Veronica and i celebrated our third wedding anniversary with a trip to Watercourse Way in Palo Alto on Saturday night. We used a bounty of gift certificates given to us by my family to enjoy a 90 minute couples sauna and massage session. Thoughts that filtered through my head while relaxing ...

• This sauna could malfunction and slow roast V and i, like the Pierce Brosnan-voiced automated house gone haywire in that Simpsons Treehouse of Horror skit.
• Getting a masseuse named Ingrid is not a good sign for a fragile wimp like myself.
• Is my butt showing?
• The next natural progression in this massage would be for Ingrid to do an elbow drop on me, WWF style.
• The playlists on these spa iPods have got to be a hoot.

V and i watched the Frodo-as-a-thug vehicle Green Street Hooligans on Sunday night courtesy of Netflix, and to be honest that's two hours of my life i want back. I should've had some inkling when during the opening credits i noticed that Barmy Army author and apparent hooligan profiteer Dougie Brimson figured prominently in the writing of the film. Apparently i knew this back when the film was released, but this tidbit had long ago been forgotten. After watching about 1/3 of the movie, Veronica was ready to quit, but i was resolved to see this schlock-fest through to the end. As today's post seems to be list-happy, i'll condense my gripes into such a representation. If you don't want Green Street Hooligans spoiled for you (although to be honest, the film does a fine job of that on its own), then stop reading now.

• First off, the plot is totally freakin' ridiculous. Characters are wafer-thin (to quote John Cleese's enormous restaurant goer in The Meaning of Life). Claire Forlani's role is essentially to cry and look helpless ... the right hand man in the West Ham firm decides to betray his gang to their Millwall nemeses on little more than a whim and with absolutely no consideration of what might happen to his friends because of this ... the brother of the head hooligan, who in a development that should surprise no one is revealed as the former head of the firm, regrets his time in the Green Street Elite but has no problem sending his naïve brother-in-law off to hang out with them knowing full well where this will go.
• Dougie Brimson perplexes me. He spends half of Barmy Army complaining about what he calls the sensationalistic and unbelievable account of hooliganism by American writer Bill Buford in Among the Thugs. Now he's produced a movie that seems almost drawn from that text. In Barmy Army, he complains that no American journalist would be welcomed into a firm. In Green Street Hooligans, he's got Elijah Wood as an American journalist (although to be fair, he conceals his journalistic leanings from his new friends) becoming quickly integrated into such a gang. Hrm?
• In his writings Brimson rails on about the evils of hooliganism, but as i commented with Barmy Army, he seems to be more than a little nostalgic about his days in a gang. This sentiment comes across loud and clear in GSH, with the fight scenes more or less glamorizing the rush of fighting alongside your mates. There's no horror in any of the fights, i wasn't shocked. Compare that to A Clockwork Orange, where i was god damn traumatized by the violence. Here it's designed almost as if to get people thinking, "that looks like fun!" Does Brimson want to combat hooliganism or extol the virtues of a real-life Fight Club? Or make a buck off public concern over the issue (most likely)? As one Rotten Tomatoes reviewer accurately points out, the film's message seems to be "violence is bad, except when it feels good, or helps solve our problems." Director Lexi Alexander tries to depict the final gang fight in a more realistic, bloody manner so as to expose her audience to the evils of this lifestyle, but as Veronica put it, it's downright retarded for all the characters to suddenly think, "wait a minute! This is wrong!", not to mention the audience sharing that brainstorm.
• Who the hell gives a Chelsea grin with a f@$#ing credit card? Have the filmmakers never seen The Krays? Or was the thought of someone's mouth getting slit ear-to-ear with a knife just a little too depressing?
• To get really nitpicky, the timeline of the movie doesn't make sense. Wood gets expelled from Harvard with "only a couple of months until graduation", which assuming he's following the standard academic calendar (and judging by the weather) would put his departure around April. Wood then immediately travels to England, and is taken into the hooligan culture on his first day there. West Ham's season however would be ending in roughly a month (mid-May). So does Wood's thug life take place in a scant four weeks, or is it spread over the next year with a big break for the summer? The fact that the penultimate West Ham-Millwall encounter occurs in the FA Cup quarterfinals basically proves the latter, but calls into question how Wood bonded with his new buddies when the summer would've interrupted his budding friendships shortly after they were so rudely introduced.
• To ruin the movie's ending ... so Frodo's personal journey led him to the realization that he could tape his drug addict roommate to get him to admit that it was he and not Wood who was responsible for the cocaine that got Wood expelled? Really? It took all those beatings to give you that brilliant idea, huh Einstein?
• Lastly, the movie closes with Wood strolling down a Boston street singing a West Ham fight song. So for all his troubles, his time with the hooligans was a good thing? Is that the message Brimson is trying to convey? What's a few cracked skulls and broken noses when getting loaded with your mates and supporting your club?

Apparently Veronica and i can't get enough of the thug life however, as after watching this travesty Veronica added the 1988 British TV movie The Firm starring Gary Oldman to our Netflix queue.

Okay, the most enthralling part of Bloc Party anthem "Banquet" is captured in a two second portion of the chorus between "to feel her" and "underneath", in a seemingly simple seven note Russell guitar flourish. The complexity and emotion of that minor riff is beyond any of the refrains or guitar duels on the rest of the track.

Rock! Robot rock!