7 Reasons

Tag: bar

  • 7 Reasons That I Hate The Man At The Pub

    7 Reasons That I Hate The Man At The Pub

    It was all going so well.  All I had to do was go to an unfamiliar pub and meet four friends that were there waiting for me.  But there was a man at the pub who cocked it all up and made everything infuriatingly difficult.  Here are seven reasons that I hate him.

    1.  The Man At The Pub Is In My Way.  Exiting the bar with a pint in my hand and entering a narrow, dimly-lit anteroom with tables and stools situated haphazardly on either side of barely delineated central walkway I walked past a couple of tables and spotted my friends seated approximately two tables away, ahead of me and to the right.  I moved toward them squeezing between the stools on the cluttered walkway.  But there was a problem.  There was a man also squeezing his way through the cluttered throng of drinkers, tables and stools in the opposite direction, heading toward me.  Fairly soon he was in my way.

    2.  The Man At The Pub Moves In The Wrong Direction.  As an Englishman I did what came naturally and stepped to my left as I approached him, in the knowledge that when he moved to his left, there would be sufficient room for us both to pass; assuming that we turned sideways, squeezed in and stopped breathing (because everyone stops breathing when performing this sort of manoeuvre, even though there is no earthly reason for doing so).  But the man didn’t move to his left, he moved to mine (his right).  He was still in my way.

    3.  The Man At The Pub Is Stupid.  No, that’s uncharitable.  He’s not necessarily stupid, I thought.  Perhaps he hails from a country where they drive on the right.  Perhaps he doesn’t drive.  Perhaps he’s drunk; he does, after all, have a pint in his hand.  I did what any other sensible person would do, given that he was to my left.  I stepped to my right.  But at the same moment that I moved to my right, he moved to his left.  We had both moved but were both still blocking each other’s path.  Bugger.

    4.  The Man At The Pub Is Still In My Way.  Oh God, I inexplicably thought, to a being that I don’t believe in, this could go on all night.  This could be one of those occasions where I and a random unwitting partner selected purely by proximity and happenstance perform the tentative and ungainly dance that I know as The Get-The-Hell-Out-Of-My-Way-And-Stop-Shuffling-From-Side-To-Side-In-Front-Of-Me-You-Simpering-Ninny.  A blushing teenage girl and I once performed this dance on a narrow pavement outside of the Lewes branch of Waitrose for a full fifty seconds; replete with breezily uttered apologies, good-natured rolling-of-the-eyes, winsome shrugs and staccato bursts of nervous laughter.  It was excruciating.  I wanted to die.  I wished the ground would open up and swallow me (which would actually have solved the problem).  There was no way I was going to repeat that again.  I resolved not to move any more this time.  “Sorry”, I said to the man with the pint, instinctively, at the same time as he said “sorry” to me.  Ah, I thought, he is English after all.

    5.  The Man At The Pub Is Mysterious.  Then something else hit me.  This man looked vaguely familiar.  We regarded each other for a split-second, but I wasn’t quite sure who he was.  It was one of those moments, when, in the back of your mind, you know that you know a person but for whatever reason – usually to do with seeing them outside of their usual context – you can’t quite place them.  This was perplexing.

    6.  The Man At The Pub Is Confused.  I noticed that my friends – who were frustratingly still ahead of me and to the right, as the man and I were going nowhere, were all looking at me – two were pointing – and roaring with laughter.  They were hysterical.  I failed to see how two grown men trying to get out of each other’s way in a pub was quite that funny, but then I noticed something quite odd.  Although my friends were seated ahead of me and to the right, the sound of their laughter was coming from behind me and to the right.  I turned to face the sound.  My friends were sitting there.  I turned back to face the man blocking my path.  Then I realised why he looked familiar.  He was me.  I was the man in my way.

    7.  The Man At The Pub Is A Laughing Stock.  It turned out that some bright spark had come up with the brilliant idea of covering the entire back wall of a small, dimly lit room with a mirror to make it appear lighter and airier and the customers appear stupider.  As I turned and walked toward the table where my friends were still laughing uproariously, the sniggering barmaid was busy collecting glasses there.  Feeling rather embarrassed and wishing to downplay the act of foolishness that I was slowly realising I would never, ever be allowed to forget I sought a crumb of comfort from her.  “That must happen all the time,” I stated blithely to her.  “No.”  She replied rather haughtily, “that’s never happened before”.  With that, she turned away and walked out of the room, back to the bar, from where we could hear her sobs of laughter for many minutes.  The evening didn’t go well.  Still, as long as I don’t write about it, no one else will ever know.  Oh.  Bugger.

     

     

  • 7 Reasons You Shouldn’t Watch The American

    7 Reasons You Shouldn’t Watch The American

    The new Anton Corbijn film – The American – starring George Clooney is out in the UK right now.  I saw it on Saturday, here are seven reasons that you shouldn’t. (and don’t worry, there are no spoilers)

    The poster for the George Clooney, Anton Corbijn, Irina Björklund,Paolo Bonacelli,Thekla Reuten,Violante Placido movie (film), The American

    1.  The Unconcious.  The pace of the first half of The American is slow.  It’s so slow, in fact, that if anyone had said “so slow”, it would have come out as,  “sssssssssssssssssssssssssssooooooooooooooooooooooooo sssssssssssssssssssssssllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww”.   Someone may even have said it, but I’m not sure, as I was dozing.  Not a deep and satisfying slumber, but the fitful sort where you find yourself alternating between brief bouts of consciousness and unconsciousness, with occasional forays into semi-consciousness and thoughts of what the hell is happening to me, is this what old age is like (ness).  So, I’ll sum up what I saw in the first half of the film (without spoilers).  I saw George Clooney living the soporifically mundane daily life of a hit-man.  In a series of slowly cut shots with no dialogue I watched him: Counting his bullets, drilling a series of small holes in some tips, oiling his mechanism (not a euphemism), polishing his barrel (nope, nor this), adjusting his sights, rearranging his small change on a table, lining up his fish fingers in size order, adding up all of the telephone numbers on his mobile and dividing them by four, testing the accuracy of his oven timer against his wristwatch (an Omega Speedmaster Professional with a black dial and black leather strap: model number 3870.50.31, I had time to note), comparing the shapes of his fingernails with his toenails, dusting his light bulbs, and staring into an empty fridge while over his head a strip-light buzzed  (I may be wrong on some of these, but if they weren’t there, it felt like they were).

    2.  The Conscious.  That’s not fair, you’re probably thinking, if you’d been awake, it probably wouldn’t have seemed that dull.  But I wasn’t the only person that was sleeping during the first half.  Because when I was in the toilet after the film, a man standing behind me said, “You were asleep during the first half” and, as I prepared to answer him, the man at the urinal next to me replied, “I know, it was really slow”.  It turned out that they were friends and that I wasn’t being addressed at all.  So there you have it.  Based on the available evidence, there are two distinct types of human-behaviour that occur during the first half of The American.  There are the Sleepers, who sleep, and then there are the Sleeper-Watchers who, while they have remained conscious, aren’t watching the film either; they’re watching people sleep so they can tell them about how they slept later, in great detail; “You kept leaning forward, and then you fell back, and then you leant forward, and then you fell back, and then you leant forward, and then you fell back, and then you said “chopsticks”, and then you fell back…”  was my personal Sleeper-Watcher’s epic account of my movements.  So, during the first half of the film, 50% of the audience are sleeping and the other 50% are watching them sleep and compiling a dossier on their movements, their utterances and their dribbling.  Which means that 100% of the audience are not watching the first part of the film.  That’s how dull it is.

    3.  Lust.  And then the second half of the film begins.  It begins with Violante Placido in bed with no clothes on and, in the words of my personal Sleeper-Watcher, “…you sat bolt upright and stared at the screen while breathing rapidly, remaining in that position for the rest of the scene, before you settled back in your seat and stayed awake for the rest of the film”.  So not only do you get a full report on how weird you are in your sleep, you get a full report on how lecherous you are when you’re wide-awake too.

    4.  Clooney.  And then there’s Clooney. Now I understand that George Clooney’s playing an emotionless, calculating and reserved man.  But we see his bottom in The American, and I can state categorically, that his arse has a greater number of expressions than his face in this film.  Here is his full range of facial expressions in The American (sorry if you were hoping for an arse montage, though we do have one of those on the About Us page):

    A montage of George Clooney's facial expression from the film (movie) The American
    7 Emotions : 1 Face

    5.  References.  During the film, in a scene where Clooney is counting the grains of salt contained in a salt cellar before he thinks about Switzerland for five minutes in a bar with formica tables, something distracting happens in the background.  There’s a film on the television.  It’s Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West.  God, I love that film, I thought.  It’s in my top ten films of all time.  Why aren’t I watching that?  Why in God’s name would you taunt the viewer by placing an iconic piece of cinematic brilliance within your own, not  brilliant, movie.  So, he’s made me fall asleep, he’s made me appear lecherous, he’s made me watch a man iron his vast collection of handkerchiefs with a lukewarm spoon, and now Anton Corbijn is actually taunting me.  He’s showing me a bit of a film that I love that’s better than the one he’s made and that I’m watching, I thought.  While screaming inwardly.

    6.  The Pants.  And then there are the pants.  Violante Placido, for reasons I won’t bore you with, decides to disrobe (except for her pants) and go swimming in a river.  But why would anyone take all of their clothes off except for their pants?  Then they’d be wet once they got out of the water.  And they’d have to go home wearing wet pants.  And who wants to wear wet pants for an afternoon?  And I know that you’re thinking that it was for the sake of modesty, but it wasn’t.  Because they became completely transparent the moment they got wet, a fact that my Sleeper-Watcher noted later, before he informed me that I, “…sat bolt-upright and made some sort of involuntary tongue noise.  And didn’t blink for eight whole minutes” in reaction to this scene.  Three days later, after a great deal of thought, I still can’t fathom the pants.

    7.  The Ending.  Again, I won’t tell you what happens, but there’s a moment of awareness when someone alters the thing.  And when that person – whose gender I won’t digress – alters the thing that I won’t name, I had a moment of clarity.  I knew, in that instant, that the character that was going to do the deed would be thwarted by the one that altered the thing and that the other character that I also won’t name would eventually have to do the deed – not with the broken thing that had been altered, but – with another thing but that we hadn’t been introduced to, and that the deed would end badly.  Not only for the character who had been forced to do the deed with the new thing, but also for the character to whom the deed was being done, that countered the deed with his own thing, having previously sparking this chain of events by altering the initial thing in the first place.  And it was just bloody obvious that was going to happen a long time before the end.

    So, to summarise:  During the first half of the film you will fall asleep or resort to watching someone else sleep to keep you entertained; you will then be branded a pervert, be partially baffled by facial expressions, taunted by the director, and then wholly baffled by pants before eventually spotting the blatantly obvious ending many minutes before the film ends.  I don’t think ungoing is an actual thing, but I want to do it.  Right now.