Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

Well, since I can't seem to shut up about British stuff at the moment, here's a few thoughts on Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which I just rewatched on Netflix last night.

The first thing to say is that I'm not 100% sure it holds up. This is not to say it's a bad movie or anything, but it looks and sounds really raw, and the line readings and acting aren't always as great as they could be. Part of this is because a lot of the characters are played by non-actors - for a couple of them it was their first time in a movie, and others were definitely at the beginning of their careers.

Guy Ritchie also tries to be a little too clever sometimes with his cinematography. The spot where it really works is the start of the movie, where Eddy loses the card game and kicks off the chain of events that make up the plot. The camera focuses tight on his face, following him as he walks out and blurring or doubling shots of him to give that impression of drunken what-the-fuckness that I can relate to.

Not that I've ever lost £500,000 to East End gangsters in an underground poker game, but Ritchie does a good job of capturing that body-blow type of feeling.

He's a little less successful in a few other spots, like when they're celebrating having pulled off their heist, or when Big Chris (as played by Vinnie Jones) is beating Dog to death with a car door for having threatened his son. In the first case, it looks too staged, while in the second it's kind of obvious - of course Big Chris is enraged at his son being endangered, so I wonder if shooting that more matter-of-factly would have worked better than slow-motion.

Though it should be noted that I was super impressed with that scene when I was seventeen.

But about that there Vinnie Jones: was there ever a role better suited to a human being than that? Maybe I say it because I don't know Jones as a footballer, and because this film was the first I ever saw of him. But with twenty years of seeing Jones in other roles, and learning more about British gangster films, I have to appreciate how well he inhabits the role - after all, there's not many footballers I'd believe in the role of an East End enforcer.

Casting is uniformly pretty good in the movie, at least in terms of how the actors look. The main characters all look like petty criminal losers, the weed growers look like a bunch of middle-class stoners out of their element (I'm always a bit surprised to remember that Winston is not, in fact, played by Blur singer Damon Albarn, but he could have been), and the real criminals all look like real criminals.

As I said, sometimes the line readings aren't great, which might be because the actors aren't great at line readings, or because the lines aren't easy to read in the first place. But very little of it takes you out of the movie.

Two other casting choices I want to single out. First is Sting, as JD, Eddy's father. I always forget he's in this movie, and I have to say that for a tantric-sex-having, lute-playing former punk rocker he's actually fairly believable as a bar owner and basically the one honest man who's not affected by the shenanigans going on around him. The scene where Vinnie Jones comes to tell him he's going to have to give up the bar in a week, and Sting tells him to tell his boss to go fuck himself, is really fun and the two actors play off against each other really well.

The other one is Jason Statham, who like Vinnie Jones used this movie to launch his movie career. But where Jones has played essentially the same character for the past twenty years, Statham starts out here as a very different character from what he plays in the Transporter or the Fast & Furious movies. Actually, the first scene, where he's shilling stolen goods in an alley in London and giving it the wideboy patter (to use the Brits' own term of art) makes him pop like a firecracker. You can believe him in the role, even knowing what a badass he gets typecast as all these years later. Go rewatch that scene and enjoy an actor reveling in a role.

What else is there? The music, of course, though perhaps the most memorable thing is the use of Ocean Colour Scene's "100 Mile High City". Britpop was kind of over by then, but the movie still manages to catch that zeitgeist in a way that feels right. Most impressive to me was the use of "Fools Gold" by the Stone Roses as the end of the plot unfolds, with all the bad guys dead and the heroes walking away with whatever riches they've found. I love the song, and it's a nice revelation to see it crop up here.

So yeah, flawed movie and all, rough around the edges with the acting and scripting and cinematography, but you can't deny that the movie's fun and eye-catching and well-cast. Despite the presence of Jones and Statham, who went on to big success in Hollywood, it's not chock-full of other British actors that you recognize, so that you can just go on enjoying the movie without going, "What? John Simm, Doctor Who's the Master, as New Order guitarist Bernard Sumner?" To pull out an example at complete random.

Lock, Stock and its successor Snatch are the only two Guy Ritchie films I've seen. I don't know if I'm feeling the lack, but taken together they're a fun indicator of what British gangster movies were doing back then. They also got copied by a bunch of other movies, which also shows how people responded to them. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is where it started, and it's a nice way to spend a couple of hours - so go check it out on Netflix asap.

English Football Managers: An Endangered Species

I've already written of my pleasure at Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's appointment as Manchester United manager. That was with three matches of him in charge, all of which he'd won. And now we're at seven, across both the Premier League and the FA Cup, and he's still got that perfect record. So talk is naturally turning to whether or not he should be offered the job on a permanent basis.

Some people (by which I mean Guardian football writers, since I get most of my footballing news and insights from there) would say yes, and others think it should go to another manager, perhaps one with more pedigree in winning stuff. The big name thrown about is Tottenham's Mauricio Pochettino, who's helped turn Spurs into title contenders (though not winners). The other one that's cropped up is Zinedine Zidane, who's available after his shock resignation from Real Madrid following their third Champions League victory.

I'm sure other names will crop up as the season draws to a close. There are plenty of innovative young managers (and not so young ones) all across the continent - I'm sure Thomas Tuchel would get a look in, and potentially Massimiliano Allegri, or any number of others. I've also heard Gareth Southgate mooted, though not without reservation.

Notably, though, he's the only English manager whose name comes up in these sorts of discussions, and that's only because he led England to the semi-finals in this most recent World Cup. He wasn't in the frame for discussions of who should get the Arsenal job or the Chelsea job when those came vacant at the end of last season.

But then, why would an owner of one of the top six sides select an English manager to lead their team, when they could just cherry-pick one of the best (or second-best) managers from Spain, Italy, Germany or France? And it's not just the top six sides who are a little scared of hiring Englishmen: in the whole Premier League, there are only five English managers (or six, if you count Chris Hughton, who's considered Irish because that's where he played internationally).

It wasn't always like this. In the Premier League's very first season, out of 22 managers, all but 16 managers in the division were English, with one Irishman and the rest all Scots. That trend held until the 1996-97 season, when Arsene Wenger joined Arsenal. At the end of that season English managers accounted for 55% of all managers in the league, whereas the year before they'd hit a never-to-be-achieved-again high of 80% (or 17 out of 20).

The number stuck around 50-55% until 2010, when it dropped to 25%. Despite climbing up as high as 45% again in 2015, though, the number's stuck at around 20% ever since, or an average of 27% across the last ten seasons.

These numbers are slightly skewed by the fact that they only count the managers in place at the end of the season, and in the case of 2019 they're in real-time, which is to say that they represent whoever's in charge at that moment. That means that I've just updated my spreadsheet to reflect that Mark Hudson has taken over as caretaker at Huddersfield Town following the resignation of David Wagner (American/German), and that I haven't counted Mark Hughes (Welsh) because he left Southampton before I created the spreadsheet.

One of my favorite facts is that no English manager has won the English top division since it became the Premier League. I'm not discounting the achievements of Alex Ferguson or Kenny Dalgliesh when their teams have won it, but they're Scottish, not English, and so despite having the same passport as Gareth Southgate or whoever, they don't count for the purposes of this blog. And Ferguson's success slightly distorts matters, as that means that only two Britons have won the league in the past 26 years.

That's a pretty long time for a country's managers not to have any success in winning league titles. If we take Spain as a counter-example, Spanish managers have won the title 12 times, of which four Castilian-speaking managers have won it seven times between them, with two Catalans and one Basque taking the rest.

Spain is a good example here, because like the UK, it has much sharper cultural differences between its regions than other European countries. There may not be an official Catalan or Basque or Galician national team, but those areas consider themselves separate, not least because of language, to a degree that you wouldn't find in Germany or Italy, or indeed even the UK itself.

Italy, by the way, has the opposite problem. The majority of managers are Italian, and there was a point this season where all 20 teams were managed by Italians. The last foreigner to win the title there was Jose Mourinho, with Inter, and each season since then has crowned either Antonio Conte or Max Allegri as the winning manager.

But back to England. The popularity of hiring English, or more generally British, managers has collapsed since the 90s. Any analysis of why that should be is likely to be incomplete, so let me attempt it anyway, so I can have it picked apart by people smarter than me.

The main cause is probably the division between the elite clubs in England and the rest - the ones who fall between seventh and seventeenth place. As the gap has widened between the buying power of Chelsea or Manchester City on the one hand, and Watford or Everton on the other, the bigger clubs have set their sights on larger prizes than just the league. They aim for the Champions League. And if no English manager has won the Premier League, certainly no English manager has won the Champions League during the period, from 2005 to 2012, when English sides dominated by getting to the final almost every year.

So the first strike against English managers is that they aren't proven Champions League winners. The next point is that they aren't proven trophy-winners of any sort, or at least any sort that matters to a top-flight team's owner. The likes of Eddie Howe (Bournemouth), Sean Dyche (Burnley) or Neil Warnock (Cardiff City) may have won second division trophies and steered their clubs to promotion into the Premier League, but they've won no other trophies of note, certainly not during their tenures in the top flight.

In fact, the only English manager currently in the EPL to have won any trophies at all is Roy Hodgson, at Crystal Palace, who's won an impressive eight top-flight leagues abroad, and two national cups in other countries. And in fairness he had a crack at a top EPL team, when he managed Liverpool, but that wasn't what you'd call a total success.

You could say that this reluctance to hire English managers is also down to the fact that their placing each season means they can't even realistically plan to win trophies. Some teams place high enough to participate in the Champions League or the Europa League, while others do badly enough that they drop into the Championship, but for those teams ranked 7 to 17, there's nothing to play for after a certain point. The winners of the league tend to emerge fairly early, and so do the candidates for relegation, so everyone else can basically coast.

An extreme example is last season's Burnley team, which got as high as seventh at one point and then embarked on a losing streak of something like 11 games, which saw their position dip not at all. If all a manager has to do is coast and avoid the kind of catastrophe that sees them relegated, that doesn't exactly indicate ground-breaking tactical nous.

The one example of someone who tried to bridge the gap is Everton's David Moyes (Scottish), who was handpicked by Alex Ferguson to take over at Manchester United in 2013. He was anointed on the basis of strong performances by Everton in the preceding years, which saw them nearly reach the Champions League. But Moyes's style proved unsuited to United's, and in a lot of ways the club has still not recovered from the tailspin caused by his 10 months in charge. Nor has his own reputation recovered quickly - he had shitty spells at Real Sociedad in Spain, and at Sunderland (which in recent years has become the graveyard of many a manager's career), before rescuing himself somewhat by keeping West Ham from being relegated last season.

You could argue that winning a European trophy would be a good way for an English manager to make a mark, and you might be right. Except that again, you run into the problem of the gap between the richest clubs and the middle class. The example here is Burnley this season. After last season's heroics they qualified for the Europa League, but because those games take place on a Thursday night, and typically require longer trips than Champions League away legs, the players have less time to recover. And Burnley's results have shown that. They currently sit 16th, on 22 points, with a -20 goal difference.

And to be fair, playing in the Champions League is already plenty tough for the richest clubs, which can afford larger squads to rotate in and out for those types of matches. What hope do smaller, less well-off clubs like Burnley have?

Let me leave you with a thought on how to resurrect the English manager, though. There was a time when English managers (and players) would crop up abroad and do exciting things out there. Terry Venables won La Liga with Barcelona in 1984-85, and Welshman John Toshack won it with Real Madrid five seasons later. Venables later led the English national team to the semi-finals in Euro 96, on home soil, making him one of the most successful national managers since 1966. Bobby Robson also had spells abroad, in Spain and Portugal and the Netherlands, and also led England to the semi-finals in the 1990 World Cup.

There may not actually be a correlation there, but it's worth exploring. More English managers should take postings abroad, so they can learn what's happening in other leagues and bring it back to England. Other countries' coaches have been introducing innovations to the EPL, so why shouldn't the English? There's a little promise here, as young English players like Jadon Sancho are suddenly becoming in vogue in Germany - if that continues, they could eventually become the managers who land elite jobs in England by having won big in Europe.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Is a Damn Delight

It's been a week since I managed to hoodwink my dad into going to see Into the Spider-Verse, and if he hated it, I'm happy to say that it fulfilled all my expectations, and on top of that was a great exploration of decades of Spider-Man history. Perhaps unsurprisingly, since they share some behind the scenes folk, it's up there for me with Lego Batman as a humorous but expansive take on a superhero's mythos.

I think the last time I regularly read new Spider-Man comics was around 2000 or 2001, when J Michael Straczynski was writing the character (pretty damn well, as I recall) and 9/11 happened. So I've missed out on a whole hell of a lot of continuity, not least the idea that there might be a bunch of different Spider-folk running around.

I had an idea of Miles Morales, of course, and of Spider-Gwen, so it was nice getting acquainted with those characters properly. And it was cool to see other takes, including Nicolas Cage's wonderful portrayal of Spider-Man Noir. I happen to love alternate versions of characters, especially from different time periods, so that really made me want to check out the Noir stories.

Not only that, the animation was really well-done, to the point that it looked like rotoscoping at points. Though my one complaint was that some stuff out of the main focus of most shots (and sometimes within the main focus) was weirdly doubled, as if it was meant to be a 3D movie. I kept having to check the other viewers with me in the theater to see if they were wearing those special glasses.

But to get back to the Lego Batman comparison: the thing I loved about that movie was that all 80 or so years of Batman's continuity were fair game, and the filmmakers made reference to lots of the most important parts of that continuity.

Into the Spider-Verse did something similar, though it told a more straight-forwardly serious story, which also meant that it had to keep its references relevant to the story (except for the post-credits scene). That generally worked, even when they threw in references to Spider-Man 3 and Tobey Maguire's dance moves.

But overall, it showed that the animated versions of comic book movies are light years ahead of the live action versions in terms of inventiveness, humor and fan service (if that's not a dirty word). Lego Batman, Teen Titans Go to the Movies, and Into the Spider-Verse are able to do a lot more with the characters than The Dark Knight or Spider-Man: Homecoming, because the expectations are probably lower and the studio probably expects fewer people to go see them. So they can throw in stuff like Stan Lee cameos (yep, even in Teen Titans), references to Earth-616 (which I've only recently learned is the standard Earth of Marvel continuity) and dumb jokes that really only appeal to comic book geeks like me.

So it was a really fun movie, a really beautifully shot movie, and if you haven't seen it yet you should check it out. Fandom may be at a level of toxicity where you can't give Miles Morales a live-action movie starring Donald Glover, but this is somehow better, because the filmmakers can use a bigger canvas to tell their story. And I'm looking forward to seeing what's next, whether for these animators or for these characters.