Lancing the Boyle

Westerns
Originally uploaded by The Salaryman.

Underground adverts are not unlike aggressive beggars or flashers. Even more so when you come out of the station and are confronted with a poster pimping the same cultural excreta that has been saturating every wall and surface in the tunnels. Walkways and escalators are covered with colourful noise from Dewynters – the wise vertically integrated marketing people that have very successfully corned (or else cornered) the market in attracting philistine hordes to the latest cash in musical (I am waiting for more meritless back catalogues to be pilfered – maybe a musical based on Don Henley’s 1980s solo output set amongst witty, desirable American high school kids?) or turgid ‘new play’ starring someone who may have been in EastEnders around 1996 about divorcees with a long line in one liners. Emerging from a hailstorm of saccharine nonsense once again, I was confronted by a mass of freckles and slightly cheeky looking childness set against a blue sky with falling pound notes.

Millions ‘The Danny Boyle film you can take your kids to see!’

He was back – the man behind the celluloid methane bomb that was ‘The Beach’ has somehow taken advantage of the tax break slush fund nature of the UK’s film industry to make more product.

Boyle let me down and led me astray. As a youth, I was amused by Shallow Grave – a sub par thriller based around a formula more tired than a half remembered ‘knock knock’ joke. Then was I was completely enthralled by his magnum opus:

Trainfuckingspottingposterssayingchooselifeinevery
tediousstudenthallsforfuckingyears

I loved it and I was an oaf for doing so. It is a piece of grunge-y zeitgeist-y merchandise with a self consciously great soundtrack that has aged worse than a packet of special Irn Bru tie in edition ‘Lunchables’ left absent mindedly under a radiator for ten years. Oh, and if Irvine Welsh thinks he some kind of tartan Joyce for the ‘E’ generation than you can call me Will. I also had a copy of the ‘Reservoir Dogs’ screenplay at this time, sadly.

So now ‘Millions’ – a trivial moral fable about two kids who get into lots of obvious choices and fake peril with the aid of £229k in stolen cash. And they have to spend it in a few days as the UK is changing over to the Euro. This thing must have spent a very long time in development indeed, as the chances of that happening at all are rather low. One kid is a consumer, the other some kind of religious loser who talks to saints and wants to give it away in a random and inequitable fashion. Lots of innovation there. If either had any sense they would call one of the numbers in the back of in flight magazines and call some shifty buggers from Aruba to look after it for them. Of course I have not seen it as knowing my luck, I would be crushed and electrocuted by a falling projector – and would not want such a thing as my last memory. Hopefully when Gordon closes the loophole we will see less of this sort of refuse.

Holiday moments with bog brush haircuts

bogbrushcrulo
Originally uploaded by The Salaryman.

Holiday companies are clearly not as liable for the strictures of the Trade Description Act as other firms. Referring to Lido de Jesolo as the ‘Venetian Riviera’ is about as accurate as calling Hastings the London Riviera – at least Jesolo was sort of a German/Italianate version so light on taste but also missing new age English seaside pleasures such as the sight of DSS drug zombies shuffling along piers as the faded, green stains in the vague shape of a Bulldog gently peel on the be-sovereigned Dagenham Man nearby.

No matter how nice a trip is, if you make the mistake of going with package types there will be moments when one’s fear of mortality exits for a time. Listening to conversations that have less use than frog flatulence, the cackling of smug retirees (who really should be more sympathetic to those of us of a generation that will work for another fifteen years than them and retire on a pension smaller than the daily takings of a bad busker) and the loud antics of chav larvae makes one wish voiding for a moment, before seeing something beautiful again.

Italians, for all the dodgy accounting, do really have more casual style than Northern Europeans. The shaded driver is as impervious to the presence of this bog brushed creature as he should be.