Straight Outta Crouch End

 A couple of weeks ago I received news, in short order, that I had finally obtained two things I had been waiting for for three years or so: an allotment of land I can tend; and official confirmation that I have ADHD. To get an allotment and an ADHD diagnosis, you have to put yourself on a waiting list and then bide your time, while various people ahead of you die. It's not really a joke! When I spoke to the doctor in charge of assessing me I said that I felt I had been waiting an eternity, and she told me that in some wards in the UK, the wait can take up to seven years. I said: "Oh man - we must be losing some of those people, along the way." She looked up: "Are you asking if they're killing themselves?" "Yes." "Yes."  Getting both things in such a short space of time felt strangely serendipitous: here, after months of waiting - when waiting is officially one of the things I am least good at! - was a diagnosis that my mind was justified

A brief summary of the film, before we get into the whys and the hows and the Ryan Goslings. Barbie (Margot Robbie) is a Barbie girl in a Barbie world, where - generally speaking - life in plastic is fantastic. Barbie, like Truman Burbank in The Truman Show, lives in a simulacrum of the real world, where every day is very similar to the one before - she and gazillions of other Barbies do things like go to the beach, have dance parties, win Nobel prizes for literature, while various Kens stand around and look pretty - until thoughts of mortality spur her to leave her own world and join the 'real' world (Los Angeles). One of the Kens (Ryan Gosling) joins her on this trip. Barbie discovers that her feelings of estrangement have been caused by a pair of real-world humans, a mother and daughter (America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt) who are growing apart; the mother cherishes her daughter's old Barbie dolls (and also works for Mattel (?)), while her daughter is now a moody litt

 It's been a wild few days or perhaps even weeks, who's to say, in the landmark trial opposing Gwyneth Paltrow to a man or woman alleging that something happened to do with skiing. The court case could have huge implications for [??]. A quick recap of the crazy events we simply can't get enough of is in order.  First off, the contention itself. Accounts differ as to what actually went down on that fateful morning or afternoon in Aspen, the Alps or possibly even Japan, why not. The Emma actor - during a skiing holiday with her children, at least one of whom is called Apple - was skiing, or on a chairlift maybe, when some guy alleges that, I want to say, they collided? Causing him to have pain? Paltrow, for her part, denies this version of events, counter-alleging that, I mean, what the fuck can you counter-allege to that, I dunno, that they didn't in fact bump into each other or something. At stake is, probably, the guy's hospital bill.  The actor said many funny an

I’ve become annoyed lately with people asserting that such and such a film, or book, or television show “broke” them. Hyperbole is the internet’s shared language, of course, and we all fall victim to it: films “destroyed” or “ruined” us; we were “in pieces” at the end. Such phrases are so common as to have become practically meaningless - besides which, the fact that someone cried at a film tells me almost nothing about that film if I do not know the person well; perhaps they cry easy, who’s to say? Crying is an honest reaction, but it is not a critical one: it’s easier to point to your tears than articulate an intellectual position. It feels almost like there is indulgence there; we say that a film devastated us, because in a cultural landscape where so much washes over us, we are at pains to show that our emotions are still intact; we are relieved to find ourselves still vulnerable, and readily tell others about our weeping.  But Close, the new film by Lukas Dhont, broke me. It’s the

Last week in a cafe, as I was having lunch with a friend, a couple sat at the table beside us with their baby, whereupon the infant began to stare and stare at me, looking away and then looking back over and smiling, and gurgling, and laughing - and I, naturally, being a person of immense dignity, responded by courting the baby's full attention to the max, grinning and making faces and playing peekaboo behind my hands. Babies and children tend to like me, and I like them back: if I'm at a wedding I'll spend a good long time cuddling any attendant babies rather than making conversation with besuited elders; and if your small child should challenge me to a race in the park, of a fine summer's day, you can bet your last penny I'll lead from the front and then stage a pratfall on the final lap. My dad has five younger siblings, most of whom had children as I was growing up, and so throughout the 80s and 90s there was always a succession of tiny cousins to hold and make

 I saw an infuriating tweet last week that I can't find anymore, which said (and I'm obviously paraphrasing, since I can no longer find this tweet): "Hating on Wes Anderson is completely over. If you hate Wes Anderson, good news: you won. Every American film now looks exactly the same." It's a worthy sentiment in defence of a fine cinema stylist - but bogus, since it wasn't Anderson-haters who won the battle for cinema, but Anderson-ignorers; everybody else lost. That we now find ourselves in a landscape where many films are visually monotonous is attributable mostly to the Disney monopoly and in part to the rise of Netflix, which has contributed to squeezing out a good few auteurs, and creating a recognisable 'film-as-content' aesthetic, where photography, decoration, blocking, design don't detract from an easily managed storyline that you can half-watch while texting.  But this perception of Anderson as representing the last stand of a certain ty