Hair and Moore

I've just about recovered from last Thursday. The only lasting damage was done to my hair — but I'll come that later. France's loss and Holland's victory both helped me on the road to recovery. Particularly France's loss... where is one's French office mate when one needs to mock them?

But enough about the football. And the moronic inhabitants of Thetford, not to mention those of Jersey, Liverpool and Boston.

On Thursday I got a little drunk, as is evidenced by my posts from Thursday evening. After, I think, my tenth beer I decided I needed to get my haircut. Sadly, I didn't resolve to go down to the barber's the following day, instead I decided it would be a good idea to cut it myself. Using a pair of nail scissors. Whilst drunk. Miraculously I still have both of my ears. Unsurprisingly on Friday morning my hair looked like a drunken man with a pair of nail scissors had cut it. It was such a mess that I was too embarrassed to go to the barber and have him do his best to tidy it up. Instead I bought a pair of clippers, a bargain at only $12.95 + tax, and am now sporting an almost military style haircut. At least that's what the front looks like, I'm not to sure about the back. I tried my best to ensure there are no mullet-like aspects of the back, and now I keep on feeling it and wondering if it's longer than the hair at the front... I don't think it is... it better not be.

Today I saw Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and I have to say it was some what disappointing. The first half of the film drones on about the links between the Bush family and the Saudis, particularly the Bin Laden family. To summarize Moore is stating that one rich oil family in Texas had links to another rich oil family in Saudi Arabia. Fancy that two incredibly rich families working in the same industry having links. Hardly ground breaking stuff. But it does get better. Lots of mocking Bush for his lack of attention to terrorism before September 11th and his reticence to attack al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and even more mocking of his decision to go to war in Iraq. Liberally sprinkled with dead Iraqi children and dead American soldiers.

The most moving and most scary parts of the film came from Moore's favourite location, his home town of Flint, Michigan. I was truly shocked to see a couple of US Marines, at least I think they were Marines, driving around the shopping malls and run down areas, walking up to people and trying to recruit them. It's one thing to go to a career fair, or have a stall in shopping centre or other passive methods. But walking up to people and almost press ganging them is something else... and I thought the religious crazies who try to convert me when I'm out and about were bad enough. Then there were the scenes with a woman in Flint whose son had died in Iraq, and how she was blaming Bush for sending all these poor American soldiers over to die in an unnecessary war. Even a heartless bastard such as myself felt for her.

At the end of lots of people, not including myself, clapped. I suspect they were all people who were going to vote Democrat, come November, before the film. Really what Moore has tried to make is a piece of anti-Bush propaganda as opposed to a documentary. I wonder if it will work. It certainly didn't effect me enough that I would change the way I'd vote, if of course I had a vote... which I don't. But maybe it didn't effect me because I'm not the target audience, after all I'm not American.

Still it was probably worth seeing. The scenes of Bush doing or saying something unintentionally funny (ha ha, not strange) are always amusing. But, for me at least, it didn't reach the heights of Bowling for Columbine.

In other news. Two films I've seen recently that I did think were very good are City of God and The Station Agent. The first is a film about drug dealers and gangsters and murders in the slums of Rio de Janeiro; the second a film about a dwarf train spotter (that is a train spotter who happens to be not very tall, and not someone looking for very small trains) living in an old train depot in Newfoundland, New Jersey. Both are excellent, although very different. I was thoroughly amazed at how little of the Portuguese I understood in City of God, not that I speak Portuguese. But I know some Spanish and French so I'd expected to understand a few of the words. I didn't.