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Date night tonight and we cracked a bottle of champagne. I feel sure we had a reason. It might just have been to celebrate getting through another week without cracking up (too much). It was nice and because I have been drinking so little in the last 3 or 4 weeks (I forget when I stopped nightly boozing - it feels like yesterday but time is broken) I got nicely merry. But not so merry that I didn’t stop when the bubbles stopped.
We knew we only had limited time to watch a film before we fell asleep. We discounted something cos it was nearly 2 hours long and then wasted 20 minutes looking for something else, before returning to the original choice.
We chose “The Gentlemen”. I knew I had heard something about it, but couldn’t remember if it was that it was great or it was terrible. Only once we’d paid and it started did I suddenly remember it was a Guy Ritchie film and so (no offence Guy) I thought I may have made a bad choice. Whatever I was going to think about it I was pretty sure it was the wrong choice for Catie.
It was engaging enough though, though obviously ridiculous. The mannered dialogue jarred to begin with, as no one spoke like people speak and all spoke in the same Pound Shop Russell Brand vernacular. But interestingly this stylistic decision sort of worked as once your brain had adjusted to the nonsense, it was sort of OK.
It was of course laddy and glamorised violence and skirted/played around with/employed bantery racism (and in some cases just plumped for racial stereotypes), but was elevated by some strong performances, particularly from the reblossoming Hugh Grant who is excellent as the ineffectual and flawed bad guy (The Gentlemen is not a patch on Paddington 2 though if you want to see Grant at his all time career high - also brilliant in A Very English Scandal).
If you suspend your disbelief and buy into the idea (that so many screen and playwrights seem to susbscribe to) that there ie nothing cooler than gangsters then it’s an enjoyable diversion with some laughs and some surprises and some dick swinging.
It passed two more hours until our release from prison.
Paddington 2 does too though.
