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May 5th, 2007
10:43 am - Withnail
Last night I stayed up with H to watch Withnail and I. It's generally in most 'top ten' British films. I thought it was good, what can I say. Like so many historical films, it seems as much in the time it was made (the eighties) as in the time it was set (the late sixties): the less publicised bit of the eighties, which was dissolute young fellows in long coats smoking and lying around in scruffy rooms. God I went out with enough of 'em at the time.
I noticed that drug-dealer Danny, inventor of the Camberwell Carrot, was Inspector Frank Morgan from Life on Mars. And he was also '85' (so named from his IQ), the thick security guard in Alien3.
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It's one of my favourite films, but you knew that. The sort where you grasp something new every time you see it. The first time,  legionseagle and I saw it just before we went on holiday in the Lakes, borrowing a relative's house. Nothing quite like that happened, but I had known people so like that at Oxford in the early 1980s. A week or so later, we went to see something else in the same cinema - Reefer Madness, I think - and when they let us in early we found Withnail was just finishing. We shouted "Danny!" as if we'd bumped into a friend. I was just reading up about the actor and it turns out he's done all sorts of interesting stuff, and written a play that won an award and all sorts. Good for him. I knew loads of people like that, and I think it's true that from that nexus we went two ways, onwards to survival and compromise, or crash and burn. By 'like that' I was changing the subject to talk about the characters in the film, not the actor. |
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