![]() ![]() And I’d certainly watch a year-long search for Britain’s Worst Pub. That Tom has proven the need for the local is undeniable, even if the four were cannily chosen to reflect the absolute best of their communities, but that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be an urgent new series. ![]() I suspect this is in large part because few in Westminster or Holyrood ever just venture of a dank Tuesday night down the boozer: it’s really that simple. ![]() And it’s really a shame, the timing, because there are now extremely large questions to be asked, chiefly of the benefits of the winter crackdown on Covid pubdom, when some are challenging evidence as to the pub-effect of viral spreading (as opposed say, to universities, or the school run). The last saw our four target pubs having survived – thrived even, with expansion or innovation or simply a better relationship with brewery landlords – yet came before the second lockdown. The valiant Tom Kerridge, Saving Britain’s Pubs. The first was cheerfully ignorant of any problem other than tired pubs and a modern lack of customers, and the second saw our hero, with his usual good grace and some eminently sound advice – if too often that simply seemed to be “don’t make punters feel they’re entering an abattoir” – on the cusp of changing minds, just before Covid hit. Profoundly unfortunate timing beset Tom Kerridge’s bid to save the pubs of Britain, throughout all three episodes, filmed separately. Witty and searing, this is (if you can get over the Tarantino stuff) one to clutch to your chest: watch much! Ethan Hawke’s marvellous madness is, in the third episode, redeemed from cries of “white saviour” by the appearance of Frederick Douglass, who calms bible-boy down finally: one white man can’t, no matter the flesh or the will, accumulate the black experience. The Good Lord Bird is, if you haven’t yet had the joy, a fairly rumbly retelling of the story of John Brown, driven by God to free all in slavery. Yes, people should have the right to love who they will. It’s gorgeous in many ways, infuriating in more, chiefly how sunnily slow it is. And perforce a certain teen gender-questioning. It is directed and made by Luca Guadagnino, joyously garlanded for Call Me By Your Name, so will feature, among all else, coming-of-age scenes. Jack Dylan Grazer as Fraser and Alice Braga as Maggie in We Are Who We Are. Fraser would love this life for ever, certainly more than that of an army-brat with parental issues. He wears stupid clothes, bats violently back at his mother for cutting a slice of meat too fat, loves grim music, finds peace on an Italian street in Chioggia when he finally takes out his annoying-bastard hanging earphones and listens to two sewing machines. Into this dichotomy wanders Fraser, son of the new army base commander, Sarah, and her wife, Maggie. Whereas the US military chooses to place everything, cheeses and courgettes and beer, in the same place, globally, like McDonald’s, thereby allowing planned theft of beer. Italian markets: wayward and hot, shambolic, flyblown, eternal. I was also much taken by the setting for new HBO drama We Are Who We Are, an American base in Italy, in which the military “market” serves to delineate the differences between the host country and the guest. ![]() The witnesses in this documentary – the forlorn, the rich, the weak, the appealingly mad – do. The mystery has influenced crime fiction and filmic drama, from Twin Peaks (along with the Oregon/Washington setting, DB Cooper was also the name of course of Kyle MacLachlan’s lead agent) to Heat, but that doesn’t make it an American story. I was left with two thoughts: evidence, without any additional motive or context, is not as it says and all Americans want to be, briefly, acknowledged for their life, preferably on screen. The exemplary folk behind this film tracked down a few rational suspects’ relatives, and these good people argued over how their claims to know Cooper’s true identity stood up. DB Cooper was, according to your preference, a crook, or a lunatic, dead, or the last American hero: conspiracy theories now have him as a trans man, an OCD Vietnam veteran and a needy divorcee. It told us, firstly, how much Americans love, just love, conspiracy theories, and are ever willing to beat down those local radio station doors in order to say so. The Hijacker Who Vanished ultimately told us much more about America than it did about the culprit, one alleged “DB Cooper”, who parachuted into the night over frozen mountainous Oregon and has never been found. ![]()
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