with it. Art!
Matey just learned what he's guarding
Now for the interesting part. This film seems to be (very) loosely based on a gigantic bank robbery, where South Candians, SS Teuton troops and Teuton civilians looted the gold reserves of Bavaria at the end of the war. There is very little present on teh Interwebz about it because the whole thing was covered up then and afterwards. There is a book about it, which <apologetic shrug> I may have to purchase.
Motley! Climb into this cardboard box. You can be the bank, and we'll be the tank. O just the odd firework rocket or two.
BOOJUM! Reviews Films
And theatre and television, if the fancy takes us, because nobody and nothing is safe from our satirical eye and poison tongue*!
"Clifford The Big Red Dog": What can one say apart from bewail this cheap and nasty 'homage' to that immortal "Digby The Biggest Dog In The World", with a disgusting puce pooch taking front and centre. It seems a little odd, too, that they would paint a huge hound in the colour of the Sinisters. Or that one of their two political parties, the Wizard Gizzard Lizards or the Ice Cream Bandits, would not object to a potentially slanderous, or not slanderous enough, film. Art!
Blimey! Think of the dog food costs**
"Encanto": Kid's animated film with a vapid looking character trying to look wry and instead coming across as dangerously flatulent. Don't tell me, this is an attempt to lie kids into believing that Esperanto is cool and trendy - "You CAN - with Esperan!" in a dreadful attempt to make it O So Street. It's possible to tell from a bus poster's colour palette alone that they want this one to be light and frothy - like the scum that forms on polluted rivers. Art!
What's "Devoured by wild animal" in Esperanto?
There is nothing more depressing than a film trying excessively hard to be upbeat and cheerful, in my opinion, which is the one that matters. Encantoxic.
"Hawkeye": O my <sighs deeply>. Another dismal updating, this time "The Last Of The Mohicans" being brought up to the present day, and the "Daily Beast" has the temerity to tick political correctness boxes about bringing more female characters into it. Illiterate trodlodytes! The Munro sisters are up there in the novel with Hawkeye I'll have you know. Art!
Of course the reason he goes by the name 'Hawkeye' is because his real name is Natty Bumpo, which sounds absurd and not at all heroic and the female love interest is guaranteed to have a name like "Ardra" when in real life she's Stinky McWizzlegit.
Time For Some "Tormentor"
Yes indeedy Ally Sheedy. As mentioned, we have set the scene enough and now horrible things start to happen.
‘C***** no, she’s not.
Listen, I’m going to ring her friends.
She didn’t mention about going out or staying out, did she?’
‘No. No, she
didn’t. You go and ring around, I’ll
have a look for her on the road.’
By half past eight Louis was back home, not having
seen any teenagers who might have been Jennifer. There were two missed messages on his home
phone, frantic calls from Angela to say that none of Jennifer’s friends had
seen her since college, hours before.
He bit the knuckle on his right hand hard enough to
draw blood, only feeling a ferocious pressure on the bone as he bit, no
sensation of pain coming through at all.
Once again he went back up the street, looking for any
clues that might indicate what Jennifer had done.
Nothing. No
signs anywhere. Vanished. He stared at the barren tarmac pavement, the
mockingly bright and bountiful streetlights, at cigarette butts in the
gutter. No Jennifer.
Arriving back home, Louis kicked his shoes up the
staircase in the lobby and stamped into the lounge, hissing and cursing under
his breath. He opened the creaking
sideboard and took out one of the bottles of cheap, nasty whisky kept there,
kept there normally but now needed in exceptional circumstances.
After knocking back a half pint, he rapidly realised
that food was essential , to avoid suffering a heaving stomach upset. Midway through making a sandwich, the front
doorbell rang, twice.
‘Coming!’ he bellowed from the kitchen, snatching up
the cheese-and-ham sandwich from the worktop.
‘Who comes calling at this time,’ he asked himself. Jennifer, hopefully,
come to apologise for causing such concern and alarm when she’d only gone off
to the pictures and not told anyone.
I shall only say that there is no good news when he answers the door. Things, in fact, continue to get worse.
"From The City, From The Plough" By Alexander Baron
Yes, Conrad finished this fine novel yesterday and wanted to comment on it. As mentioned before, the first half of the work deals with the 5th Battalion the Wessex Regiment, a formation of six hundred men drawn mostly from Wessex but with a leavening of men from experienced units and from other parts of the country. You get to know named characters, officers and the enlisted men, before they get sent to Normandy on D-Day. Art!
The very real 5th Wiltshires the 5th Wessex were based on
The book follows them through the long, bloody attritional slogging battles in Normandy that caused them heavy casualties, yet which ground their Teuton opponents to powder. By the novel's end only about fifty men are left alive and unwounded, of the original six hundred; about that many again are wounded lightly enough to return later, but we are not told the names of any of these survivors, which implies that the mix of characters we met in the first half are dead. Grim, sobering and realistic stuff.
Finally -
As with yesteryon I had another small item to insert as a coda, except it would have added another 1,000 words, so we can learn all about Empedocles tomorrow.
* If you really had one of these you'd never dare swallow.
** We will tactfully glide over other matters.
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