The Ego's Last Stand

Kevin can't hide his disgust.














Those clever-dicks at the Premier League have decided that Wolves can have a suspended fine of £25,000 dished out because they thought they'd have more chance of beating Burnley than Manyoo, so kept their first-team spare, put the reserves out and got smashed 3-0. Fair enough, you might think, after all, they should try to win every game, but what's the difference in losing 1-0 with your first team and 3-0 with the reserves? Especially if the first-team lose the subsequent (winnable) match as they're knackered from chasing shadows at the theatre of ritual humiliation/disembowelment? The loss to Wolves' goal difference was fixed by beating Burnley 2-0, so who really loses? Not even Burnley, because they don't win away games.

The big issue (and the controversy. Hi!) stems from the fact that some teams (Liverpool) rotate all the time but just seem to avoid this punishment... Correct me if I'm wrong but didn't Rafa Benitez rotate his team at Craven Cottage in a match towards the end of the 07/08 season to save his key players for a Champions League game? Fulham won. Without those three points, they wouldn't have stayed up, and Reading would have. Perhaps Reading should write to the Premier League; kicking up a fuss worked for Sheffield United. Sort of.

People harp on about the fans getting little return for their money on a trip but maybe they should take their beef up with the Premier League too. Such a sour taste would be considerably lessened if the ticket prices weren't obscene. As a Newcastle fan, this sort of piss-taking is par for the course, which the Premier League seem to delight in.

Best league in the world? I take it you don't watch La Liga.

Knowing How The World Works

Last week I was treated to a free cinema pass. That this was used on Knowing is something that is still affecting me four days later. If something seems too good to be true, that is because it is. Surprise at the film's high IMDb rating is matched by the shock that Nicolas Cage is still seen as employable. He looks like he has become the plaything of one of the creepy plastic surgeons from Louis Theroux. The mind boggles. Add the worst child actor ever and a final 'twist' that seems to be in every fucking film in the last year and it makes you want to jizz your overdraft on a plane ticket to LA just so that you can make someone accountable for this absolute cobblers.

Is it a sci-fi? Is it a horror? WHAT IS KNOWING? It is people looking at some scribbles and going, 'oh, look, someone predicted 9/11, if we had known we could have stopped it'. I'm not American and found that to be a bit crass. The whole point of natural disasters is that they are natural, you can't predict them, even if you have got a bunch of albino aliens (was Paul Bettany unavailable? Or is it that the script is so strained that shit actors are all they could get?) telling you every bad thing ever ever ever. The score was ok but it just ended up heaping confusion on every thing as the 'action' was straddled by terror and noise.

The disaster scenes were more or less pornographic; I don't go to the cinema to watch commuters get squished one by one under a renegade subway carriage. As one friend pointed out, one of the flaming men from the aeroplane sequence was right next to some water... Why didn't you help him, Nic?! Why didn't you push him in?! He was too subdued by the disaster porn all around him, that's why. If the authors had ignored the laws of engineering and physics, like in the first episode of Lost, he could have gone through the stray turbine leaving just his mangled hair folicles behind. That would have been worth paying for.

No matter how bored you are, you're not bored enough to see Knowing. Complete and utter gubbins.