Making Manchester United Again

#sorrynotsorry

I wanted to write this post a week or so ago, when Manchester United put us all out of our collective misery and fired Jose Mourinho, but now that we've seen how United's done under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as interim manager, I have a little more information to work with. And after watching them demolish Bournemouth this morning, it's fair to say that the change in management has perked the team up significantly.

I've long been ambivalent about Mourinho. He obviously led Chelsea to their greatest period of success back in the last decade, and before that, at Porto, claimed the last Champions League title for a team outside the Big Four countries in 2004. But his teams are frequently boring, and he's long had a knack for making great players look ordinary. Add to that his tendency to flame out in his third season at any club, and he looks more like an expensive gamble than a real option for a club to regain its former glory.

And maybe it's only that I've paid a lot more attention to him the past few years, because I've been playing Fantasy Premier League during that time, but he's also seemed worse this time around. His first season at United doesn't bring up any particular memories, but last season he kicked up his feuds with his own players, such that it was surprising to see how well Paul Pogba played in winning the World Cup this summer. And the start of this season saw him kick that feuding into high gear, even stripping Pogba of the captaincy and benching him completely for the last couple of games before he got the sack.

But then he was gone. The most mystifying thing for me was how much I cared - Manchester United has been one of the teams I've most loved to hate since about 1999, when they knocked Juventus out of the Champions League and then snatched it dramatically in the last five minutes of the final against Bayern Munich. Yet, oddly, seeing Mourinho go filled me with a weird excitement, a need to see what happened next and whether it meant United would finally challenge for the title again.

(Although there was also a perverse desire to see just how bad things could get - at some point would even United get relegated?)

That excitement rose when they announced that they'd be hiring Solskjaer as their interim manager for the rest of the season. Solskjaer obviously is the guy who scored the winning goal in that 1999 Champions League final, and despite not being associated with the club in the same way as David Beckham, Gary Neville, Ryan Giggs or Paul Scholes, is legitimately a club legend. He's even 45, the exact same age as Alex Ferguson when he took over in 1986, though I'll admit that's stretching analogies a bit too far - Ferguson had already had a certain amount of success as a manager in Scotland before getting the United job, whereas Solskjaer's previous managerial experience in the Premier League was an ill-starred stint where he took Cardiff City down to relegation.

And yet, as of today he's now overseen three successive wins in his first three games, something only Matt Busby and Jose Mourinho himself achieved. The other number people have been throwing around is the five goals his United team scored against Cardiff in his first game in charge - since that was the first time United had scored five in one match since Ferguson's last game in charge in 2013.

Generally it's not good to draw too many conclusions from this run, since these three matches have all been against decidedly weaker teams, two of whom were promoted in the last two years, and all of whom are in decidedly poor runs of form at the moment. In addition, Man United line up next against Newcastle United, who are also in their own difficulties at the moment, so Solskjaer's skills won't be properly tested against a top 6 side (Spurs) until 13 January.

But I come once again to the game I was watching this morning. United looked fluid, free-flowing, deadly - stringing together passes and rushing into danger areas where they were well placed to score against Bournemouth. Pogba was particularly deadly, pulling back the first two goals and creating another later on. Whatever Solskjaer's skills as a coach or the hands-on-ness of his approach, the evidence is right there in performances against opposition that the Mourinho team would have struggled against. It's also hard not to assume that he's trying to stamp on this United team the style of football he learned under Ferguson.

The other question is what happens at the end of the season. If Solskjaer continues like this, he'll surely be in the running for the job on a permanent basis, with Spurs manager Mauricio Pochettino the other likely candidate (unless he gets lured away to Real Madrid, who are also looking for a permanent coach but haven't made as charmed an appointment). It'd be interesting to see, if Solskjaer does get the job, what he'll be able to make of it, and whether this really does herald a change in fortunes for the team, rather than a dead-cat bounce.

This all brings us back to the question of why I care so much. As I mentioned, United has long been the team I loved to hate. They almost always got the players that helped put them head and shoulders above the competition, including a very young Cristiano Ronaldo, and they had the swagger and arrogance that came with dominating the game throughout the 1990s.

But I suspect my current nostalgia for the 90s is what's behind my excitement - Solskjaer is part of the team that I learned about when I first got into football, which is also when the UK in general, and Manchester in particular, was the cultural epicenter of everything I was into. Seeing them come back into that kind of form would be a nice throwback to days that were, if not happier, then not as marked by darkness (as evidenced by the title I came up with for this post).

When United was winning everything in sight, we were still years off from invasions of Iraq, wars on terror and rising xenophobia. Not to mention that the UK didn't seem likely to ditch the EU anytime soon, even if they did complain about it a whole lot.

In any case, it'll be fun to watch how United develops under Solskjaer. In particular, it'll be interesting to see whether Pogba's run of form continues, given the promise that attached itself to him with his £89 million price tag when United bought him from Juventus (and, um, when he won the fucking World Cup). United may not have the best team, but in Pogba it may have the best player, Mohamed Salah notwithstanding.

So for the first time in twenty years, and with shame in my heart, I think I may find myself rooting for Manchester United soon...

2018: Another Year I'll be Glad to See Gone

On the one hand, life is a series of cosmic ironies: I once expressed confusion at someone saying that a particular year had been a bad one, and they were happy to see it go.

On the other hand, the screaming void continues to claim our sanity: I wrote posts in 2016 and 2017 saying how crappy the year had been, and now I'm doing a third.

In fairness, it's been slightly less crappy in some ways than the previous two years. I started out by going to London for three months, earning some extra cash and seeing friends and family. In a way it was a perfect vacation back into my old life between 2006 and 2013, right up to and including the fact that I was living next door to a friend's old place.

(I even ran into his old flatmate, and was thinking about that guy again recently. What struck me was how mature, even serene, the guy seemed now - he has a wife and lives in a nice house that he owns, in a neighborhood that's improved immeasurably since 2006. I'd like to be like that one day...)

And I've ended the year in an interesting new job, that's really stretching my creative boundaries in a lot of ways. The main negative for me is that I'm not writing as part of the job description, apart from a brief or slide deck here and there, but it takes some important strands from my previous full-time employment and lets me examine those more: stuff like working with startups and finding out about tech sectors that aren't gaining a lot of investment.

But to be honest, the stuff in between was pretty heavy-going at times. I managed some freelance work during the summer, but between those jobs found myself spinning in circles a bit - when you're not on a schedule, what's to stop you from playing web Solitaire all day? Turns out, it's my own willpower, which... well, wasn't always up to the task.

Jokes aside, I felt even more trapped in the house than before, when I'd been employed but working from home. When you don't have anywhere to go or anything to do, there's not much point in even leaving the house, and I could feel how that was spiraling into progressively less awesome things. So yeah, the new job came just at the right moment.

Personally, it was again a fairly blah year. A couple of friendships came to abrupt (or abrupt-ish) ends, and the dating was hamstrung by being both poor and resident at no fixed address. It doesn't help that I literally had one of the worst dating experiences of my life, which I'll be happy to tell you about IRL. And yeah, the looming 4-0 didn't help with looking at my dating life, or with feeling any less behind my friends.

There were other positives, though. The time in London, as I mentioned, allowed me to revisit parts of the UK I hadn't been to in a while, to see friends I hadn't seen for ages. And it was easy to bolt on my yearly trip to Italy, which despite having shitty weather was much more pleasurable than I'd expected it to be (in addition to giving me the idea for a new short story).

I also managed a couple of fun road trips, at opposite ends of California. Back in July my dad and I went on a road trip to southern Oregon, where I got to experience Ashland, Crater Lake and various other natural wonders (along with an impressive load of junk food). I even got to experience the pleasure of introducing my dad to an area of natural beauty that he hadn't seen before, the Avenue of the Giants.

Meanwhile in October I had my Joshua Tree trip, which as I said was a fun experience in pushing my own boundaries. And all the driving put a nice big dent in my podcast backlog, which is also nice, I guess.

Writing-wise, I don't know how much "progress" I made, but I was pleased to meet my goals and come up with new stories. I also started working with a freelance editor on some pieces, which helped me tighten things up, but also gave me heart that I'm on the right track with them.

I also went looking for help with the dating and fitness stuff, finding some awesome ladies to coach me at both. On the dating side I get some cheerleading and suggestions for places to try and meet more ladies, while on the fitness side I've learned how to properly stretch key muscle groups, and I'm pretty much able to touch my toes again (!).

So... despite the title, and how I started this blog post, I actually feel a bit hopeful for the year to come. It might evaporate on January 2nd, or it might turn into an unending parade of awesome, but it feels like the important thing is to take some action and ask for help (which was my big lesson of 2017, after all). I'll see how that goes next year, and what these actions turn into, if anything - but at any rate, I'll be sure to report back in twelve months.

Punisher War Zone: Frank Castle as He's Meant to Be

The universe has been conspiring to have me watch this movie lately: after discovering that it existed, I found out that a filmmaker I follow on Twitter, Lexi Alexander, directed it, and then someone on a private, comics-focused group I'm part of on Facebook started talking about it. I went and found the episode of the "How Did This Get Made" podcast that has Alexander talking about the making of the movie. So, inspired by this I went to my Amazon Fire TV last night intending to rent it.

Result? It turns out it's been on Netflix the entire time.

So I watched it, and I can say that it's probably the best adaptation of the Punisher that's out there, including Netflix's own collaboration with Marvel, starring Jon Bernthal.

Of course, let's get one thing out of the way straight off: this isn't exactly Citizen Kane. Or even Raiders of the Lost Ark. It feels like it wouldn't be out of place buried on the SyFy channel's lineup of direct-to-video movies, even though it has a pretty good cast (including Dominic West, the Wire's own Jimmy McNulty, as the main villain Jigsaw).

But, its charm comes from a certain unhinged, go-for-broke willingness to plumb the depths of the source material's absurdity. Not content to set up a trio of parkour-loving criminals to get killed by the Punisher, it dispatches one of them, mid-flip, with a rocket-propelled grenade.

When the Punisher blows a gangster's head off in front of the FBI agent who's been chasing him all movie, the agent's reaction is less horror as annoyance.

And in the climactic battle, where the Punisher faces off against most of New York's street gangs, one bad guy's last words are, "Oh, for fuck's sake." To put it another way, this movie has Garth Ennis's fingerprints all over it, and to be honest, that's exactly how it should be.

In case you don't know, Garth Ennis is the Northern Irish writer of comics like Preacher, Hitman, the Demon and the Marvel Max Nick Fury mini-series that apparently put off George Clooney because of how ridiculously violent it was. He also had a couple of defining runs on the Punisher, beginning with a 12-issue limited series in 2000 and going through a regular series on the mature-readers Marvel Max imprint.

I caught the 2000 series when it came out, but didn't read any of the Max series until a couple of years ago, when a friend lent me the "Kitchen Irish" storyline. You could say that Ennis and the Punisher were made for each other - if you take the premise of a guy killing every violent criminal he sees at face value, it'd get boring, so you need to add something extra, a little colorful, maybe a little grotesque. And this is exactly what Ennis specializes in.

War Zone dispenses with the Punisher's origin story almost completely. It mentions it from time to time in order to give viewers just as much information as they need, but otherwise the Punisher is a known presence in New York, with both the cops and the mob well aware of him. It does give Jigsaw's origin story, by having the Punisher throw him into a glass-grinding machine.

Even when story elements don't come from Garth Ennis, they feel like they could: one of Jigsaw's henchmen is his brother Loony Bin Jim (played by Doug Hutchison), who in his first scene eats the insane asylum orderly who's been torturing him for years. Once free he smashes every mirror he sees for the rest of the movie, out of respect to Jigsaw and (presumably) because he really likes smashing things.

In case it's not obvious, this movie is kind of like a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon, but with all the gore and violence retained. People are dispatched with guns, knives, spiked railings, baseball bats and a chair leg, among other things. The Punisher himself, played here by Ray Stephenson, is kind of a cypher, stoically wading through hundreds of bad guys and not uttering a line until about 20 minutes into the movie. His Terminator-like crusade positions him as the straight man against the incompetent and morally compromised cops and FBI agents who first are assigned to catch him but end up teaming with him.

Put another way, this is a spiritual precursor to Deadpool, though more grounded in reality because the Punisher doesn't have superpowers. And if it looks a little cheaper, at least it all looks and feels appropriate - and anyway, it's clear the filmmakers blew all their budget on the gore effects.

So, silly and absurd and violent as it is, I can't do anything other than recommend you check it out ASAP, while it's still on Netflix. Forget the po-faced discussions of PTSD and gun control that dominate the Jon Bernthal show: this is the Punisher as it's meant to be.