Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

Rugby is, at an abstracted level, always a game of making and taking chances. We tackle about tackle efficiency, lineout success rate, scrum penalties, turnovers and so on but they all boil down to making scoring opportunities, taking them or denying those chances. The matches that I actually watched, and to a lesser extent the highlights as well, seem to highlight that aspect of the game more than normal. All Blacks v Ireland For most of the first half, Ireland created chances and took some of them, the All Blacks defence wasn’t terrible, while the Irish defence just prevented the ABs attack from creating chances at all. For most of the second half that reversed but just when it looked like the AB were going to come from behind and win the Irish scored again and that was it. Smarter people than me have been saying that the ABs have a really antiquated defensive essentially lack of system. They rely on their fitness and fight for every scrap of the pitch. This still works against mo...

More short reports, some from highlights. Japan v France I get that, like so many, Galthie is looking at his wider squad with a view to the RWC but, ouch. I don’t know the cap numbers here, but there are a lot on unfamiliar names, at least in Les Bleus shirt, on that list and the highlights showed that sometimes they’d click offensively, but they never seemed to play as a team. You could see the more experienced individuals, they put the work in, but it was solitary effort and Japan ran good support lines and offloaded from those solo tackles, looking good in attack. To some extent that seemed to change when Galthie swapped the 9’s. Couilloud looked much sharper than Lucu from what I saw and the French sparked on defence around that. Japan will be rueing the one that got away. Galthie will take stuff to learn for his team and players and will have learnt important things about his players while not losing. New Zealand v Ireland The Irish fans will be celebrating their first victo...

I don’t think we can really assess the premiership of BoJo yet. I’m not a historian by any stretch of the imagination but it’s taken me the best part of the last 15 years to stop wanting to throw things at the TV or radio when I hear Tony Blair’s voice. (I have never stopped shivering and wanting to throwing things when I hear Maggie Thatcher’s voice.) With BoJo we haven’t even had a proper chance to reflect and examine the actions he and his cabinet took during the Covid pandemic. They trot that out as “a great achievement” but we haven’t properly looked at the mistakes they made, the chumocracy that appointed minister’s wives to various roles - one undoubtedly highly qualified for it, the other really not. Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I think there were necessarily terrible, but I’m not saying they were necessarily wonderful either (they are saying they were). How many of the “wonderful” things they did were their ideas? How many were suggested from beneath? How many mi...

I’m going to be somewhat abbreviated about at least some of these because I only saw highlights for various reasons. It’s hard to judge the whole match well from the highlights. In time order here we go. Japan v France This match rarely looked in doubt from what I saw, but France looked oddly out of sync for a while. I suspect that’s the new halfbacks just putting the timings off a little and everything certainly settled down over the course of the match. They also looked a bit heavy in the legs at first and, while I can concoct reasons for that, I’m not really sure why. Something to look out for next week. Nevertheless a good win for Les Bleus. New Zealand v Ireland This match was billed as a heavyweight battle. Ireland have beaten NZ a few times recently, including their last match in November. NZ had lost two in a row for the first time since 2011, they haven’t lost three in a row since 1998… would Foster face losing that record and the “Fortress Eden Park” tag - they haven’t lo...

The short review of Elvis is really easy. It’s a Baz Luhrmann film, for better or worse. It’s a biopic about Elvis. It’s kind of Jukebox Musical using Elvis music. If at least two of those things don’t grab you, you probably won’t like this film that much. I like the Luhrmann films I’ve seen ( Romeo+Juliet, Moulin Rouge and Strictly Ballroom ) and although I’m not really a fan of Elvis, I know his music and his death is the first celebrity death I really remember making the news so I was at least willing to engage on those parts. The next thing that really matters is how well the lead makes you believe they present as the character they’re portraying. That’s particularly important here because, for reasons I guess I understand, the film is intercut with actual footage of Elvis' performances. Fortunately Austin Butler does a really good Elvis, the look, the moves, the accent and the singing. There are a number of songs reworked for telling the story here, and they sound like Elv...

Having said in my review of First Kill the elevator pitch must have been easy, I find myself really struggling to imagine exactly what the elevator pitch for Everything, Everywhere, All At Once was. This movie is part of the current multiverse craze, it’s a musing about maternal love and a daughter’s duty (in two generations), it’s a wuxia action movie, it’s several romance movies and it’s a comedy. And somehow, although the film feels busy, it also works well. Some of that is the stars. Western audiences will be most familiar with Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis, but there are a lot of people that we might not be as familiar with who have quite long careers and are more than capable of carrying their parts. This being a film that spans the multiverse those parts are quite varied as we see the same people from different universes. This isn’t a comedy in the classic style. You don’t have the jokes and laughs coming along predictably, but there are enough that I think you have to...

Honestly a lot of my comments about the first part of this season still apply. Perhaps that’s inevitable when you have a 7-2 split in the number of episodes, roughly a 7-3 split in the number of hours. What this split really gave us was a reveal that acted as a mini-climax, then a second true climax to the season. For part two, the story largely abandons good plotting in favour of tugging on our emotions. They do a good job of that, I cared about what happened to the characters individually and, to some extent, in their little groups. But in that last phrase lies the problem I had. In 4.1 we had groups of Hopper, Joyce and Murray, the California kids and the Hawkins kids as four groups, that merged down to three when Hopper, Joyce and Murray merged into a single group. This section really undoes that as all those groups split up again. I understand the idea that the various groups completing their tasks interact through the Upside Down to help each other in ways they can’t really k...