Some people say Australia is a football country now - soccer, that is (and if anyone is hoping that we might become so much of a football country that everyone is going to stop saying soccer, keep hoping). I guess we are, if by “football country”, you mean a country with a lot of people who love football, and in which lots of people will watch football, live and on TV, at least when big games come around.
But I can’t help feeling that we won’t really be a football country until we start responding to our teams being knocked out of tournaments with nationwide wailing, gnashing of teeth, and furious demands that heads roll.
You know, like all the other football countries.
In countries that are REALLY into football, a disappointing loss isn’t just a disappointing loss, it’s a national trauma. You don’t see fans responding to defeat by saying what a great journey it’s been and how proud we all are of our team. No, in proper football countries, they fall to their knees, cry their eyes out, beat their fists on the floor, drink the pain away, and spend at least a month calling for the coach to be sacked and half the team forced into retirement.
THAT is caring.
I’m not saying Australia should aspire to be the kind of country where players who miss penalties get shot. I’m just saying we probably won’t ever win a World Cup until we start needing antidepressants every time we lose.
It’s a funny thing about Australia, really: people here love to whine about how we care too much about sport, which just proves they really don’t get out much. If you want to see people who care too much about sport, go to a soccer game in Europe, or a cricket game in India, or the streets of a city that was just in the Stanley Cup final.
Compared to quite a lot of the world, Australians have a very healthy sense of perspective about sport. Although it’s all relative, of course: I wish my sense of perspective about sport was healthy enough that I didn’t care at all. Sadly, the older I get the more I find that my devastation in defeat is always more intense than the pleasure I get from victory, and that’s not really any way to live.
So I don’t know if I want Australia to be a football country. Unless we can get really really really good at football, it’s just not going to be worth the pain, is it?
Film Corner
I saw two movies last week. One was MEG 2: THE TRENCH. The other was DRACULA: VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER.
Both of these movies were about people at sea trying not to get killed by a terrifying monster. In DVOTD, the monster was, as you might suspect, Dracula. In M2:TT, the monster was giant sharks…or was it?
No, indeed: the true monster in MEG 2 is…
HUMAN NATURE.
Most movies I come out of with thoughts on how I could’ve made it better if the producers weren’t such idiots that they didn’t hire me as a script doctor. Remember how I did that with Barbie? You enjoyed that, right?
Here’s how you could’ve made MEG 2: THE TRENCH better:
More shots of Jason Statham on a jetski throwing exploding spears. Jason Statham doesn’t even get on a jetski until quite late in the movie. If you really want to make a profound cinematic statement, you need to get him on that jetski in the first twenty minutes and have him regularly throwing exploding spears from then until the credits.
Embrace the stupidity of the general premise, but refrain from making your villain actually brain-damaged. By “your villain”, I don’t mean the sharks - as we’ve established, the monster is HUMAN NATURE. Specifically, greed. Even more specifically, the greed of a nasty rich woman who wishes to make money by plundering the ocean environment.
Now, it is fine to have your villain be a nasty rich woman who wishes to make money by plundering the ocean environment. But that doesn’t mean you need her to literally say out loud, “I am going to make money by plundering the ocean environment”. It doesn’t mean you need to have to her intrude on a video call to the heroes, even though she is supposed to be concealing her identity, for no other reason than to say, “I am the bad guy and I like doing bad things and I don’t care about good things because I’m bad”.
That’s a paraphrase, but not much of a one. Watch MEG 2, and you’ll see.
Also, if an evil mastermind dispatches mercenaries to an island to kill the good guys, she is not going to then take a chopper to the island herself to give them orders that she can just as easily provide by phone. Unless of course, you need her on the island so she can be killed in a Jurassic Park rip-off scene, and you are a writer so lazy you can’t even be bothered to write a single line explaining why she would want to be there.
So in a nutshell, every time the MEG 2 writers felt like having their villain do something idiotic, they should’ve swapped in a jetski-exploding spear scene instead.
On the other hand, how could you have made DRACULA: VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER better?
I don’t think you could have. Unless you put Dracula on a jetskit I guess?