I’m getting a bit restless in lockdown. I’ve had two bad facial hair experiments so far. I’m  resisting the urge to try to cut my hair. My sleep pattern has slipped this weekend so my routine is messed up. It’s tough to focus on work when working from home but at least it gives a bit of routine. I feel for anyone who doesn’t have an enforced structure on their days in this crazy time. I know there’s people dealing with emergency services and things who have it worse, but there’s a real danger of losing your grip in this weird lockdown world. The kids who live next door to me have been pretty inspiring. I’m pretty sure they’ve just bounced on their trampoline and laughed for the last four weeks and that’s some good work when you’re a kid who can’t go outside.

I watched Argo on Saturday night. More Ben Affleck. It’s good. Not as good as The Town but it’s good. Ben Affleck had very bad hair and I found that distracting. I think part of the problem is the tidied true story. It’s based on real events but things are tidied up to make it something else. It’s like on the sound engineer’s board of levels they crank up the dials marked “Angry Iranians” and “Heroic Americans” and turn down “Help from other countries” and “Ben Affleck isn’t Hispanic”. It’s funny that something based on a true story can seem not real. I think it suffers by comparison to The Town and maybe having seen the two so close together took something away from Argo.

It is good though. Ben Affleck is great except for his hair. The rest of the cast are good. John Goodman and Alan Arkin are entertaining. The excellently named Scoot McNairy is good as the complainy hostage. To give the film credit, the final third is a rolling series of very good and tense scenes cutting across all the various characters playing their parts in the caper which works very well.

I think my next project for this blog will be to put together a rankings list to compare the films I’ve written about. I need to do some thinking into how that will work. There’s some ambitious options but there’s always the danger I’ll give up and just use a spread sheet. So far everything I’ve written about in this incarnation of the blog has been something I hadn’t seen before so I don’t have to worry about rewatch value and value of surprise in my ratings but that’ll be something to consider as well. We’ll see how it goes.

In the meantime, I will continue to write about any films I watch and the ideas I have about them and I might have some thoughts on music in the next few days.