LEE PAYNE

Tag: films

  • Looking through my box of comics and feeling old

    In my younger days, I loved The Beano and The Dandy and my mum had both comics delivered to the house each week. I thought the smell of a fresh comic was one of the most intoxicating imaginable and was sold on their bright colours, gentle humour and simple charm.

    I have a large, very heavy box under my bed right now containing pretty much every comic that ever came through the letterbox of my childhood home. When I feel like adult life is getting on top of me, which happens more often than it really should, I open the box and spend a while indulging myself in the innocence of youth.

    It seems that my ‘golden’ period of receiving The Beano and The Dandy was between 1999 – the year I turned 7 – and 2003, when I was 11.

    My box of comics

    There’s a sort of running joke I have with a friend from when I was at university. We often talk about how we’re getting old and that our youth is well behind us. Well, we will both be 30 next birthday (him before me, I must add) which feels like something of a milestone but our chat about pipes, slippers and bowls of mashed up apple might be somewhat premature.

    Still, looking back through my old comics, it’s hard not to smile at how dated these dear old things are. Here are a few examples.

    This issue of The Beano, from December 2002, was giving away a free pack of stickers for your FA Premier League album. Collecting football stickers is still very much a thing, so nothing too bad so far, but look at the players used to advertise this brilliant giveaway! Dennis Bergkamp of Arsenal (retired in 2006), Paolo Di Canio of West Ham (now 53 years old) and Michael Owen of Liverpool (who left the Premier League to join Real Madrid two seasons later).

    A 9-year-old can’t just fill his football sticker album up on an empty stomach, though. He’s got to have breakfast first. How about some Mornflake Oats? You can still buy them, though heaven knows when I last saw an advert for them. The bit that caught my eye was the statement that they are available at Somerfield. That particular chain of supermarkets was taken over by the Co-Op in 2009, and by 2012 all Somerfield stores had been rebranded to that of their new owners.

    I’ve written before about how I’m not into films, but Disney’s Tarzan was one of the few that I have actually seen in the cinema. The film was released in October 1999, but by Christmas 2002 the character was back in an exciting new video game for… the GameBoy Advance. Released in the summer of 2001, the GameBoy Advance took games away from the bedroom and made them portable – for as long as the battery would last, that is. I never had one (I had the original GameBoy, which was in black and white).

    I may not have had a GameBoy Advance but I did have a PlayStation 2. Pretty much everyone I knew who was my age between 2002 and 2006 had one, actually. There was one boy at school who had a GameCube – we all thought he was weird. The PS2 is still the best selling games console of all time (more than 155 million of them have been sold worldwide) but anyone who wasn’t lucky enough to own one in December 2002 had the chance to win one in this competition. Note how you can’t enter online, you’ve got to send your entry in by post.

    Speaking of brilliant competitions, here’s another one. I don’t know if this still happens, but when I was a kid it seemed nearly everyone – boys especially – went through a stage where we’d spend that bit between getting home from school and going in for tea whizzing about on skateboards. I had one myself, but I was utterly useless at it and never did manage to pull off a single trick on it. Here the comic is giving away a skateboard. What could possibly make that prize better? By the skateboard having a photo of your favourite WWF wrestler on it, of course!

    Yes, nowadays it’s the WWE that does wrestling, but until 2002 it was called the World Wrestling Federation. They were forced to change the name when they lost a court battle with the World Wildlife Fund. I swear I’m not making this up.

    Those are just a few examples of how the last 20 years or so have changed the world, seen through the prism of British comics. Wow, does it make me wish I was 10 again. The comics still even have the little sticker on them that the newsagent would use to let the paper boy know where to deliver them. Simpler, happier times.

    If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading.

  • My favourite film – Submarine

    I have mentioned before that films aren’t really my thing. I’m not quite sure why that is. I struggle to suspend my disbelief for 90+ minutes and therefore find it difficult to feel involved in a film (but then I can do that no problem with a TV series), and while the big explosions and huge fight scenes might entertain a lot of people they tend to bore me. Michael Owen gets a lot of stick for feeling this way, but I’m totally with him.

    As a result of this, I have seen a very short list of films so far. I was taken to the cinema as a child, mostly to see Disney animations as I recall, but you could name a huge number of ‘classics’ that I’ve never seen a single second of. I saw Blade Runner for the first time last year – purely because it was set in November 2019 and it was appropriately geeky in my eyes to watch it in November 2019. To be honest, I didn’t really see what the fuss was all about.

    My favourite film is one that a lot of people probably haven’t heard of. It was released in 2011, following a premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2010. It’s called Submarine.

    Submarine trailer

    Submarine is not about submarines. The film is based on a novel by Joe Dunthorne, who wrote most of it while at the University of East Anglia doing a creative writing degree. I read the book after seeing the film and thoroughly enjoyed it – the big screen adaptation stayed remarkably true to the source material, and Dunthorne’s writing style was very readable.

    The focus of Submarine is a 15-year-old boy, Oliver Tate, who is something of an outsider. No wonder I can relate to the character. You see, when I was at school there was usually one girl a year that I was completely besotted with. But I never told any of them – I never even tried to speak to them at all. I preferred to admire from afar. Oliver seems to take a similar approach, but plans his attempt to get together with the object of his desires, Jordana Bevan, with military precision.

    Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige) and Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) in Submarine

    I don’t want to spoil it, I want you to go and watch it, so I won’t go too far into the story but it centres around Oliver and Jordana’s relationship, Oliver’s fears that his mother is having an affair, and Oliver’s reaction to a crisis in Jordana’s family. There are poignant moments but also some very funny ones (‘My mother is worried I have mental problems. I found a book about teenage paranoid delusions during a routine search of my parents’ bedroom.’)

    The title is derived from a line in the book, a love letter Oliver sends Jordana, in which he states ‘you are the only person that I would allow to be shrunken down to a microscopic size and swim inside me in a tiny submersible machine’.

    Richard Ayoade, who you may know as Moss from The IT Crowd, directed the film and did a fantastic job at rooting it in the book’s 1980s setting. I think it’s the feeling Ayoade creates that seals the deal for me in making this my favourite film.

    Richard Ayoade directed the film

    So, will you have heard of any of the cast? Well, Oliver is played by Craig Roberts, who first appeared in the kids’ TV show The Story of Tracey Beaker and also turned up in one of the later episodes of Skins. Noah Taylor, who plays Oliver’s father, has been in Game of Thrones and Peaky Blinders, his mother (Sally Hawkins) starred in The Shape of Water, and Jordana’s mother is played by Melanie Walters, best known for playing Stacey’s mum Gwen in Gavin & Stacey.

    Oh, and the fact that Alex Turner, the frontman of Arctic Monkeys, wrote and performed six songs for Submarine’s soundtrack is just a coincidence…

    Submarine often pops up on streaming platforms, though at the time of writing is only available for rental or purchase. Click here for places to get it.