Questionable deeds

Walking down Sauchiehall Street on Friday night, just as we approached the corner at the top of Buchanan Street, Ka and myself were surprised to see four Ghostbusters striding up the street towards us. In full uniform, suited and booted, complete with wired up proton packs, the four strode up past us, around Donald Dewar. Ka and myself were just out from the cinema and had noticed the posters with the familiar Ghostbusters logo adorning various walls, dotted throughout the tall building, advertising the movies short rerelease on the big screen.
We’d just been to see two very different films. ‘We need to talk about Kevin’ was a serious, disturbing, drama thriller, based on the bestseller by Lionel Shriver, in which a mother struggles to comes to terms with events in recent years following on from her struggles in bringing up her first child, who grew up to have some sort of anti social, psychopathic disorder which eventually led to him carrying out some very nasty deeds.
Haunted by these events and the struggle in coming to terms with her son’s evil deeds, Tilda Swinton gives a fantastic performance as the mother, Eva.

Our second film of the day was a lighter, sillier affair. How silly is down to the views of the cinema goer. ‘Anonymous’ is a surprisingly fun, eventful and good looking affair centred around the idea that Shakespeare himself was a fraud and did not, in any way, write the plays and texts he is supposed to have and, in fact, it was all the written work of the Earl of Oxford. Rhys Ifans plays the Earl, a man happy to remain in the shadows, as far as his written work is concerned, as, in those times, fiction created through the written word and through the plays that depict them, were seen by many as the devils work, even though the Queen herself, Elizabeth I, seems to have a soft spot for them. Ifans’ Earl, and Vanessa Redgrave’s Elizabeth I, are yet more characters haunted by questionable deeds from their past which, in the end, are revealed to have disastrous consequences.
Apparently there’s been a few folk upset by this film and it’s storyline. People in Stratford have been particularly horrified, removing the Shakespeare’s name for various tourist signs, road signs and pub titles.
Shocking displays of protest, I’m sure. Just sheer vandalism.
As long as they don’t start ripping the place up, mugging Derek Jacobi and looting Stratford’s bookshops then hopefully there won’t be many arrests.
In fact, one of the best things about the movie itself, were the crowd and street scenes, bringing the old Elizabethan London streets to life, along with Shakespeare’s own Globe Theatre, with brilliant special effects.
The Glasgow streets had plenty of life anyway as Ka and myself headed back down for the bus home. Unfortunately there was very little CGI involved but you’d think there’s was some kind of mystical quality with the sheer amount of costume shops that have sprung up out of nowhere, like Mr Benn’s favourite hang out. Obviously more than a few folk, wishing to make a quick, easy buck over the Halloween period, have grabbed some of the many shop spaces, lying empty and unused on the city’s high streets, sitting waiting patiently on this economic downturn to lift.
On the Friday morning I had to take yet another visit to the registrar office after we had received, yet another letter about Lucy’s death certificate, a whole ten months after she passed. I had went along to sort it out on Thursday afternoon, was made to wait for half an hour and then told to go back at nine the next morning. So, as agreed, at nine o’clock, I was once more sitting in the Registrar’s waiting room, staring at the dull, blue walls, waiting on a Registrar assistant to show up with the documents required. Never before have I been confronted with a more boring room. With the exception of the various letters and booklets entitled ‘Have you just had a baby?’, ‘How to register your marriage’ and ‘So, whose dead?’, there was absolutely nothing to keep you entertained while you waited.
Sorry, there was one magazine. A year and a half old issue of ‘Chat’ magazine but as effective as I’m sure Kerry Katona’s most recent diet is, or was, in this case, I wasn’t particularly interested. The registrar office probably hadn’t even supplied that for their waiting room, it had probably been left by some bored housewife.
So I chose to continue staring at the walls.
After around twenty minutes I noticed a small notice opposite, above a small red plastic box. ‘Suggestions and comments’ the box was entitled by some photocopied text stuck on to it’s front by sellotape. A large yellow folder of suggestion forms sat underneath, waiting.
Now impatient and annoyed I pulled a pen from my pocket and got to work. Tearing one of the suggestion sheets from the folder I suggested the presence of some daily newspapers for their waiting room. Even some more up-to-date magazines to read, or at the least flick through, as you waited on a registrar to attend a previously arranged appointment. A magazine that was not over, say, a year old.
To be truthful, the impatience and frustration felt whilst waiting was probably more to do with the reasons of why I was there, sitting in the registrar office in the first place.
This was the reason why Ka and myself escaped once more to the cinema on the Friday afternoon.
In retrospect ‘We need to talk about Kevin’ was probably not the finest choice in order to cheer us up though. A brilliant film though it may be, it’s not exactly a bundle of laughs, never mind a wonderful advert for parenting.
‘Ghostbusters’ would have probably been a cheerier cinema trip, and that’s a movie with a central theme of ghosts and hauntings, even if it did turn out to be the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.