A Big, Fat Fish Pie For The Weekend

A busy day in the kitchen yesterday. A fresh loaf, a blueberry cake, and hell, I’m in the kitchen anyway, I might as well go the whole hog and make a fish pie.

This is more or less Nigel Slater’s famous recipe, and I’ve been making it for long enough that I can quote it from memory. It’s a messy job, there’s no doubt about it, but I’ve tweaked it enough that it’s reasonably straightforward. Even if it wasn’t, fish pie would be worth the fuss.

I start with about half a pound of fish in my big saute pan. Enough milk to cover goes in, with a bay leaf if you’ve got one and some peppercorns. Bring it to a simmer, and cook until the fish is about done. Should take about ten minutes. While that’s bubbling, chop a couple of big leeks and some mushrooms (enough to give you a couple of big handfuls of dice) and a stick of celery. I also put four fist sized potatoes in the steamer to cook, as they are, in their skins.

Fish done. Fish comes out of pan, and put somewhere to stay warm. If you’re a big ole cheaty-head like me, you’ve used a fish pie mix that’s skinless, boneless and already chunked up. If not, the skin and bones will come away easily from the cooked fish, which you should keep in chunky pieces. No mince here. Pour the fishy milk into a jug through a strainer. Keep this with the fish.

Wipe out the pan. Back on the heat with a little oil and butter, and cook the leeks and celery over a lowish heat with the lid on until the leeks are soft and bright green. Whip those out, reheat the pan and do the mushrooms, letting them soak up the oil and butter. You can do these in two pans if you like, but do them separately to stop the mushrooms going wet and sloppy, rather than flavoursome and slightly caramelised.

Once the mushrooms are nice and brown, add the leeks back in, and sprinkle over a couple of tablespoons of flour. Let this cook for a minute of so until you can’t smell the flour any more, then throw in the milk. Let this bubble until the sauce you suddenly have in the pan thickens a bit to a nice creamy texture. A big spoonful of creme fraiche, lots of salt and pepper, then stir the fish back in. If you fancy chucking in any fresh herbs, flat leaf parsley, maybe some celery leaves, hell, even basil, now’s the time. Give this another five minute love in. The sauce should be creamy and rich, not at all runny or sloppy.

While that’s doing, check your spuds. They should be done. Do what you have to do to turn them into mash. I’m not going to tell you how to do it. You’re a grown up. Be comfortable with your mash-making technique.

Pile the mixture into a baking dish. Now the spuds. I use a ricer, and squish cooked unpeeled potato straight on top. Saves on peeling, and gives a nice light result. Then cheese. People say you shouldn’t put cheese on a fish pie. Screw them. I like cheese. I used a nice strong Wyke Farm cheddar with horseradish for a little doink of heat. If you’re going to be all huffy about it, just dot some butter over your mash.

Hot oven (about 200C, Gas 6) for 15 minutes or until there are nice brown toasty peaks on your mash.

Serve to someone you love (you’re not gonna go to all that effort for someone you don’t at least fancy) with some peas and a little soft music.

Worry about the washing up later.

The Sunday Lao Tzu: at peace

One can not reflect in streaming water. Only those who know internal peace can give it to others.

There are several reasons why I choose to allow my Sunday posts to be quiet and reflective. The main reason, I think, is that I am in a quiet and reflective place at this time of the week.

All is still here. A cup of tea, steaming faintly. An empty plate, toast crumbs stippling the surface. Upstairs, the sounds of my wife preparing for the day. The light outside is cool. The sky seems a flat, gray bowl, but if I look carefully, I can see the faint colour changes of the cloud cover, slightly deeper hues shading away from the monochrome into blue. A bird flits from branch to branch on a tree outside, as busy as I am still.

For a moment, I let the day sink in, and distraction slip away.

Blood + Roses: Treat Yourself To Some Grown-up Horror!

The big news this weekend for music fans is the sudden appearance of the new Radiohead album, The King Of Limbs, which I’m happily downloading as I write. But if you like horror, then there’s another reason to celebrate.
Simon Aitken’s smart, grown-up vampire film Blood + Roses is finally, finally available to buy from Amazon. OK, yes, I have a deep connection to the film. I have a big fat colourist credit, and edited the behind the scenes documentary Love Like Blood. But I believe in the film. I think it’s a clever update on the mythology and iconography of the vampire trope. It’s well written, and has a sterling brace of leading performances from Benjamin Green and TV’s own Marysia Kay (she’s on Take Me Out tonight on ITV1). Those in the know are already calling Blood + Roses “Twilight For Grown-ups”. I’m really pleased that you all have the chance to enjoy a film that I’ve been banging on about for the last couple of years. Do yourself a favour, and snag a copy of Blood + Roses, Readership. You know it makes sense.

A flag of convenience: turning pirates into customers

I’m thinking out loud here, so please do indulge me.

 

Adrian Faulkner tells a story on his excellent blog about a work colleague with a newly acquired e-reader, and his attitude to the cost of content for the device. In short, he thinks e-books are overpriced, and has taken to torrenting. Adrian recoils at this, and I agree. But at the same time…

I’m in the same position as his workmate John. I received a Kindle as a birthday gift, and love it to bits. But I was immediately struck by the disparity of pricing on the online store. Like most people with a new Kindle, I zealously hit the free or dirt cheap options, grabbing the complete works of Dostoyevsky and Dickens for less than I’d pay the lovelies at AMT Coffee for my morning cup of joe. But there were also Penguin editions of the same works that cost exactly the same as the paperback editions. There will, granted, be differences in translation, and of course e-books are liable to VAT, but apart from that I can’t see how that justifies a 700% difference in price point.

Modern authors also exhibit this disparity. Stephen King’s Under The Dome is a whopping £16.99 in the Kindle Store. You’ll pay half that for the paperback. I love Stephen King, but I’m caught in a bad place here. I don’t want to lug a breezeblock sized brick of paper around with me. That was a prime factor in buying an e-reader in the first place. At the same time, I’m buggered if I’m paying the thick end of £20 for it. Thus the dilemma that John has easily solved by merrily downloading his books for free. I don’t agree with what he’s doing, but I can kind of see his point. (In my case, I shall get the book out of the library, assuaging my conscience and supporting an essential public resource at the same time).

Part of the problem is the perception of worth. John thinks e-books are worth less than a hardback book. He sees craft and manufacturing cost in the heft and weight of a fat wodge of paper. He seems unaware of the fact that the paper is simply a carrier for the important stuff, the words on the page. But it’s not surprising he’s confused. There’s no consistency of pricing. A best selling CD, book, or DVD will cost you different amounts depending on where you buy it. And frequently when you buy it. Wait a few months after release, and a lot of titles suddenly have a huge discount applied, or turn up in twofer deals. Or sometimes free on the covers of newspapers.

Here’s a challenge. Given the choice between a vanilla DVD title in a cardboard sleeve with no extras for nothing, and a “normally” priced copy of the same thing with all the extras, I will lay money that the majority of people will plump for the freebie. I’m not talking your film buff or cineaste here. I’m talking about the man in the street. The sort of person that doesn’t want a director talking over the top of their Saturday night movie. The sort of person who doesn’t care about deleted scenes because if they were any good, they’d be in the film, wouldn’t they?

Of course, these films aren’t free. They’re promotional items, and you pay for the newspaper to get them. But they have the word FREE all over them. In the same way, musicians are now expected to put tracks online for free, again as promotion for full works. And here’s the problem. There’s already confusion over an object’s perceived worth. The idea of not paying anything for your entertainment has become an encouraged, acceptable option, regardless of the intention behind giving it away.

Neil Gaiman has extolled the virtues of this approach, citing the uptick in sales after doing just that for an audiobook of American Gods. Thriller writer Stephen Leather has done the same thing, putting his early work on the Kindle store for under a quid a shot. Again, this has been highly successful. But these are established artists, able to control the pricing structure of their material. If you’re a struggling author or film-maker, the appearance of your work on a torrent or Rapidshare feed chews up your revenue stream in a moment. If the film or book is all there is, if there’s no back catalogue for which you can use that free item as a loss leader, then the strategy seems to have failed.

That sounds incredibly negative, I know, and there’s no easy answer. Once people get used to the idea of free, then it’s really tough to change their minds. It’s easier than ever to get your work out to an audience, and much more difficult to get them to pay for it. It’s completely doable, of course – look at the success Amanda Palmer has had. She completely gets the vital role in keeping her audience sweet. She works incredibly hard at connecting and communicating with her fans.

There are ways of turning negatives into positives, too. Steve Lieber’s “Die Hard in a cave” comic Underground was merrily pirated by fans on 4Chan. Instead of complaining or issuing lawsuits, Leiber went on the site, and began chatting with the fans of his work, pointing out that the book was available as a print edition. Net result: a massive spike in sales. Similarly, fantasy author J.S. Chancellor asked people who had downloaded her work to leave reviews of it on Facebook and Amazon. It worked, and again, an uptick in sales was the result.

Self-pub and self-distribution is a tricky business to get right. It takes imagination, guile and a lot of effort to make a buck in this new marketplace, and the strategies that work for one artist are more than likely not going to work for another. Persuading your public that your work has value is more than half the battle, but if you can win that battle then good times approacheth. The Johns of this world can be talked into paying for their books and movies, if you talk to them in the right way.

(EDIT: to correct the schoolboy error JS Chancellor pointed out in the comments.)

I Run To Death, And Death Meets Me As Fast: X&HT Watched The Seventh Victim

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The crossing where the dark roads of horror and film noir meet is a place of fertile earth, where nightmares are easily grown. The ground, after all, is fertilised with a hefty dose of bone and blood. There are a ton of great films out there that take typically noir traits, and give them a shivery twist. Think of classics like Alan Parker’s Angel Heart, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence Of The Lambs. David Fincher’s Se7en. Kolchak The Night Stalker. Hell, half the X-Files was horror noir. Think of a film where a hard-boiled tec takes on a case, only to find that he’s hunting down something with a little more of the night in it than he anticipated.

Back in the heydays of noir, the 1940’s, this crosspoint was wide and broad. Noir has always been black and white in both visual and moral terms, and like horror, is not overly concerned that good should always triumph over evil. Both genres cast a bleakly jaundiced eye over human relationships, and easily find and stress-test the weak points.

The 1943 film The Seventh Victim saw producer Val Lewton take the psychological horror that he had pioneered in the classic Cat People, and add a noirish feel. Deep shadows and slashes of light were already visual cues for hard-boiled film, and this was a look in which Lewton’s long-time cinematographer Nicolas Musuraka revelled. On The Seventh Victim, he and director Mark Robson went a step further, soaking every frame in pools of darkness.

The Seventh Victim begins as the sheltered world of our heroine, Mary, is quickly stripped away. She attends a boarding school, the fees paid by her only relative, her sister Jacqueline. Jacqueline has disappeared, and the funds have dried up. Offered the choice to stay in the school as unpaid help, Mary instead opts to travel to New York to find her sister.

Once in the Big Apple, the mystery only deepens. Jacqueline has given away the family business, and got into some very bad company. Mary is quickly snared in a web of lies and deceit, and the hunt for Jacqueline will lead her to question the motives of everyone who pledges to help her.

The Seventh Victim casts an eerie, uncomfortable spell right from the first frames. Mary is urged to leave the boarding school and not return by the headmistress’ assistant, who tells her that “you must have courage to really live in the world” – a creepy foreshadowing of future events. Jacqueline is described as a rare beauty by everyone she meets, a light in the dark city – and yet she is obsessed with death, and rents a room above the Dante Restaurant (a powerfully appropriate name) containing nothing but a noose and a chair.

The film contains sequences that are the match of The Cat People in terms of shadowy shocks. Mary and a private detective who has taken her case search the cosmetics factory that used to belong to Jacqueline, at night. The one room they haven’t entered is barred by a black rectangle of shadow at the end of a dark corridor. Both Mary and the detective recoil at the sight of it. They are right to do so. There is death in that room for one of them.

The final fifteen minutes, in which Jacqueline wanders the streets after being cursed by the Satanists who have swallowed her life and shattered her sanity, are as powerful as any horror of the era. Vulnerable and alone, Jacqueline is threatened by shadows that turn out to be harmless, only to have new real, threats loom out of the darkness. Trapped by her own crumbling will, Jacqueline’s escape route is clear to us all, yet still a punch in the gut when it happens. Mary starts to hope for the future, unaware that her sister has already closed the door firmly on it. It’s an astonishingly bleak ending.

Noir doesn’t often get this creepy, horror doesn’t often have this atmosphere. Fans of both genres should find much to admire in The Seventh Victim, even if it’s a little too cold-hearted to love.

Leading Man Clive put me up to this, but then he knows my proclivities better than most. It proudly appears under the banner of the annual Film Noir Preservation Blogathon, raising funds to get classic and wrongly forgotten movies back into shape so they can thrill and chill a brand new audience. Readership, I urge you to support this worthy cause, which as I’m sure you can imagine is pretty near to my heart.

You can donate using Paypal by simply clicking on the lovely lady under the lamp-post below. Be gentle though. She may look like a kitten, but this cat has claws.

“You must pay for everything in this world”: X&HT Watched True Grit

For most, the defining image associated with True Grit is of Rooster Cogburn, grizzled, one-eyed, overweight U.S. Marshal, riding down on his nemesis Lucky Ned Pepper and his gang, a blazing six-gun in either hand. The Coen Brothers don’t argue with this view, and ensure that Jeff Bridges gets his moment to grip horse traces in his teeth in their lush new version of the tale. I shall not add a contrary voice to the consensus.

I am glad to see though that the focus on this re-telling is firmly on the girl who tells the story. Little Mattie Ross, only fourteen and yet taking on the world and all its hard lessons in her pursuit of the man who murdered her father. The hunt, it is clear from the beginning, is her way of grieving, and it would be tantamount to betrayal to abandon the chase, no matter what obstacles lie in her way. The world does not care about justice, it seems, but she does. Mattie will never tell a lie, never break a promise, never walk away from a contract.

Though small enough to be knocked off her feet by the recoil every time she fires a gun, she will sleep in a funeral parlour full of corpses and fearlessly negotiate with a hard-bitten stockman to ensure she has the funds to continue her quest.  Set against her, everyone else seems compromised, foolish, crippled by their misdeeds and mistakes. Her prey, Tom Cheney, is a weak, venal halfwit. Laboeuf, the Texas Ranger who falls in and out of her company is a strutting loudmouth, incapable of silence even after he near bites off his tongue. Cogburn, well, Rooster is as mean as a long winter’s night and about as ugly. He’s a drunk, a brute and a killer, who’d be dead at the end of a rope years ago if not for the star that he wears. It’s no accident that everyone but Mattie is a grotesque, with mouthfuls of appalling teeth, scars and extraordinary facial hair. As Cogburn, Jeff Bridges manoeuvres his bulk around like a bear after a stroke, quick and graceful only in combat.

Mattie is no angel. She’s stubborn as two mules, inflexible as a new leather crop. She will shed tears for no man, although shed tears she does, in a truly heartbreaking moment. The world is a simple place in her eyes, a realm where there is no excuse for the wicked to remain unpunished, for the death of an honest man to go unavenged. Mattie is biblical in her wrath, relentless and unbreakable. She seeks a man with true grit to help her bring Tom Cheney down, but in the end it is clear that she has more grit than anyone.

Hailee Steinfeld provides us with a clear, unalloyed view of Mattie Ross. In tight braids, an over-sized hat, breeches and boots, she cuts an unyielding silhouette. She is clear-eyed, tough but with an underlying sweetness. It would be easy to turn Mattie into a vengeful automaton, but that is never the case here. She takes joy in tales told round the campfire, and in the company of her beloved pony Little Blackie. She learns some awful lessons out on Indian territory, but they never dispel her faith that justice will be done, and that the men she rides with will prove as equal to the task as she.

The re-telling of True Grit is a job that has been done with care and skill. Under the lenses of Roger Deakins, the New Mexico landscapes are harsh and clean. The Brothers Coen have provided a lean script, the dialogue florid yet spare, capturing the conversations of Mattie, Rooster and LaBoeuf with a delight in the eccentricities and formalities of the period. There is violence, and when it appears it is sharp and brutal. But that isn’t the point to the tale, and it’s well over halfway through the film before a gun is fired in anger. True Grit is a story about how when it comes to seeking justice, innocence is frequently the greatest weapon you can wield.

An excellent comic adaptation of the moment when Rooster and Mattie first crossed paths is available on the True Grit site for your perusal here. Fill your hands.

Don’t Get Me Started: X&HT Didn’t Watch Never Let Me Go

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This is not a review. This will not be fair, or balanced, or even particularly well informed. It will be full of spoilers. I’m not here to measure the virtues against the flaws.

I’m here to talk about the idea behind Never Let Me Go, why it patently, clearly doesn’t work and how dressing up a core SF trope in literary clothes is a dirty trick.

The story, as brought to us by the chronicler of the English mind Kazuo Ishiguro, is set in an England where cloning for body parts is legal and accepted. Of course, we’re not told that all at once. Instead, we’re introduced to the student body of Hailsham, a secluded boarding school. They are your usual bunch of artsy upper-middle class wet sponges, who flop about making doe eyes at each other, without the faintest idea in their heads that something is remiss here even when teachers keep bursting into tears and rushing out of the classrooms. They are educated, sent out into sheltered accommodation, and when the time is right, harvested. All of which they accept with a stoic, bovine acquiescence. There’s no sense that they can escape their fate, that they can find a life outside their defined role.

The idea of a society that would openly sanction or even allow organ harvesting is intriguing, and leads me to wonder what that world would look like. It would be a very different place.. The very idea that we would tolerate bags of spare parts that looked like Keira Knightley wandering the streets is one that takes a bit of a stretch. We’re squeamish at the best of times. We allow factory farming because it is convenient, cheap, and above all out of sight. The butcher’s counters at Tesco tend not to have attached abattoirs. Let’s face it, if scientists came up with a talking cow, the numbers of vegetarians would spike overnight

At the end of the story, Hailsham is revealed to be a failed experiment – an attempt to show that clones have souls. It’s never made clear why the school was closed. Was it that, like Philip K. Dick’s replicants, the Hailsham kids don’t show emotions, but rough approximations, fakes, large-scale autonomic reflexes that just happen to look like fear or love? Or, more likely, that the clones are indeed human, and that we don’t care? That if the program were to be shut down then the crisis that forced us into the position of creating the clones in the first place could reoccur, putting society back to square one? All of these questions are never addressed, which is a shame, because the society in which Hailsham exists deserves a second look. Never Let Me Go seems to depict us reverted to a slaver’s past, a time when we could quite easily look on certain creeds and colours as resources, as tools. But we never see this world beyond the narrow focus of the Hailsham kids, and they’re all too drippy to give a toss about.

None of this is new, of course. The nature of humanity is a core concept in SF. One of the formative books of the genre, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, deals with that very issue. Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep brings us Roy Batty, rebelling against his nature and destiny to find his humanity despite the cruellest of barriers – a shortened life span. The Clonus Horror, a 1979 SF movie takes the whole idea of clones and organ harvesting and gives it a pulpy spin. Michael Bay’s 2005 clunker The Island takes the same tack, mirroring the Clonus story so closely that it led to a lawsuit and an out-of-court settlement. Both films pitch the clone factory as a conspiracy that, once revealed, brings the whole edifice down. Never Let Me Go doesn’t bother with that kind of closure. The characters simply shrug and carry on, plodding onto the killing floor with uncomplaining docility.

The primary disconnect for me comes from the idea that the clones need to have feelings and emotions in the first place. Surely if we have the technology to create something like that, it would be far more cost effective to make them obviously non-human. It’s just the organs we want, after all. Build something with a rudimentary brainstem, or the capacity for self-awareness of your average squirrel, make it mobile enough that it can feed and water itself without the ability to run away, and there you go, job done. If you can sort out a resealable zipper so you can pop out the organs you need, so be it. A farm animal, effectively.

Or, if we absolutely positively have to have intelligent, self-aware bipeds, we could quite easily condition them to embrace their position in life, so that they see their eventual sacrifice as a good thing. I’m thinking the way the lower classes in Huxley’s Brave New World are so happy with their lot that the idea of rising above their station fills them with nausea. I’m thinking the Ameglian Major Cow from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, so happy with it’s fate that it cheerfully points out the best cuts to potential diners. The one problem I always had with Duncan Jones’ masterful Moon was that Sam had to have memories of his “past life”. Why would he not simply be conditioned to be happy where he was, even to the point of tidying himself away at the end of his “shift?”

I can deal with Never Let Me Go, just, barely, if I look on it as a kind of satire both on factory farming and a very British kind of stoic resignation to one’s fate. Otherwise, it’s simply too ridiculous a concept to take seriously. The idea hangs together if you treat it as a life-extending plot committed by the rich and powerful that will be busted and brought down by our clone heroes. But Ishiguru ties a Swiftian-style Modest Proposal to a very English love triangle, and it’s simply too unwieldy a prospect to float. The fact that it’s been sold to the public as a love story from the writer of The Remains Of The Day is dangerously close to misrepresentation. It’s a bleak account of a particularly nasty kind of dystopia that doesn’t even have the guts to give the audience a dose of closure.

Needless to say, I won’t be seeing this one. I think a rewatch of The Island might be in order. There’s a film that knows it’s stupid.

The Sunday Lao Tzu: on love

“Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.”

 

Love is not supposed to be easy. It’s not a universal cure-all, a panacea for the ages. Love will not give you a happy ending. Love does not mean that everything is going to be all right.

At the same time, love is not a disease, an infection, a shot through the heart. We could say it’s a form of madness, a consensual delusion. But if love is not returned, or rejected, or ignored, then the pain is very real, and as sharp and deadly as any blade.

It is impossible to write dispassionately about love – which is kind of the point. We all need companionship, the feeling that we are valued and treasured for the things that we are. We all need comfort and passion, support and shelter, finding in another person those things that we lack, or that we need.

Love is, simply put, the moment when you find someone and know, without doubt or equivocation, that you are supposed to spend the rest of your life with them. Through hardship and heartbreak, through joy and delight, in sunshine and rain. If you can, then love has served its purpose. If you can’t, then there can only be pain. That primal, simple truth has been subsumed in a backwash of sentiment and retail opportunities, and it simply isn’t needed. If you love someone, and they love you back, then they don’t need a token of your appreciation once a year. They know.

But it’s always worth telling them, just to be certain.

One Shot: X&HT Watched The Fighter

Boxing movies, like most dance films, like most music films, are rags to riches tales. They tend to be “true stories” – as much as any Hollywood biopic can have any claim to veracity. They will be set in dirt-poor urban neighbourhoods, where everyone gathers outside stoops and porches when they’re not in the local bar starting fights and getting in trouble with the waitresses.

They will focus on the last shot at stardom, the fight or talent contest or rap battle that our hero or heroine absolutely cannot lose. Most importantly, they talk about how the family is the key to success, while at the same time pointing out what a bunch of monsters the family of the main character is.

The Fighter succeeds by taking all these elements and cranking them up to distortion point. It’s the tale of Micky Ward, a stepping-stone boxer used by better prospects to get up the ladder to the lucrative title bouts. Played by Mark Wahlberg as a doughy, sad-eyed lump of protein, Micky is a no-hoper, a never-gonna.

He’s crippled, not by lack of talent or fighting spirit, but by his family. Ma Ward is a manipulative harridan, seeing insult and disrespect in every stray comment. His sisters are a bunch of lemon-sucking, frizz-haired monstrosities. A Greek chorus of harpies. His brother Dicky, mentor, trainer, that guy that knocked down Sugar Ray Leonard that one time, is a manic, eye-bugging crack addict. Any one of these would be enough to send a normal person off down the street screaming. All three in one house give you a fairly close idea of the inside of a lower circle of hell.

In these kind of films, the main character always needs a love interest to help find the confidence and belief in themselves that will give them the chance to escape the traps that their live have become and live their dreams. Frequently they’re from the other side of the tracks, and it’s no different here.

Things are so low-rent in this world that Charlene, played with perky toughness by the delightful Amy Adams, stands out by having gone to college. She’s a dropout, but by sporting an education she’s some sort of interloper to the Wards, who view any outside influence with the kind of swivel-eyed suspicion that really deserves to be backed by a banjo and a hooting jug. She’s a threat to the family unit, and they make their displeasure clear.

Later in the film the ladies Ward will start a seven-to-one street catfight with the lovely Ms. Adams, as she is not only no better than she oughta be, but also indulges in lesbian threesomes, according to reliable scuttlebutt. Sadly, these speculated threesomes are never pictured, which I’m guessing means they didn’t happen. A boy can dream, I suppose.

So, there’s the inevitable schism. Dicky goes to jail, which gives Micky the excuse to break away from the Wards, and what a surprise, start winning fights. There are montages. Lots of montages. Training montages. Fight montages. Dicky in jail getting clean montages. Which is fair enough, and very much on model. Rags-to-riches tales need montages, because the process of going from rags to riches inevitably takes years and we are an impatient bunch that need to see progress fast. The dancer will slip and trip, but in a couple of lap dissolves we’ll see her pirouette across the studio floor. The rapper will frown over a blank sheet of paper, but we’ll soon see it fill with rhymes.

Dickie reappears with new teeth but the same old attitude, expecting to pick up where he left off, leading to yet more schisms and fights. Lockers get punched. I feel sorry for lockers in these kind of films. They come under all kinds of abuse.

Finally, Mickey decides that even those his family are a bunch of raving nutballs, he needs them. Or at least, the insight that Dickie has on his fighting. This again is textbook stuff, a reunion leading to the final triumph of the protagonist. Does he triumph? Well, this is the story of a fighter that won the WBU crown in 2000. There should be no surprises here.

And that’s the point, Readership. The Fighter is a film about the fight, not the victory. The important thing is not the conquest, but the battle to get there. Rags-to-riches tales make this point clearly. They end at the moment of triumph, dissolving away to a final series of cards telling us what happened next. But it’s not important. It’s all done by the time the boxer raises his hands into the flashbulbs of the cameras, or the moment that the dancer or the singer takes her bow in the blast of the spotlight. After that, we know the story. We can take over now.

One last thing. Cleverly, director David O. Russell runs footage of the real Micky and Dicky over the end credits. There’s been a lot of honking in the review columns about how broadly Christian Bale plays the manic Micky. Accusations of over-acting, of method gone mad, have been levelled at him. Watching the footage of the real Pride Of Lowell, you quickly realise that Bale calmed down his performance. The real Micky, a motormouth attention vampire, would drive you nuts in five minutes flat.