Vicky Cristina Barcelona: what’s that all about, eh? Part five*

It’s possibly best to start reading earlier in the series but if you really can’t be bothered, all you really need to know is that I’ve been trying to figure out Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

PS1 In case you need telling, I don’t think all Americans are narcissists or that all America is narcissist. Or even that the invasion of Iraq was necessarily a totally bad thing or completely stupid idea. Just that narcissism and solipsism were big players in the badnesses and stupidities of the invasion and what came after.

PS2 Spending so many hours at the cinema with my sons and daughters gave me a deep appreciation for children’s films. Most of them are far better made, acted and plotted than adult films. Children’s passion for logic and consistency is so often worn down as they grow older, their own passion eclipsed by their wish to have their own thoughts supplanted by another’s withered hysterias. How else to explain the status of, say, Ken Loach or Mike Leigh?

PS3 My daughter’s current rave is Toy Story 3. She’s grown-up. She watched it on her laptop, a bootleg recorded on a phone from a mid-row seat in some American or Israeli multiplex. I can’t do that. I’m a grown-up grown-up. I’d love to see it at the cinema but I no longer have any children to take me. If I went by myself, they’d think I was a paedophile. And I had enough of those as a child myself, watching cartoons, alone, at long-defunct cartoons-only cinemas on Oxford Street and Victoria Station, moving seat about every five minutes so as to stay one step ahead of their hands. (And I wonder why I’ve just about given up on cinemas.)

Some entertainment?

The last government was always talking about things being ‘world class’. I never quite figured out how — on the Class Scale — that related to footballer’s ‘different class’. Which trumps which**. Oh well, here is a kind of international infant school guide to the world — where everyone is the best at something.

And here is someone who really was the best. Different class or world class or just class? All of them, I guess.

* Of five

** I have the same problem with the Load Scale. I’m never sure which is the greater, a shed-load, a shit-load or a fuck-load?

Next up I’m taking a break for a bit and will return at the start of the football season with — at last — my wonderings about who Freud would have supported in the World Cup. And the Premier League.