Deborah Ross

Exercise in patriotism

Honestly, first it’s restaurant reviews and now it’s films, too, which does make me think: what next? Deborah, when you get a minute, would you mind changing the toner in the photocopier? Deborah, would you make sure to empty the bins before you leave? Doesn’t anyone else at The Spectator do any work at all? Oh, all right, I’ll do it. I seem to do everything else, so why not? I’ll just empty the bins, change the toner, and then get to it, OK?

So, what is my brief, then? My brief, it appears, is to see the films ‘ordinary punters’ are likely to see rather than, say, Les Soupes Turines de Paris by André Labourious, which is showing for the next ten minutes only at the Curzon, Soho, and won the prize for best film about soup at the Outer Mongolian Film Festival last year. This is a great shame because while Les Soupes de Turines de Paris isn’t André Labourious’s greatest work (I think that has to be Encore Chateaubriand!) it has its merits. Plus, the DVD comes with some most interesting extras, including an audio commentary provided by several croutons and a buttered roll. As for Encore Chateaubriand!, I think it is on at the Renoir until the end of the last week. Do catch it if you can.

Meanwhile, this week’s big one, then, which is Oliver Stone’s much-fanfared World Trade Center, billed variously as ‘a true story of courage and survival’ and ‘every generation has a defining moment …this was ours’. Why do I cringe at such tag lines? I’m not sure. I’m still trying to work it out. But it may be because something totally horrific happened when those towers came down and some people survived it but most people didn’t so why the triumphal note? You never get this kind of nonsense with soup.

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