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Friday 28 June 2013

The Shock of the New

So, like most of the British public, I have little interest in tennis for the vast majority of the year.  I keep up with the grand slams, and make it my business to know who the top players are, but that's pretty much it.  But as soon as Wimbledon comes around, I'm hooked like that bloke in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  This year is no exception, and it's been a bizarre tournament so far.  Players are retiring through injury left, right and centre (some blame the courts, others defend the surface), and the likes of Sharapova, Nadal and Federer have been knocked out in the first two rounds.  Yet Serena Williams remain in this tournament of surprise exits, so clearly the tennis gods are waiting to serve something up for her (if you'll pardon the pun.  If you're going to be following this blog you're going to have to be pardoning a lot of them) for saying some truly stupid shit about rape.  Then again, if karma existed in sport, Argentina's tally of World Cups would be at zero.

Speaking of the World Cup, I and a lot of my generation have fond memories of the 2002 tournament, mainly because due to the time difference, the games took place in the morning by UK time, which meant that we got to watch some of the England matches at school, our teachers having (probably rightly) assumed that kids would play truant so they could watch our boys in action, if they didn't have the option of sitting in the school hall at 7:30am eating bacon butties and watching, respectively, an agonisingly boring 0-0 draw with Nigeria and a merely agonising 2-1 defeat to Brazil.  This concession wasn't enough for those of us who would rather watch a mid-morning Turkey-China matchup than attend lessons on algebra and the possessive apostrophe, but it was a nice thought.

As we all know, nostalgia is a powerful force.  Just because an eleven-year-old me had a great time down at the schoolyard discussing Spain's chances with our exchange student Julio, doesn't mean that the tournament itself was necessarily a good one.  The 2002 World Cup was marked by a ridiculous number of shocks; Portugal, Argentina and defending champions France crashed out in the group stages (France in particular failing so hard that it remains unmatched in their history, though they had a damn good try in 2010).  Italy lost in the second round to co-hosts South Korea, who ended up reaching the semis, dispatching current footballing nonpareils Spain on penalties in the quarters.  Other surprise quarter-finalists included Turkey, Senegal and the USA.  The connection with this year's Wimbledon should be obvious, which brings me to my main line of inquiry; does a great number of shock defeats for the favourites devalue a tournament?

I'm aware this may seem paradoxical, considering that earlier this week I praised Tahiti's presence at the Confederations Cup, but then Tahiti were first-round cannon fodder.  They didn't beat anybody, whereas the likes of Michelle Larcher de Brito, Sergey Stakhovsky and Steve Darcis definitely, memorably did.  I love it when teams such as Senegal make it to the World Cup and want them to succeed, but at the same time I want the favourites to do well; seeing some of the best players in the world underperform, as so many of them did in 2002, is honestly fairly dispiriting.  I would far rather watch Rafael Nadal at full throttle, playing like we all know he can and taking tennis to new and thrilling heights, than a Nadal clearly struggling with injury losing to a player he should be beating, regardless of how well his opponent did to win (and Steve Darcis played the game of his life).  A big tournament like Wimbledon or the World Cup is on one hand about drama, and shocks provide that.  But it's also about the pursuit of excellence, and ideally I'd like a championship final to be between the best in the world that year.  It feels wrong saying this; after all, I'm British and as a nation we love an outsider.  I've yet to speak to anybody who thinks that this year's Wimbledon is the better for the loss of Sharapova, Federer and Nadal by the middle of the first week.

And yet, for sport to mean anything it must be a meritocracy.  On the day, Steve Darcis outplayed Rafael Nadal.  Stakhovsky outplayed Federer and de Brito outplayed Sharapova.  In 2002, Senegal outplayed France.  The USA outplayed Portugal.  South Korea didn't outplay Spain and Italy, but the referees seemed to be very sympathetic to them due to their being a) the underdogs (Tahiti maybe got away with a few fouls last week that a team like Uruguay would have been penalised for) and b) the host nation (see also: Manchester United; Old Trafford; Penalties; Mike Riley).  When a team is lucky, as South Korea were, then a win over a top team often leaves a bad taste in the mouth.  But in sport, and particularly in tennis, the better team or player nearly always wins.  Teams like France and Argentina didn't acclimatise well to the conditions in the Far East.  Teams like Turkey and a relatively unfancied Germany did, so they went through.  Stakhovsky may have been younger and hungrier than Federer on the day, and was certainly the better player.  It's a shame when the top stars of a sport underperform, but you can't begrudge their conquerors their success (unless they're South Korea, evidently).  Much as great sportsmen and sportswomen excelling in their chosen field is thrilling, so too was Papa Bouba Diop's winning goal for Senegal against France in the opening game in 2002, and the team's subsequent delighted, dancing celebrations.

I think, in the end, it all comes down to balance (and I'm aware that by writing these words I've disqualified myself from a post as a sports correspondent for Fox News).  Shocks are precious because they're comparatively rare.  The title wins of the unseeded Boris Becker and Goran Ivanisevic at Wimbledon were fantastic because the tournament is so often won by one of the top few seeds.  The same goes for Ghana's run at the 2010 World Cup, in which they were a penalty kick away from the semi-finals.  In a field of top teams (Spain, Germany, the Netherlands) performing to the best of their capabilities, it was amazing to see an outfit like Ghana emerge as the last underdog standing.  When there are so many shocks, as in 2002, where in seemingly every match it was a toss-up as to who would win, it does devalue the tournament to a certain extent, but more than that, it devalues the power of the shock itself to move us and to thrill us.  Only time will tell whether this year's Wimbledon will follow the same pattern as the Japan/South Korea World Cup, or whether the top seeds Djokovic and Serena will find their names on the trophy after all.  But as a (fairweather) tennis fan, I'd rather Nadal and Federer were still in the competition, and with the greatest respect to players like Sergey Stakhovsky and Tsonga's conqueror Ernests Gulbis, a year in which they found themselves playing each other in the semi-finals would be a poor year for the Championships in a lot of ways.

Monday 24 June 2013

Wrestling Review: WWE Payback 2013

Before we begin - yes, I know it's not real.

Payback really is the archetypal B-show.  It doesn't have the tradition and name appeal of Wrestlemania, Summerslam or Survivor Series, or a gimmick theme to add interest, like with Money in the Bank, TLC or -God forbid - Hell in a Cell (I remember when Hell in a Cell matches were only used to end particularly vicious feuds, not because it's October).  It was just a bunch of matches, in a sequence.  Thankfully, all of the matches ranged from above average to excellent, which all added up to make Payback the WWE show of the year by a long way.

(Note: Seeing as this is my first wrestling review, any industry terms that may be unfamiliar will be explained at the bottom of the page)

Match 1: Wade Barrett (c) vs. The Miz vs. Curtis Axel (w/ Paul Heyman) (Triple Threat Match for the Intercontinental Championship)

Interesting choice for the opener, considering that at the moment the IC title has as much prestige as the National Television Awards (Waterloo Road as Most Popular Drama over Sherlock?  Kiss my ringpiece, British public), and that none of the three men involved are known as particularly flashy of high-octane performers.  But this match ended up impressing me; it was nothing special, but was a solid pro wrestling match with some cool moments and an inventive finish.  Curtis Axel was the star of the show here, and the weird thing was that he wasn't even meant to be in the match, but then Fandango got a concussion doing the paso doble too vociferously (or something).  His tactics in the match fit very well with his character; in recent weeks he's been scumming wins over John Cena and Triple H via countout, disqualification, Vince McMahon stopping the match just to screw with his son-in-law, and Cena having better things to do and leaving the ring to stare at an ambulance.  Doesn't do wonders for the guy's credibility, but then he's not beating Cena or Triple H in a straight fight.  So Axel, true to form, played it very sneaky, lurking outside the ring conferring with new manager Paul Heyman, biding his time and waiting for an opportunity to pounce, which was a refreshing change from the usual 'one guy gets knocked out of the ring and mysteriously incapacitated for three to five minutes while the other two have a normal match' template for three-ways.  The finish played into this dynamic, with Miz having Barrett trapped in the Figure-Four Leglock, and Axel stealing the win by sliding in and pinning Barrett's shoulders to the mat just before he could tap to the submission hold.  So now he has a belt, which should help the credibility thing.

A couple more points on this match: firstly, Miz as a face actually working for once.  I haven't been the biggest fan of his face run, firstly because his character is still the same douchebag as it was when he was a heel, only now he insults bad guys, and secondly because he's no more than passable in the ring.  The Figure-Four always gets the crowd going, but that's mainly because of its association with the legendary Ric Flair.  But in this match, there was a point where he got back in the ring and laid waste to the other two guys in an intense and exciting manner, and the crowd went wild!  More of this, please.  Another thing to remark upon is the reaction Curtis Axel gleaned from the crowd.  Chicago crowds are usually full of smarks who know their wrestling history, and Axel is the son of the late Mr. Perfect, a very well-respected performer.  So the crowd was very much behind him, despite his being a heel, and the pop when he hit his dad's old finishing move, the Perfect-Plex, was one of the biggest of the night.  The commentators sold it as a big win, especially it being on Father's Day, and there was really no indication that Axel was being excoriated for winning the match in such an underhanded way.  It was presented as a joyous moment, which may just indicate that in front of a Chicago crowd, all bets are off when it comes to character alignments.

Wade Barrett was just sort of there, which has really been the story of his title reign.  Rating: **3/4

Match 2: Kaitlyn (c) vs. AJ Lee (w/ Big E. Langston) (WWE Divas Championship)

Listen; mainstream women's wrestling in the USA has never been good.  Luckily in the modern age you can go and watch Manami Toyota vs. Kyoko Inoue on Youtube, or something similar.  The WWE generally hires female wrestlers for their looks, gives them very few storylines, and books short matches.  But sometimes you get an exception to the rule, and this was it.  This match had actually been over a year in the making, ever since AJ turned on her former best friend back in early 2012, for having the temerity to (correctly) suggest that her boyfriend Daniel Bryan was an emotionally manipulative jerk (Note: At the present time, Daniel Bryan is a beloved fan favourite.  Such is the fast-flowing nature of wrestling storytelling).  Things came to a head when Kaitlyn began receiving texts and gifts from a secret admirer, which turned out to be AJ trolling her with the help of her heavy Big E. Langston.  Then Kaitlyn went ape on Smackdown and slapped a referee about.  So we have an evil challenger playing mind games and getting inside the head of a champion who's beginning to lose her composure, and a friendship rent asunder.  When you give two female wrestlers an actual storyline, and a whole ten minutes to put on a match that plays into it, guess what?  It's entertaining.  It's not hard.

Let me be straight; this wasn't an amazing match.  But by the standards of WWE women's matches, it was incredible.  It was wrestled smartly, there were some impressive reversal sequences (a crossbody into an attempted tilt-a-whirl slam into an octopus stretch springs to mind), and Kaitlyn's spear is better than most male wrestlers who've used the move as a finisher.  I'm looking at you, Edge.  The finish of the match played into the story.  Kaitlyn speared AJ out of her boots and could have pinned her, but decided to inflict more punishment on her tormentor.  This backfired, and AJ locked on another Octopus Stretch, to which Kaitlyn tapped out.  Shockingly, Big E. Langston didn't get involved at all, preferring instead to stand at ringside with his arms folded throughout the match, which will never not be awesome.

After the match, Kaitlyn began to weep, to which the Chicago crowd, ever contrarian, responded by booing and chanting 'You Tapped Out'.  I don't think that's the reaction they were going for.  One guy yelled 'THERE'S NO CRYING IN WRESTLING!', which leads me to believe he's never seen Ric Flair vs. Shawn Michaels.  But I think we've learned that wrestling fans don't like open displays of emotions that aren't righteous anger.  I'm not sure how much of a fan of the 'secret admirer' part of the feud I was (you generally don't get a story like that with the gender roles reversed, thought there are precedents), but at least we got a fleshed-out storyline for WWE's women, even if it didn't pass the Bechdel Test.

Oh, and Jerry Lawler on commentary at one point espoused the damaging fallacy that all women secretly hate each other.  I know I shouldn't expect anything less from the old dinosaur, but if he does it again I'm going to hire Kenta Kobashi to fly to Memphis and give him the Burning Hammer.  Rating: ***

Match 3: Dean Ambrose (c) vs. Kane (United States Championship)

This was the weakest match of the night, but still perfectly fine.  I will always have a soft spot for Kane and his destructive rampages in many a Royal Rumble, and I do love his current character of 'surprisingly reasonable and caring fire demon from Hell' (Kane doing 'normal people things' is always funny), but he's never been the greatest wrestler in the world by any stretch.  What made this match still compelling was the dynamic between the performers, and Ambrose's mannerisms played into their shared history; Ambrose's heel group The Shield put Kane's brother The Undertaker out of action.  Ambrose is great at playing a creepy weirdo (think Heath Ledger's Joker) and at one point in the match he parroted Taker's trademark throat-slitting gesture and attempted his 'Old School' rope-walking manoeuvre, which Kane ended up reversing.  Angered, Kane lost his composure and tried to slam Ambrose through the announcers' table on the outside, which Ambrose reversed into a DDT, after which he slid back into the ring and won by countout.  Again, storytelling through wrestling; an unspectacular and fairly plodding match elevated by good character work.

True to form, the crowd frequently chanted 'Let's Go Ambrose'.  But they didn't boo Kane.  You can't boo Kane.  He's not quite face and not quite heel; he's transcended the simple binary, like a 7-foot masked Jacques Derrida.  Rating: **1/4

Match 4: Dolph Ziggler (w/ Big E. Langston and AJ Lee) (c) vs. Alberto del Rio (w/ Ricardo Rodriguez) (World Heavyweight Championship)

I know I've been going on about the importance of storytelling, but I'm a firm believer that a truly great wrestling match cannot just rely on the moves involved.  Case in point; Do Fixer (Ryo Saito, Genki Horiguchi and Dragon Kid) vs. Blood Generation (Masato Yoshino, Naruki Doi and CIMA) from ROH in 2006.  A visually dazzling and very fast-paced match featuring six great athletes, featuring some impressive high-flying.  And it's honestly kind of boring.  I would much rather watch a match between lesser athletes who are not just throwing out moves for 25 minutes until it's time for someone to win, but who are using their moves to tell a story.  In the last three matches on Payback, we saw three examples of very different stories being told.  The fourth match was the best on the show in terms of narrative, even if technically it was less than perfect.

Dolph Ziggler cashed in his Money in the Bank briefcase the night after Wrestlemania, taking advantage of an injured del Rio, in what was honestly the best 2-minute match I've ever seen.  Thereafter, he suffered a concussion, and was on the shelf for a while, which meant that del Rio had to wait to get his hands on him.  Another thing about Dolph Ziggler; despite being a heel, he gets cheered by a sizeable minority of the crowd (this happens a lot amongst smarks nowadays; see also Punk, CM).  The noise when he emerged to challenge del Rio to win the title in the first place was deafening; the night after Wrestlemania is notorious for attracting the hardest of the hardcore fans.  Chicago, as I've said, is full of smarks, so you can guess what happened.  Ziggler - the heel - got cheered to the rafters.  And reactions like this put wrestling companies in a difficult position.  Do you stick with the story you're trying to tell, or do you adjust a wrestler's alignment based on how the crowd are responding to the narrative you're trying to present?  Obviously, you don't do the latter all the time, especially in front of a Chicago crowd, who in the first match cheered a man who is accompanied by a known shyster and who lives on undeserved victories, simply because his dad was a good wrestler.  But Ziggler's been attracting cheers for ages, and del Rio hasn't been working that well as a face (probably because his face character is very generic).  Sometimes, audiences force the hands of the writers.

That's what happened here.  The story WWE told was thus; del Rio was desperate to win the title, so desperate that he targeted the recently-concussed Ziggler with an array of kicks to the head.  The doctor (and his seconds) asked if he wanted to stop the match, but Ziggler fought on and looked like he was going to make a comeback, until del Rio finally ended the match with another head kick.  Ziggler gained the sympathy of the audience, despite having been previously cast as the villain (he did a brilliant job of selling the neurological trauma of the kicks), and del Rio looked like a heel for ruthlessly decimating a stricken man.  The crowd did a lot of the writers' job for them by cheering the heel and booing the face, and by the end of the match Ziggler was established as a plucky face, and del Rio as a dickhead who went too far.  There were a few iffy moments in the match (Ziggler messed up a Cross Armbreaker counter into a Fameasser), but the action was great, and Ziggler's performance as a man in peril terrific.  Rating: ***1/2

(Note: del Rio gave a promo after the match celebrating his win, just like a face would, while the crowd booed him vociferously.  On Raw, he acted much more heelish, blaming the crowd for never having taken to him, and cheering the villainous Ziggler over him.  I thought that they'd go the direction of having him as a champion trying to play to the crowd while unaware that they hate him, but then they already have John Cena for that.)

Match 5: CM Punk (w/ Paul Heyman) vs. Chris Jericho

This match was just on the card to sell tickets.  CM Punk is from Chicago, where he is loved like no other wrestler.  He'd been out of action since losing to The Undertaker at Wrestlemania, but made his triumphant return here in front of his hometown crowd.  Unlike the previous bout, there was no story behind this, other than both men trying to prove who is the best (Note: In Japan, this is every match).

Despite this, the action was superb, which was expected, as both competitors are excellent wrestlers.  There were many believable false finishes, reversals and submission counters, which had me enthralled.  CM Punk, despite sporting sideburns not seen since the days of Martin van Buren, was cheered crazily, and put in a great performance; even his top-rope elbow drop, which is usually pretty dodgy, came off well.  Jericho played heel a little bit (in front of this crowd, he had to), and provided a strong adversary for Punk to overcome in his return match.  The finish made Jericho look tough, as it needed two finishers to beat him; Punk hit the GTS, which knocked Jericho into the corner, so Punk grabbed him and hit the move again.  This provided redemption for Wrestlemania, where the same thing happened, only with The Undertaker, after the first GTS, thinking 'fuck your finisher, I'm literally a zombie', no-selling it and Tombstoning the hell out of him.  So this match did everything it needed to to re-establish Punk as a major player in the WWE; it was long, and felt significant because of all the finisher kick-outs, and gave him a win over a credible opponent in an excellent match.  The only criticism I'd make is that the result was never in doubt (as only idiots would book a returning hometown hero to lose his first match after an absence), and also that they could have made more of Heyman's interference almost inadvertently costing Punk the match, if, as I suspect, they're going to split them up as a team (Note: they did).  But those are minor quibbles, and for me, this was the best match of the night.  Rating: ****

Match 6: The Shield (Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns) (c) vs. Daniel Bryan and Randy Orton (WWE Tag Team Championship)

This, on the other hand, was slightly disappointing.  The problem was that the match felt too short for what it was, like they went straight from the feeling-out stages to the finish.  It wasn't as good as the six-man tag matches that we see from The Shield on a weekly basis on free TV.  Daniel Bryan was as awesome as ever (and the crowd bloody loved him, despite his being a face), but Randy Orton was a bit of a detriment to the match.  The issue with Orton is that he only periodically looks like he isn't going through the motions.  I thought he'd turned a corner with the surprisingly great match at Extreme Rules against the Big Show.  He looked energized, got the crowd fired up, and put on an entertaining bout.  He even brought back the Punt!  But here he was seemingly wrestling at 70% speed, although there was one awesome moment where he caught Rollins coming off the top rope and powerslammed him (Randy Orton's powerslam is a thing of beauty and is better than the RKO.  Discuss).  I loved the finish though, which did a lot to further the tensions between Bryan and Orton.  Bryan did his usual dive to the outside, but The Shield moved out the way, and he accidentally clattered into Orton.  Later in the match, Reigns was going for a spear on Orton, so he shoved Bryan in the way rather than take the hit himself.  Orton gave Reigns the RKO, but Rollins threw Orton out of the ring and beat the stricken Bryan with a brutal-looking stomp to the head.  So Orton looks heelish for taking revenge on Bryan for what was an honest mistake (which is good if they're going to be feuding, as the WWE would be moronic if they made the wildly popular Bryan the heel), and The Shield look like a cogent team by comparison.  But this wasn't the best match these four could have done by a long shot.  Rating: **3/4

(Before I review the main event, just a few notes on backstage happenings.  Triple H confronted Curtis Axel after his title win and gave him the brush off, which makes Axel look like he isn't on Trips' level, though to be honest he isn't.  Triple H and Vince McMahon had a confrontation, as Vince wants Triple H to retire for the good of his health.  Vince, trying to play reverse psychologist, said to Triple H that he could have a match with Curtis Axel, so Triple H said no just to spite him.  I'd ask for a refund on that 'Manipulation for Dummies' book.  Also, ROB VAN DAM IS COMING BACK YES YES YES.  RVD was a favourite of mine back in 2002-3 for doing loads of cool flippy stuff, wearing awesome leotards, and being in my all-time favourite odd-couple tag team with Kane (I'm sorry, Booker T and Goldust, but that's the way it has to be). The last time I saw him wrestle was last year in TNA and he looked pretty damn slow compared to in his pomp, but I can't see any harm in having him back as a nostalgia act.  Plus, my girlfriend informs me that when the announcement 'RVD returns at Money in the Bank' came up on screen, I looked like a kid in a candy store.)

Main Event: John Cena (c) vs. Ryback (Three Stages of Hell Match for the WWE Championship)

Firstly, props to the contrarians of Chicago for booing both men during the introductions.  That'll learn 'em.  Look, just pick someone to cheer, won't you?  I know neither man is a smark favourite, but cheer whoever you hate less.  As Noam Chomsky said, "Choosing the lesser of two evils isn't a bad thing.  The cliche makes it sound bad, but it's a good thing.  You get less evil."

John Cena gets a lot of flak for his supposed lack of ring ability, but he's really not bad at all.  His TV matches are generally very samey, and he could sell a bit (and sometimes a lot) more, especially after the end of a match, but his high-profile matches are invariably good; I'd still rate his match with CM Punk on Raw earlier this year as the best match I've seen in 2013.  Ryback is a big dude with some debilitating-looking power moves, and his character since he turned heel (basically, master troll) has been very entertaining.  However, this match didn't fill me with confidence when it was announced as a Lumberjack Match followed by a Tables Match followed by an Ambulance Match.  I love tables more than Ikea, but lumberjack matches are often fairly dull because the presence of men around the ring throwing the participants back inside limits what you can do with a match, and I can only think of one good ambulance match (Kane vs. Shane McMahon from 2003).  But this ended up being a perfectly serviceable main event.

Stage 1 featured the best spot of the night, as Ryback ended up in the middle of a 40-man brawl on the outside, and Cena climbed up on the top rope, jumped onto EVERYONE, and they all toppled like dominoes.  It was a really great visual.  You can show me technical wrestling between Dean Malenko and Chris Benoit or a whole host of World of Sport guys, and I can appreciate the artistry but there's a chance it'll leave me cold (and I know that this may seem heretical, what with my being British).  But you give me John Cena jumping on a pile of dudes, and I'll be wowed.  That probably says a lot about me, but you can't deny that the crowd loves it, and as I've said, it was a memorable moment.  Ryback won the first fall when he reversed Cena's STF into the Shell Shock (which may well be my favourite finishing move not enacted by Brock Lesnar) and pinned him.

Stage 2 was a tables match, and Ryback didn't screw about, getting his wood out straight away.  The problem with the second stage of any 2/3 falls match is that we know we're getting a third stage (the ambulance parked next to the ramp was a bit of a giveaway).  But Cena and Ryback did enough to keep it interesting, mostly by way of Ryback trying to obliterate Cena by using his freakish strength to throw the steel steps at him.  Both times Cena dodged, and a table got shattered into splinters, which was, again, a cool visual, really bringing home the fact that Ryback is dangerous.  Ryback tried to Shell Shock Cena again, but Cena countered into the Attitude Adjustment and slammed him through a table.  Next.

Stage 3 started with Ryback recovering and powerbombing Cena through the announcers' table (shockingly, not the Spanish one).  Thereafter, the match took place on the ramp, which must have sucked for the live crowd.  Any suggestions that the ambulance may have in fact been real were dispelled when the wrestlers started removing parts (like the bonnet and the siren) and use them as weapons.  Eventually, they got up top, and Cena AAed Ryback through the roof (I hope for his sake that wasn't legit) to retain the title.  Watching all the ambulance parts being used to inflict damage was fun, but it was a bit too light-hearted and it lacked the gravitas that a big title match really needs.  But then I expect nothing less from John Cena.  This was the weakest stage of the match, but the overall package was entertaining and capped off an excellent show.  Rating: ***1/4

Glossary

Face - Good guy
Heel - Bad guy
Smark - Hardcore fan, who knows the inner workings of the business (how a match is put together, for example), and who is more likely to cheer a heel over a face, for example if the heel is a better in-ring worker, or has a more entertaining character.
Alignment - Whether a wrestler is face or heel

Sunday 23 June 2013

If You Can't Stand Tahiti, Get Out Of The Kitchen

International football will always be awesome in my eyes, far moreso than club football.  I love the history behind it, and there's something more exciting about keeping up with the fortunes of minnows like Eritrea and Tuvalu than there is about following your average lower-league domestic team.  Sorry, Accrington Stanley fans, but that's the truth.  The quality of even the top international fixtures isn't as good as the Premier League or the Bundesliga, and supporting England can often seem like a grim march to the grave.  But it's not about the money for the players (which is probably why they seem less motivated), but more about glory.  That and national pride, which I'm less on board with (after all, I'm from the nation that sings 'Two World Wars and One World Cup whenever we play Germany, to which the Germans should really respond 'Three World Cups, Eleven Semi-Finals, and we may not have won a world war, but we did rebuild our economy afterwards, we provide for our people better and are generally less disagreeable than you lot', but I guess that's not as catchy), but what ya gonna do?  When a big international tournament happens, it brings people together in celebration, and that's a wonderful thing, whereas club football is more unpleasantly tribal.  It's an occasion for rejoicing in the beauty of life.

Or it's an occasion for rioting over the cost of the thing, as we've seen in Brazil.  And it would be a shame if that were to overshadow a lovely fairytale; that of Tahiti.  For those who don't know, the Confederations Cup is played every four years, twelve months ahead of the World Cup, in the same host nation, so as to provide a sort of warm-up for the big one, and the champions of every continent are invited to participate.  The champions of Oceania (a confederation consisting of New Zealand and the Pacific islands, ever since traditional powerhouse Australia started playing Asian teams instead) are Tahiti, ranked 138th in the world and with one professional player.

They got smashed in every game; 6-1 by Nigeria, 10-0 by Spain, and 8-0 by Uruguay.  There was a huge gulf in class; Tahiti defended naively and were far too rigid in positioning.  But then that was exactly what was expected.  Nobody will remember all the goals, but they will remember the moments.  The atmosphere at the games was superb, with the players cheering and booing like Tahiti were Hulk Hogan and their opposition were Andre the Giant.  The Brazilian fans have been more enchanted with Tahiti than was Paul Gauguin; it's not very often, after all, that they get to support the underdogs in international football.  The BBC commentator said it best when he remarked that when Spain got a penalty, the whole stadium was willing Fernando Torres to miss.  And then he did!  The keeper celebrated like he'd won the lottery - Tahiti were 8-0 down at the time - and raised his hands to the heavens and thanked God, thought if he'd watched more Chelsea matches the last couple of years he'd know that Fernando Torres doesn't need divine intervention to miss a shot.  The joy on the faces of the Tahitian players when they scored their only goal of the tournament against Nigeria was a sight to behold, and the cheer when the Tahitian goalkeeper saved a lazily-struck penalty from the Uruguayan centre-back was deafening.  After the Spain drubbing, the world champions cleared off the pitch quickly so that the team that had just lost 10-0 could take their well-deserved standing ovation from the audience, which was a lovely display of sportsmanship; say what you will about Jose Mourinho as a person, but when a lower league team came to Stamford Bridge in the FA Cup, he always went out of his way to be hospitable and to make it a special day for them.  It was the same at the Maracana.  For Spain it was just another international game, for Tahiti an experience that will stay with them forever.

And that's the point I'm trying to make, really.  Andy Carroll may apparently be worth £35m, but the experience of playing the world champions at one of the most famous stadiums in the world is beyond price. Some people were rather churlishly questioning Tahiti's place at the tournament, but it's not their fault that they qualified.  Critics said the same when North Korea went to the 1966 World Cup when accomplished  European teams like Scotland and Yugoslavia were at home, but then the Koreans beat Italy and nearly reached the semis.  Obviously, Tahiti were never going to cause a shock like that, but their shocks were smaller in scale - the goalkeeper saving a penalty, a striker scoring a consolation goal, Luis Suarez being robbed by a defender who works on a building site - and they were all the more precious because of that.  Best of all, they attacked!  Even at ten goals down to Spain, there were no thoughts of damage limitation.  They got men forward and really had a go.  Compare it to the Spain-Ireland game last summer at Euro 2012, which was a dreadful experience.  Ireland barely attempted to play attacking football; they spent 90 minutes parking the bus in front of their goal, and Spain still battered them.  Not as badly as they trounced Tahiti, but I know which I'd rather see as a football fan.  Tahiti were bigger outsiders than the protagonist in a Camus novel, and they did themselves proud by really trying.  For every race storm or nightclub punch-up in the Premier League, there's moments like this, and I doubt I'll treasure anything from the upcoming domestic season like I did Tahiti's three brave defeats in Brazil.  Tahiti; the worst team in the history of the Confederations Cup, and the greatest.

Movie Review: World War Z

WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS

Hollywood has decided to turn all the books I love into films, and I've come to terms with that.  I've decided to delay seeing Cloud Atlas (mixed reviews) and Midnight's Children (generally poor reviews) until a time wherein I can cope with the possible mental trauma of seeing two of my most beloved novels of all time imagined in a way that I find inadequate.  I live in hope, but then I did watch Dorian Gray, in which the gay subtext was rendered as a gay supertext, thus negating one of the main dynamics of the original text, and in which Colin Firth played Lord Henry Wotton looking like his own pervy uncle.  So generally I go into book adaptations with low expectations, and hope that I'll be pleasantly surprised.

Max Brooks' World War Z is by no means a modern classic along the lines of the David Mitchell (no, not that one) and Salman Rushdie tomes mentioned above, but it's still a great book.  It's an ostensible oral account of a zombie apocalypse, as told by its survivors, who are located in such diverse places as Tibet, the West Indies, and Antarctica.  The book eschews unity of character in favour of depicting an overarching progression from outbreak to catastrophe to resistance, via short sections that are representative of this historical trajectory.  It's vivid in its imagination of the horror, and its take on possible human reactions to a zombie contagion is deeply disturbing, precisely because it seems so plausible.  Needless to say, it comes highly recommended.

Obviously, a narrative like this is unfilmable.  You can't pack three dozen or so characters into a two-hour movie and expect the audience to keep up, especially a movie of the summer blockbuster kind.  So instead of a disparate array of apocalypse survivors, we get Philadelphia native and former UN investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), fighting to save his family and the world from the marauding hordes of the undead.  He travels to such exotic locations as South Korea, Jerusalem and, er, Wales, in order to find a cure for the murderous reanimation being experienced by swathes of the globe.  It's a pretty simple narrative, which is fair enough.  A simple narrative done well can be a wonderful thing, and I'd rather see that than a faithful but unsuccessful rendering of Brooks' rather complex and epistolary book.

I will say this for World War Z in its motion picture form; it doesn't mess around.  In the first five minutes we get: Gerry's family having breakfast; Gerry's family stuck in traffic; ZOMBIES EVERYWHERE JESUS CHRIST.  I felt a bit more time could have been spent on building up the eventual apotheosis of the outbreak, a la Shaun of the Dead (I know it's a comedy, but a great zombie film nonetheless), in which the zombie infestation is foreshadowed for the first third of the film.  But it's a minor quibble, and there's far more significant things to criticize about World War Z.

Firstly, and this may be controversial, but THEY'RE NOT SODDING ZOMBIES.  At least, not in their traditional guise.  In the film there's disagreement over whether these creatures are zombies, but let me spell it out.  They eat human flesh, turn their victims into one of them, and they even moan for God's sake.  They are fundamentally zombies in many ways.  But sadly they're the modern kind of zombie, which means that instead of lurching as in the classic Romero zombie flicks, they run at speeds that Usain Bolt could only dream of, and fling themselves at unsuspecting people like Mexican luchadores on crack.  They're not just the human undead, they're the superhuman undead, which bothers me somewhat.  Really, Danny Boyle has a lot to answer for where zombies in the popular imagination is concerned; his 28 Days Later is the most significant 'running dead' film (though I still count the criminally overrated Slumdog Millionaire as his most egregious cinematic sin, but that's possibly a rant for another day).

This may seem tendentious, and it's true that I am something of a zombie traditionalist and have been wanting to vent about the trope of the undead sprinter for some time.  But understanding the type of zombie utilized here is fundamental to an analysis of what does and doesn't work in this film.  As I see it, the difference between lurching and running zombies is the difference between the horror film and the action film.  Your traditional zombie film (think Dawn of the Dead or its rhyming comedic counterpart) has a small bunch of protagonists holed up in a shopping mall or pub or some other such fortress, desperately doing battle against a horde of undead.  These are lurching zombies; dangerous, but slow.  The horror is psychological, rather than the cheap, sudden shocks that World War Z favours, which really made in many parts for a fairly unpleasant viewing experience.  The horror arises from the knowledge that the humans are grossly outnumbered, and that there is no way of knowing how bad the contagion is, which adds to the sense of the unheimlich that the zombie represents.  But for a Dawn of the Dead-like situation to be plausible, the zombies have to be slow.  If the zombies in their film had been like the ones from World War Z, Shaun and Ed would never have made it out of the house.

So there is tension, but again, it's of the rather unsubtle and cheap kind; we know that a zombie's going to spring out and try to eat Gerry's face because the score has gone all eerie and silent (incidentally, the score is full of rock bombast, sound and fury signifying nothing, although that's unsurprising considering the involvement of Matt Bellamy, the frontman of overblown prog purveyors Muse).  There's no real prolonged build-up of impending psychological dread.  Instead, what we've got is an action film.  Not that there's anything wrong with that, but the nature of the zombies dovetails with the hyperkinetic cinematographical style that seems to be all the rage in the modern action film.  The zombies can run; let's use a lot of shaky-cam!  Imagine zombies slowly lurching while the camera zips around like an enervated wasp.  It'd be inappropriate.  But here, the director has made the choice to use hyperkinesis in the action sequences, and in the first of these, I was utterly lost.  I couldn't make out what was going on, and which one of the battling blurs was Brad Pitt (and I don't think the darkness enforced by the 3D glasses helped).  Between that, the insta-apocalypse, and Brad's annoying kids at the breakfast table, I think it's safe to say that the film didn't start well.

It got better, but I'd still make a few more criticisms.  In keeping with the spirit of the original text, World War Z depicts the effect of the zombie apocalypse on myriad locations; an army base in Korea, a newly walled Jerusalem, Cardiff (which to be frank didn't look any different).  This presents problems, as Brad Pitt's character isn't nearly fleshed out enough to tie these picaresque sections of the movie together.  He's a former UN investigator (but even the specifics of this are vague), and he loves his family.  Great.  Admirable, but he's a cypher, and it hurts the film.  And on a minor tangent, I know that the presence of a wife and kids is meant to engender empathy with Gerry.  But he spends more time going on about his family than the fact that HUMAN CIVILIZATION IS COLLAPSING, and if you're the sort of person that needs a more personal, family-oriented dimension than the mere deaths of billions, to really make you feel what's at stake in a movie, then you're probably a sociopath.

So there's a lot wrong with World War Z.  But it did a lot of things right, which brings me back to the running zombies.  As I've said, running zombie-based action scenes at close quarters are fairly uninvolving and mindless.  But the film's frequent aerial shots of the powerful and seemingly limitless hordes - in particular a panorama of a walled and secure Jerusalem juxtaposed with bestial chaos beyond its limits - are very effective at establishing the extent of the catastrophe.  If we allow that this is the sort of film we're getting - one focused on the quantity and danger of zombies rather than the psychological effect of being surrounded by them - then shots like this can only be a plus.  Honestly, it's refreshing to see a zombie film that is so profoundly conceptualised at the macro- rather than than micro-level.  Again, I wouldn't say this approach to the genre is superior to that of Romero and his acolytes, but visually the sheer scale of the disaster is realized very well, however much Gerry is really fighting for his family as opposed to humanity as a whole.  The one facet of the book that the film really brings forth is the disturbing imagery, whether it's bodies impaled on barbed wire, or a policeman looting a shop rather than protecting its contents.  The breakdown of society comes across excellently, and it's a shame that it's couched in a film that prefers to rely on frenetic action sequences for its import, but thus is the way of the summer blockbuster, I guess.  If you like zombie films then you'll either find this to be a refreshingly fast, furious and spectacular take on the genre, or a perversion of its ideals.  Which basically adds up to saying; go and see it if you're curious, but don't go out of your way.

Oh, and one more time; ZOMBIES SHOULDN'T RUN.

Rating: **3/4

Thursday 20 June 2013

Exchange Rate Psychology: An Ill-Advised Debut Post

By far my favourite currency of all time is the Hungarian forint.

What a great way to start my first blog post.  Let me explain.  The exchange rate of the forint to the pound currently stands at about 315.  This means no screwing around with subdivisions of the main unit of currency, as the Hungarian equivalents of pennies or cents would be worth about the same as Stanley Matthews in the upcoming transfer window.  The smallest coin is 5 forints, and the Hungarian branches of Tesco, a company which seems to be on a mission to open a store in every particle of matter in the known universe, just round your change to the nearest five if you drop an irregular number on an additive-laden lime Calippo.  Psychological pricing to entice buyers and increase profit (e.g. 199 forints, 299 forints) even when the customer is going to have to round up what they pay anyway; such is consumer capitalism.  But I digress.

I've loved foreign money ever since I was a child.  When this interest first reared its head, my mum, bless her, got me some little bags of various national currencies, which I played with for hours, imagining what it would be like to hand these over to a shopkeeper in some far-off land.  Sadly some of them are no longer legal tender.  My main gripe with the euro is not that it imposes monetary union on a disparate group of states whose economies are not necessarily alike and which need very different parameters to be set (we're seeing the consequences in Greece and Cyprus), but that its advent led to the demise of the franc, the mark, the peseta, the drachma, and so on, which to me takes a lot of the thrill out of travel.  As far as the euro is concerned, I'm with UKIP (and if I ever type the three words 'I'm with UKIP' again, you are welcome to try and punch me through the internet).  My favourite board game as a child was 'Go', a game from the 60s in which you travelled round the globe collecting souvenirs, in which you had to exchange your money depending on where on the globe you were.  There were stylised banknotes of all kinds; orange roubles with backwards Rs, and US dollars adorned with stars, stripes and good ol' Uncle Sam.  This is an edge the game has over the famously, money-centred Monopoly, as well as the fact that you can finish it in less time than it takes to wax a gorilla.

So I guess it's fair to say I like strange, exotic monies, which is why I like travelling to Hungary.  I've just got back from a trip to Budapest with my wonderful colleagues from Exeter University Jazz Orchestra (available for parties, weddings and bar mitzvahs).  A lot of us laughed about the huge denominations of banknotes, and it's true that having a 20,000 forint note in your wallet makes you feel like somewhat of a kingpin, despite the fact that you're wearing a Hawaiian shirt and last night's underwear (this may not apply to everyone).  Yet the large numbers at work here have a strange psychological effect on you.  A friend saw a lovely 40% silk pashmina in a shop, but balked at paying 3000 forints for it, her first thought being 'that's a bit steep', despite the fact that it cost the equivalent of less than a tenner in UK money.  Large amounts of a comparatively worthless currency still have this effect on us, because we in Britain have been conditioned to see 'three grand' as a substantial amount of cash (hilariously, the aforementioned slang term was still used by the British and Aussie staff at the hostel, who told us on our first night that they needed six 'grand' off each of us for tickets to a spa party, which initially felt like being extorted by a mafioso, albeit one with dreadlocks and tattoos in gothic script.  Again, conditioning).

And yet the opposite thing happened to me in China, where the exchange rate at the time (2007) was 13 Chinese yuan to the pound.  This particular exchange rate occupied a weird twilight zone between forint and pound, between the relatively worthless and the relatively worthful.  I basically spent my yuans like play money a lot of the time, a 100 yuan price-tag not being so ridiculously large (as with our Hungarian pashmina) as to discourage purchase.  I'd drop a Mao-festooned C-note on a piece of tourist tat, and only when I was walking away triumphantly with a brightly coloured stone before thinking 'bloody hell, that's about eight quid'.  Conversely, when I had spent my yuan and was down to US dollars, which are freely accepted in China, and whose value was closer to that of sterling, I was much more circumspect in what I spent them on.  Ten bucks for a brightly coloured stone?  Pull the other one.  (Regarding the yuan and the dollar, the value of the former is actually pegged to that of the latter, which some critics aver is an artificial way to keep American demand for Chinese exports high, but that's a debate far too long and boring for this blog.)

So what's the point of this cod-psychological babble.  Nothing really.  But there is a serious side to all this.  In 2009 North Korea, that paragon of good governance, revalued the won (its currency), so that 1 new won was equivalent to 100 of the old kind.  Millions saw their savings wiped out.  The psychological effect of hyperinflation can be devastating; Hungary itself saw the most serious hyperinflation ever recorded, the pengo losing value at a devastating rate.  Prices rose to dizzying levels, and a worker's monthly pay in March wouldn't be enough to buy a potato in April.  How serious was the inflation?  Put it this way, in August 1946, my beloved forint was introduced to replace the pengo, at an exchange rate of 400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1.  That's four to the power of twenty-nine zeroes, or 400 octillion.  That's a number for physicists, not economists.  

Let me finish with a story.  One night outside a nightclub a few years ago a schoolfriend showed me a 100 billion dollar note he'd acquired in Zimbabwe (worth about 50p) at a time when the country was undergoing its own devastating hyperinflation.  We both posed with it and made jokes about being billionaires.  But of course, being dollar billionaires was no consolation for the poor people in Mugabe's nation, struggling to afford basic necessities with their rapidly devaluing wages.  The exchange rate of the forint is as high as it is because the post-Communist government in the 90s made a complete hash of the economy, which led to inflation.  So it may be funny to pretend that 20,000 forints is a small fortune, but if there are lots of a currency to the pound, then it's for a reason, and you might want to think about it.